BILLY STEELE CHAPTER FIVE: MENACE OF THE MOLE PEOPLE

1849-a generation before the Knox family journeyed across the vast frontier, Americans became infected with gold fever and rushed to stake their claims in the West's rich, gold fields. The gold crazed hordes of prospectors ravaged the virginal lands, and violated Nature's sacred beauty of the wilderness. Wild-eyed, they vandalized the landscape. They chopped Sierra redwoods into splinters and polluted the waterways with their toxic machines. Get rich quick invaders scorched the Earth's fertile soil so recklessly in their mad hunger for wealth that nothing more could grow where these prospectors trespassed.

Few schemers realized their dreams of a golden future would never materialize as many more deluded tinhorns took their place and wantonly sacrificed Mother Nature's treasures for their avarice.

None, no searcher or prospector, however, would know that one undiscovered mine, which would later become the object of Billy Steele's quest, contained a magnificent power, so undeniably grand in scope that it was greater than an infinite amount of gold.

From the pioneers' lust for the shiny metal, there sprang towns that were "hot beds for vice and corruption," flesh peddling and fast buck communities built around the cavernous mines. But one town, Young's Haven, was instead founded on the promise of strict religious conformity, adherence and obedience to the words of its leader, rather than gold worship. Young's Haven did not know that in their haste to build their own prairie heaven, they erected their town close to a hellish unknown force.

The town's worshipers were led by a man named Joshua Agar the deliverer of many fire and brimstone sermons that shook his followers to their knees in tearful piety and an unquestioning fear of their maker. Harassed and ridiculed by non-believers, Agar vowed upon founding Young's Haven, he would someday "Make the sinners pay" for their crimes against himself and the God he believed was channeled through him.

Unaware their community of Young's Haven was built near a lost mine-a mine full of an awesome, unimaginable power, the pious pioneers used the sweat of their brows, and words from the good book to build a home of warmth and comfort for their families.

One dark day, while the town's entire citizenry gathered in church for their prayer meeting Young's Haven was engulfed by a mysteriously noxious, gassy substance. This indescribable force radiated a fiery glow. And as the radiation grew to monstrous proportions, it took the shape of a flaming black arrowhead-the same symbol that would become tattooed on Billy Steele's hand and likewise was the war paint design that would adorn the face of Billy's Lightning Warrior alter ego years later.

The rampaging radiation was the fallout from the unknown power locked in the lost, Knox family mine. The same mine, and its power would be destined to become Billy's legacy many years later.

But in the spring's renewal of 1849, the town of Young's Haven fell victim to its overwhelming radioactivity. Women and children screamed in absolute terror as the ruthlessly aggressive radioactive arrowhead pierced the town's church and formed a tremendous hand to grasp the entire community like a greedy man wraps his fingers around a stack of gold coins.

The town's leaders prayed to the lord above for mercy. The tall, darkly attired preacher named Agar, who had the poem, "Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God," inscribed on his heart, readied him self to meet his enraged maker.