November 20th, 1878
Instead of the mob we were expecting, seems the whole damn town had a nervous breakdown and decided to stay home. Didn’t stop the Marshall thinking he wanted a piece of us, but we just weren’t prepared to give it to him and decided instead to quit town to track down Olivia’s missing priest.
The party arrives at the stockyards near sunset and secures rooms at the Drover’s Cottage. There’s some chit-chat with Chigger and Al, mainly discussing how the environs around Abilene have were improving for a time, but began descending back into a haunted state a few months prior. Chigger also recognized the Drowned Coyotes symbol as one drawn on a corpse he found at the edge of the property a month back. They also mention how Howling Wind and his Kiowa have recently started getting extremely aggressive about anything supernatural.
In the night, Holden wakes to find Mr. Perkins at the table in his room. “You know, I think you may have tricked me…” he says. Holden jerks upright, fully awake, to find his room empty. He pads down to the saloon and pours himself a drink, where he attempts to get a Hunch on Mr. Perkins. Instead of his spell going off, Chigger startles him from a dark corner of the room. He says that there are different sizes of manitou, the small ones, from which Holden regularly steals power, and greater ones. He warns Holden to be careful stealing power form otherworldly things, and then is gone.
The next morning, the party mounts up and follows the rail line towards Detroit. Shortly past midday, they come to a siding and find Engine 67 – the train that brought Onesimus, Jacob, and Seri from Back East – abandoned on the siding, shot full of holes. A large automaton is guarding the engine and announces that is is the property of the Confederacy. After a brief engagement, the party disables the machine and finds the body of the engineer nearby.
After a brief discussion about their next steps, the party realizes that the engineer has become reanimated and begins shambling down the rail line to the East.
We headed back towards the farm where the Trickster God stayed. He had a little more information for us; he too was familiar with the symbol of the Drowned Coyotes, though, or so he claimed, only in passing. And he and the owner of the place told us how the Kiowa had suddenly turned violent, and seemed to be interested, and not in a good way, in anything that was not natural.
I suppose the company I was keeping would not be something they would approve of. Not, of course, that I cared much for their approval, but it meant that they might be more of a danger than I first had thought.
We stayed the night, and the next day, we headed towards a place called Detroit, where we expected to find the Singer we were looking for. We were following the railway, and nead midday, we found a train. It looked as if it had been attacked, but worse, a big machine was guarding it.
It must have been some magic of the white man. It was made out of metal, but it moved, and talked, and fought. I was not sure how to fight it, but they seemed to know, and took it down fairly quickly, without any of us getting seriously injured. I must admit I was rather impressed, though I was not going to tell them that.
Looking around after the fight, we found the body of a man whom the others said had worked on the train. It seemed the train was the same train that some of my companions had travelled on earlier. We, or mostly they, discussed what to do next, when we suddenly realised that the dead body had stood up and started walking east.