The El Dorado Saddle
Description: a handsome, hand-tooled, knot-fringed leather saddle in the charro style. The saddle looks to be roughly twenty years old: well-used, well-maintained, and in very good repair. The El Dorado Saddle boasts an interesting, seemingly abstract set of attached silver ornaments, several semi-precious stones arranged in an interesting pattern, and a somewhat obscure six-line poem in archaic Spanish etched into its underside.
To mangle the philosopher: this saddle has gotten more good men killed than Cecil B. DeMille. And a powerful lot of bad ones, too. The Saddle has shown up in any number of murders, bushwackings, hijackings, and at least one flat-out massacre: once it gets in somebody’s hands, things progress inevitably to the point where the Saddle is later found, carefully packed away, in the skeletal arms of yet another poor damned fool who tried to find a golden city in the Mexican desert.