As they enter the general market the Father greets Tobias, the owner, by name and explains what he is here for.  The older man heads to the back to get it.

“Don’t trust the stuff,” he clarified while they wait in the shop.

“It’s not natural I don’t believe.  Everything is of the Father of course, and I have never read anything about it in the Good Book, but I read plenty enough about temptation and that Ghost Rock she is a temptation.  You’ll see.”

The shop is quite plain and sparsely stocked.  Nothing to be particularly excited about.  It contains the things a traveler on the prairie needs but likely not what one might desire.  The shopkeeper comes back carrying a box big enough to fit the pistols and holsters of everyone in the room all at once with meticulous care.

“Alright Tobias,” the Father says as he takes the box, shooing Tobias away.

“Don’t like folk looking at it too much.  Gives them funny ideas.  I believe this damn rock got an old friend of mine killed somehow.”

The Father takes off his gloves and from the finger of one of them retrieves a small key and unlocks the clasp.  As he opens it you can see inside.

A great number of rags are bunched up filling the majority of the box and giving the weighty object you can feel but not see a wealth of padding.  There is an immediate magnetism as the lid opens.  A desire to see that object laid bare, to examine it intimately.  

“Feel that?” the Father asks. “That’s why I keep this fool thing locked up.”

“Don’t mean to say you boys are fools now.  I know well enough how much money these things bring and how much they’re driving the expansion out West.  I suppose everyone knows that.  Just.  It just.  It feels to me like the thing for a mind of its own.  Feels to me like it killed Charles and it know’d what it was doing.”

He turns back to the others, somewhat hoping they will seem uninterested but of course this rock is what they seek.  They’re going to want to see it.

Putting his glove back on he brushes aside the rags to reveal a large piece of cratered white rock.  

“Looks a bit like coal at first don’t it?  Like white coal?”

It does, at first glance.  Looks like white coal, but pitted all over with small craters.  Looking closer you realize the borders of those craters seem to fall very sharply creating ridges that look quite sharp.  It is hard not to desire to feel those ridges on your hand.  To roll it around your hand and feel it’s balance shift.  Hard too not to look closer.  Hard not to examine the craters, noting their near but not complete uniformity.  Hard not to think that this rock should really, by all rights, belong to you.

“You know,” he sees after he all too quickly covers the glorious thing in rags once again, “it’s said when you burn Ghost Rock it screams.”

His hand trembles as he closes the lid, then closes the clasp and locks it shut.

“They say all kinds of things about Ghost Rock.”

He pushes the locked box away and secrets the key in his glove again.

“You’ll want to meet the owner of the mine now, unless you have questions let us hurry.  It’s getting late and I must preside over supper.”