The Legend of Gnat Bunker
An American Tall Tale

© 1997, 2004 Josh Griffing

           It was a slow day in 1871, and the small, lanky old man in the Tyro hat pulled up to the bar.  He was a small man, originally from back east somewhere, who wore a pair of silver-blue suspenders and a shirt of low-grade silk, and sported the long plume of a Chinese pheasant in his silk hatband.  He ordered a dilute whiskey, and, as swarthy and ruddy natives and slender, ivory brunettes crowed with excitement and anticipation, he called for silence in the house.  Leaning back against the marble counter, he began his tale:

            “Yes sir!  I saw some mighty lively action on the River in my day.  Old Nat here was one of the professional poker chaps, for a while.  I wasn’t so thieving as some, using marked decks or such, but I made a good game occasionally.  Let me tell you boys about one trip I made from St. Louis.

           “It was a clear, moonless night, and the boat had left the pier only seven hours before.  This was my own favorite steamer, and I had a special friend in Jonas McClure, the old Scotch skipper.  His Highland Wren was the largest, fanciest boat on the Mississippi River, and it’s twin paddles were so large that at the mouth of the Ohio, one day, old Jonas was standing atop the housing with his spyglass, and looking east, saw in his little boy’s window in Pittsburgh.  The glass was so powerful, on account of having to look downstream from the bridge to the bow of that boat, that McClure saw what his son was doing at home.  He even saw the title off the little boy’s book of Arabian Nights.  Then the greatest skipper ever on inland waters got so touched that he began crying, and as he was aft of amidships, when the tears fell through the housing, they set the wheel going backward, and the boat was in Minnesota before he stopped.  That was the year of the great salt flood, but that is another story.

           “Jonas built his boat as the longest ever seen, but there was one slight problem.  No matter how much he tried, he could not turn with the stream.  So I suggested that he hinge the boat, and his problems were solved.  Jonas and I built huge pillars and plates, which swung and telescoped on either side to allow the Highland Wren to take corners, and we installed them at every thousand feet, making seventeen in all.  The saloon of the ship contained nine of these, and this is where I spent my time.

           “On this particular voyage, I was eager to try out a new invention of mine on the local gamblers.  It was an odd deck, but not in the usual sense.  In my shop in Missouri, (the smallest shop imaginable, so that cards had to be worked on edgewise to fit through the door), I had produced a deck with six suites.  I kept the spades, clubs, hearts, and diamonds, but added two new suites, of stars and crescents, red and black, respectively.  I had one hundred forty-four thousand of these decks printed, on quality paper, and had one for every third table in the saloon of the Highland Wren.  And on this particular night, I decided to try them for the first time.

           “I strolled nonchalantly into the saloon at about seven, and, walking up to the first bar, (as each section of the saloon contained two, staggered from one another and on opposite sides of the saloon), I purchased, for the sake of my opponents, a thick deck of the latest ‘house cards’, with the captain’s picture on the back.  I sauntered over to an adjacent table and sized up my adversary for the evening.

           “He was a softspoken man, with the look of a well-bred, educated dandy.  With his balloon sleeves, and blue-black garters above his elbows, he seemed a match for any player, and more than a match for most.  He was, however, Ed Palantino, the most famous card sharp in the business.  He could out-deal, out-mark, out-read, out-swap, and out-grin every man east of the Pacific Ocean.  He seemed a considerable and worthy opponent.  I tore the paper from the cards carefully and deliberately, and began to shuffle, as the other, with and unlit cigar in his hand, and another smoldering between his teeth, gazed intently at my hands, watching for any tricks of the shuffle known throughout our common trade.  But I shuffled as honest a deck as any preacher, and I asked him how he wished to play.  One hand each, or two?

           “ ‘Left and right, seven stud,’ said the stranger.

           “ ‘Six suites,’ I replied, and I delt the cards around.  The other travelers with us were intimidated by his gaze, when he seemed to be staring right through one’s head, and he whispered about being part cobra, part vulture, and having been sired by the keenest stallion in the Confederate state of South Carolina.  I stared back at him, piercing through his facade with such skill that I saw his muscles tense in his brow, and sweat rolled down his nose at my will—but he kept his constant smile, and shining gaze.

           “Then we started play.  I lead as dealer with one-dollar ante, and it soared from there.  Each of us won in the first few games, and still, no new cards had appeared.  Then, as I dealt the fifth game, the stranger’s eyes were on me all the more, and I saw him inconspicuously knead his left sleeve.  I shuffled more thoroughly now, and the tension mounted.  I dealt fourteen cards to each man, and looked at my right-hand spread.  The extra suites, in the thickest deck in the world, had finally come into play.

           “The ante sailed rapidly, and the men on either side of us folded first their left and then their right hands: laying plain cards, all low pairs and lone aces out on the table.  I raised the pot another thousand grand, and my adversary matched it, and laid his left-hand spread out on the table.  It was spades—a royal flush.

           “I was unperturbed.  I laid down my left—the same of clubs—and I saw his sweat bead.  Here was the professional, and a fortune was at stake before him, to which all the mines of Solomon and California were mere trifles.  He then smiled a gloating smile, and laid out five aces—of clubs, hearts, and diamonds, plus two jokers.

           “ ‘Beat that, Mr. Bunker!’ said Palantino.

           “I was still as cool as ever.  Not in the least worried, knowing that I had dealt and played fair throughout, I turned over my other hand.  I had another royal flush—of crescents.  The sable arcs on the cards revealed were a shuddering blow to the Italian, and as I scooped up my cards and my millions, I reminded him calmly that I had warned of the spare suites at the start of the game.

           “ ‘You no-good liar!  You’ve robbed me straight!’ he roared.

           “  ‘I don’t believe that was a straight, either, Mr. Palantino,’ I told the Roman.  ‘I distinctly saw a royal flush in there.’

           “I reminded him, also, that not one but two aces of clubs had been played in that game, and raised my own for inspection.  It was true, and had no marks.  His own aces, however, were too thick, and upon my search revealed an improper back.  All three were thus, as were his jokers, and the folded cards beside us revealed their own honesty.  ‘Are you accusing me of cheating?!’ he demanded.

           “‘No, I’m proving you.  Mister Palantino, you have a holdout in your left sleeve.  Having loaded it after dinner, you cocked it while I dealt the cards,’  I said to the great gambler.  ‘You really can’t cheat an honest man, if he knows his game,’ I said, giving his cheek a condescending pat.  ‘Now, was I right?’

           “ ‘No, you were most certainly not right, Mr. Pinkerton!’ said the Italian, his face so red that both cigars smoldered.  ‘I always load the mechanism before dinner!’ ”

           A tall stranger entered and sat down in a back corner, listening.  But all eyes were glued on this tiny "Gnat" Bunker.  Nat took another drink and began another tale.  His second story ran thus:

            “Before I was a gambler, I amassed a pretty fortune in the mining business—did I tell you about it?  Anyway, I was camping out west in the Rockies, over in Colorado, and I was doing a bit of prospecting.  Anyway, one morning I awoke and found that I had no food for breakfast, so I took my rifle and went off shooting.  I found deer tracks, and I followed them up the mountain and across the ridge.  There I saw the largest mountain on God’s green and brown and coal-black earth.  It was a marvel.  It was so high that, after I shot and cooked my breakfast and lunch, and returned to look at it, I saw the sun approach from behind me, and, as it approached its zenith, something slowed it up.  It was eleven o’clock for a whole hour as the sun tried to make it over that mountain.  When at last it made it over and the afternoon got started, I moved my camp over to that mountain, and panned for gold that night in a river on its eastern side.  Luck was with me, and the entire bottom of my pan was full of nuggets.     

           “I was elated.  Following the stream up the mountain the next day, I found a large, pure vein in the rock seven thousand feet up.  It was enough for all seven of the cities of Cibola, and an El Dorado besides.  It was twenty-seven feet high, and wrapped all the way around the mountain.

           “I lost no time, but set to work at once.  I excavated a modest cavern in the first week, and could have bought England by the following month.  I was still digging in those gilded halls when I realized that I had nowhere to put it.  The gold under my bedroll was now as high as my house in the east, and my horse had to spend all day going to the edge to graze and drink, and all the following to return.  I took a saddlebag into town every month for supplies, but it wasn’t going fast enough.  I needed more help.

           “I asked the local storekeeper if he knew anyone who wanted to dig a gold mine for twenty dollars a week, and he referred me to the saloon keeper.  He helped more than I had even hoped, and sent me twenty able-bodied men to work the mine.  To prove their strength, they each wrung my neck half off with their bare hands, tied my ankles with my own wrists, and threw me into a watering trough across town.  Then the next would come over, untie me, and repeat the procedure.  Once I had been assured of their strength, I led them to the mine, while they held their Winchesters in my back for protection.

           “I set them all to work, at twenty dollars per week, plus their own diggings, and I was able to run a very profitable mining operation.  The whole interior of the mountain was carved away, and the gold rush was on.  More and more people came out to work at the hole, and my employees’ fame grew immensely.  Two of them were German Dutchmen, and they staked their own claim after a week of employment, on a branch tunnel of my own mine which broke the surface further south.  Employing men of their own, they made the south side of the mountain, where the vein was taller, to yield immense fortunes to Fort Knox and Washington on a biannual basis.  I worked my end of the mine as well, and soon the entire mountain was hollow.  One miner even reported seeing below him (upon breaking the surface in one of the higher tunnels, where the air was a little thinner and so was easier to see through), the sun as it approached the mountain for its daily ascent.  That is how hollow my mountain was.

           “I was working in my northern tunnels the following Tuesday, when the El Dorado de Cibola Mine’s first disaster struck.  The two Germans, while perfecting a technique of lighting fires in the mine to melt out the gold, were caught in the molten metal and, sadly enough, perished.  When I received the news, I ordered all miners in both mines to halt work and to come to the main entrance.  All twenty thousand miners, at twenty dollars per week, gathered there.  We were decked out in the finery of the king of El Dorado, covered from head to foot in gold dust, and we held a quiet, solemn funeral there, for our friends who were lost in the precious metal.  The holes were renamed the Lost Dutchman Mine in their honor, and work was solemn and quiet for the rest of the week.  Then the mountain’s  heart was reached, and it was shining silver.

           “With renewed hope, and a change from the repetition of cutting through solid gold all the time, we set out for the interior.  Much gold and silver poured from the great mountain that year, and we had crews working day and night.  Then one of our crews in a particularly deep shaft came to the bottom of the Golden Mountain, and struck the granite bedrock.  The sound of iron on a real rock echoed throughout the mountain.

           “The sound shook the stones, and the rumble set fear in every man’s heart.  Though only one tenth of the planet’s motherlode of motherlodes had been mined, the vibrations threw men throughout my tunnels to the ground, or hurtling to their deaths down open shafts.  The living, terrified, fled for the outer air, and congregated at the mine office I had erected on the site of my former camp.  I met them all–nineteen thousand nine hundred eighty-seven of them.  I tried to calm their fears, but none of them would return to work that week.  So, as wealthy as we all were, I proposed that we all go east upon vacation.  We rode the stage from town to the Missouri River, and boarded the ferry to St. Louis.  So many men were headed out, however, that the first boatload of us had been down to New Orleans and back several times, and I had beaten Palantino before the last men got out.  And when they got to St. Louis, I heard the terrible news.

           “Two days after I had left the mine, they said, the sun had approached the mountain in its usual manner, and a ball of fire had burst from it and fallen into the upper regions of the mine.  It melted the remaining gold in the peak, and the molten inferno rushed down into the earth.  The gold and silver filled the lower tunnels, and left behind a thin stone crust of the mountain, which collapsed beneath its own weight in a roar of dust.  The sun, having been spared the inconvenience of climbing the mountain, now continued onward, and never waited on a mountain again.  The ruin fell further, and the roar of falling rock mingled with the surge of molten gold, as the torrent added to itself all the way down.  The fireball at the gilded river’s head then struck the bedrock, and it burst, as a Midas’ share of the Lost Dutchman flowed into the yawning fissure.  Another jet spewed forth from the old mine entrance, consuming the mine office in flames, and burning the forest all around.  One man was so close to the flood that his shoe, removed for the treatment of a blister, was engulfed by its outermost end.  He fished the boot, smoldering, from the cooling metal on the end of a stick, and though he poured most of the gold from it, that boot never did fit so well afterward, and he had to buy a new pair in the town, now a little community called Denver.  All that was left of the mountain was a tiny hillock known as Pike’s Peak, and that’s where Nat Bunker staked his claim.”

           “That’s a mighty nice yarn you’ve spun there, Mr. Bunker,” said a voice from the back of the room.  “And I know a man who is looking for you.”

           “Who is he?” said Nat.

           “He’s me,” said the other, and stood up.  Here was a giant of a man, so tall that the ceiling cracked when he bumped his head on it.  The crowds parted, and the two were left, facing each other–the first barely five feet tall, and the other nearing eight.  The small-town bar had never seen anything like it, but here it was.  A showdown.

           “I am the toughest, the meanest, the strongest, the scrappiest, and the ornriest man in this part of the country.  I can out-run, out-climb, out-kill, out-hunt, out-shoot, out-wrestle, out-kiss, out-spit, out-swear, out-jump, out-swim, out-chew, out-smoke, out-drink, and out-lie any man on either side of the Mississippi River!  My name is Mike Fink, and I’m proud of it!” bellowed the newcomer.  Nat Bunker quivered in his boots.  Little did Nat know that Mike was already in his fifties, and was not as fearful as he used to be, alongside Old Stormalong and Davey Crockett.  But he was still tough.  Nat, mustering up his courage, returned to his poker-face, and replied.

           “You never said out-boast, Mr. Fink,” said Nat, coolly.

           “Fine, out-boast!  There, I have said it.  Now you make your legend, and I’ll make mine.  Drinks for both on the loser.”

           It was agreed, and Nat repeated the entire tale, for Mike’s benefit, of the rocky debut of six-suited decks, without omitting a single detail, and adding more besides.  Mike Fink sat patiently until he was finished, and then asked:

           “So the gold you were betting on was from the Lost Dutchman mine?”

           “Yes, Mr. Fink.  All of it was.  And so was most of his, probably.”

           With a grunt, Mike Fink rose and lifted the smaller man high over his head, smashing him through the skylight as he did so.  Mr. Bunker was then flung into the sky so hard that when he came down, he broke through the roof of the O’Leary barn in Chicago, upsetting a cow, who then upset a lantern, and started the Great Chicago Fire of which we read now.  Barely escaping the roaring conflagration, he discovered a knot on his scalp, inflicted by a barn rafter on the way past.  The pain died away at last after a month or so, but the welt was there to stay.  So upon the advice of his surgeon, Nat had it removed, then used the last of his gold to pay to have it bronzed and shipped out to Wyoming.  Devil’s Tower is there to this day.

           When Nat died, in 1929, the stock market collapsed on the same October day.  Much later, as his descendants perused his belongings, they found the claim ticket for the Lost Dutchman, then called the El Dorado de Cibola, as well as the gilded boot, a deck of playing cards which delt six suites, and the land deed for Devil’s Tower beside an old grey Tyro hat.  As Mike Fink said as he left the saloon that day:

           “No one mentioned telling legends.  Just making them!”