Millers drove a rig that looked like anyone’s

 Page 3.

Millers drove a rig that looked like anyone’s else’s but it had a real funny putrid smell and Potts told everyone to stay away from his goods? Even his team to two sleek draft horses looked nervous and spooky sensing they were pulling a wagon with something evil inside. Flaps on the wagon were always pulled tight and Miller entered it like a bat returning to a dark cave after a evening hunt. Before the winter snows came thousand of flies sometimes covered the outside of the wagon. You could hear their buzzing sound some thirty feet away so folks started calling it a road apple on wheels. Miller always followed the wagon train in the dead last position and preferred it that way and so did everyone else. Most of the time a large trail of dust followed the back of the wagon train giving Potts a much needed dust bath because dirt was better than nothing.  Folks didn’t mind but whispering talk between them was Potts acted more like a lone wolf waiting for the opportunity to attack any unsuspecting stragglers. His head and neck moved viper like with the patience of a black widow spider and watching Potts you could almost imagine a shiny forked tongue flicking out tasting and sensing all around you.

He wasn’t a man to be trusted if in fact he was a man at all and his ways weren’t like normal folks but they were tolerated one rule you quickly learned immediately on this journey. In order to survive you needed to remain together, but getting along and liking each other didn’t seem so important now. The winter storms were becoming worse and some of the folks wanted to turn back but the majority of the group refused and they focused their lives on what lay ahead of them. The snows were getting deeper and the party could only move five miles on a average day. Finding a way over those formidable mountains that looked like they went on forever was starting to give everyone a very hopeless feeling. Now Potts was a short man of stature with a thick neck and a light claw mark across his chin and nose. His face was fully pockmarked resembling the wrath of an angry woodpecker with cheeks and a nose covered in blackheads the size of green pepper corns. He parted his hair in the middle but it took on the appearance of the tail end of a skunk, and with one foot bigger than the other after a episode with frostbite he walked with a limp.

Potts back was swayed and somewhat hunched over and he wore a bear skin coat he claimed he found on a dead Ute Indian Chief ? The coat was decorated with deer bones and tail feathers from a red shafted flicker. The feathers were arranged in a fan pattern in the front with the back or the coat forming a pair of wings. Finishing off with bear claws hanging from the collar the deer bones made a clicking noise alerting everyone that Miller was coming. Potts carried no gun but was always armed with a Indian tomahawk tied to his waist and tipped with a rattlesnake tail. Sometimes at night you could hear the rattle buzzing from inside Millers wagon almost as if the snake itself was alive. With a wispy silver beard that barely covered his chin they matched the few teeth he had stained in  yellow and speckled black with rot and decay. He worn a English bowler hat and kept it pulled down tightly over his ears. Occasionally it rode up exposing his right ear which was notched with a circle shape. Some folks believed someone took a bite out of it or maybe a bullet or a arrow that missed it mark.