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You step outside the bounds of the logging site, eyes fixed on a series of squat tents that house the lumber men. You hardly put together a dozen steps when a caw strikes the drum of your ear. Your neck snaps attention to the sound and you see a large raven fly over you, bathing you in a second long shadow. It perches on a low branch, staring down the barrel of a freshly drawn revolver. The raven does not seem perturbed, turning its head to pick at a few feathers, all the while staring at you with one unflinching black marble. A bead of sweat runs down your wrist as you remember the Indian from last night, the memory of his cruelty and power dragging your trigger finger closer to the bird’s early end.
You gain control over yourself with a breath, and holster. The bird takes flight without a sound. You haven’t had time to think about that Indian, or maybe you just didn’t want to, but he’s still alive and still up to whatever he was doing when you found him in the forest. This camp is just the beginning, there are more and more people making for the area. It’s one of the only natural passes in the Sierras to Nevada, it’s scenic, unsettled, and for the most part rich in timber, hunting, and fishing.
More and more people will be coming, and these won’t be frontiersmen running from warrants or looking to get rich in a place with no law, they’ll be families. Families trying their best to make a way under their own strength. You’ve seen what that Indian conjured, what he perverted in this place. Nobody who lives here will be safe as long as he is allowed to further his heresies. He needs to die, and what’s more you need to kill him. This time, you won’t stop at his heart, you’ll gut him all the way across.
For now though…you have some investigating to do. Your thoughts have carried you faster than expected to the worker’s tents. You start with Mack’s. A homely place, a cot, a table, a knife and candle sitting on a tin plate. Little else in view besides a malformed chair, apparently a tradition in this place, and a water pot with a smaller coffee pot inside it. He must’ve had somewhere to keep his money at least. You check in the corners and under the cot.