As he often did, Wyatt Earp struck true, at least with one of the shots. It struck the horseman, burying itself in its gut, letting black blood ooze out of that wound into the night. To any that was close enough to see, that blood seemed to cease it's leaking, turning into a column of smoke that rushed back into the wound, sealing it up as if it had never been, and the lone horseman issued a cruel and mocking laugh at the veteran lawman.

Charlie walked a bit cloesr to the remaing assailant and raised his rifle to his shoulder as he stopped. He aimed for the center of the thing's mass and let loose a cylinder of lead meant to stop its progress. He couldn't see if he grazed it or missed, but he only briefly picked his head up before returning to his normal firing position.
This message was last edited by the player at 16:01, Fri 27 Dec 2013.

Charlie Basset's shot struck home, hitting the rider dead on. It was a shot that might have killed a man dead on, especially considering all the other bullets the horseman had taken, but as with Earp's shot before, it didn't seem to halt or hinder him much, though Charlie might have gotten the eerie feeling that if the rider had a head, it would have been pointed straight at him.

Seeing as lead seemed to do little to the headless men, Collins rose, paced forwards twice, and squeezed off a steady if unsporting shot at the demon's mount. The pale heathen seemed to be calling something about cold iron behind him, but any detail was lost under the roar of shot.

Texas Jack steps up beside his compadres and lets loose with a shot from each Peacemaker at the monstrosity.

It might have been that cold iron would have done the trick, but Shotgun John Collins did just as much with the twin barrels of his firearm, blowing the horse's head off and sending its rider scrambling as the body collapsed from under him.

The headless rider nimbly alighted, but not long after was plugged hard by Texas Jack, and seemed now off balance and out of sorts as it worked to ready its own weapon.

Gabby lined a sight on the remaining rider, horseless and scrambling for its weapons. He scowled. No time to aim up a proper shot--it was all he could do to keep his hands steady as he raised his shotgun again. He wasn't sure if he could hurt the thing...Earp and Basset had already blasted the thing with no effect. But maybe he could stun the damn creature while Sky Dog did whatever he'd done to make the other collapse.

He lined up his shot. "This is fer Clementine, you son of a bitch." He whispered. Then he squeezed the trigger.

{{BLAM!!}}

With a furious final shot from the old miner, the gutshot horsemen hobbled for one last moment before it collapsed to the ground as well, it's now twice dead body joining those of the others already on the ground.

The next moment seemed a perfect silence, interrupted only by the crackling of the fire in the center where it seemed ages ago they had been sharing stories from old times and singing songs before their peace on the prairie had been interrupted by those three spectres that came to trouble them with fear and violence.

The cowardly doctor climbed down out of his tree or wherever he'd been hiding, and scrambled to his medical bags. "Is anybody hurt?"

Sky Dog shoved the demon horse's head lower, baulking its attempts to shake loose and get away.

"It is well to be cautious, yes? That one may be hiding himself, just leaving what he was wearing. Mansfield, do you take your lesson here?" the shaman's tone had a slight edge to it - the whole encounter seemed to have sparked the shaman's quiet anger rather than any fear.

"Dalix!" Korpi warned Daniel, coming to alight heavily on his shoulder and check him over for injuries, more excited than ruffled.

Collins spat with deliberation. "What. The Sam Hill," he said, staring with narrowed eyes at the ghoulish things sprawled out round the camp.

He looked over at Miss Hawthorne, who seemed shaken. "You all right ma'am?"

Mansfield stared at Sky Dog, uncomprehending, and licked his lips. He looked a little pale, and as always seemed hesitant around the strange Siberian. "Uh...lesson? I'm afraid I don't take your meaning."

The Evenki youth gestured down at a rider corpse with his pole, apparently intending for Mansfield to learn by observation what acts the angry ghosts of the once-beheaded might wreak rather than elucidating.

He half-led, half-dragged the vast black stallion across to the trees away from the other horses, the animal skittering and rolling its eyes as though simultaneously terrified of the shaman and powerless against his mild pulling on the bridle. Sky Dog spoke to it in Evenki, passed a hand over its nose in a curious gesture and hitched it, continuing to speak in a low tone until the beast calmed and stood at rest, shivering slightly.

"Do we shift our camp some paces?" he asked, glancing at Earp as he set down his riding-pole and bearskin, seeking in his bags. He came up with his 'young man knife' a dust-scoured glimmer along his right forearm, the sack of salt curled in his free hand, and walked over to his tea fire.

"The little wolves will want these-" he nodded at the various corpses, crouching to scoop the pulped mass of tea leaves out of the zavarka can with his knife and squeezing them mostly dry, salt on the ground beside him.  "-I do not think they will come among us as we sleep, perhaps, but my kujjai will not return close to here if we are ringed about with hungry ones."

The half-naked shaman came over and offered the soggy mass of tea leaves to Cora, nodding down at her obviously-burned arm in case she had any strange foreign ideas as to their usage.

Earp frowns and nudges the corpses with his toes.

"Hmm." he mutters as he mulls over the strange shaman's words. Finally, he nods. "I think you're right. We should either move the bodies or move camp."

Gabby pats Clementine to steady her. "Yeah, I hear that. Don't reckon I feel sanguine 'bout bedding down anywhere near these things."

Daniel turned his head quickly as Korpi called out to him, though relaxed his face into a warm smile when he realized the origin. He had no small degree of affection for the bird, and stroked the feathers on her head when she landed on his shoulder.

His attention then returned to what had attacked them, and he wandered toward the fallen without a word, looking as closely as he could at what he found without touching anything.

Korpi leaned into the stroking with a quiet contented sound, then watched with bright-eyed interest as Dalix cirled the corpses. "Zhuliev diaboli," she noted.

Anticipating what came next, the raven decended in a fire-sheened fall of shadow to the nearer corpse's side, nipped its fingers and jumped away with a little whoop to test that it was really (re)dead. A word from her brother had her pattering carefully across the ground to grab a beakful of salt and fly back, scattering it across the headless ex-undead from a perch on his chest before hopping down to loot the leg-pockets for shinies.

Reaching into the dead thing's pockets, Korpi managed to retrieve a coin. Old and grimy, the thing hadn't seen use in quite a measure of time by all appearances. In the firelight, it glinted gold.

Korpi straightened a moment and looked around to be sure no-one was immediately about to steal her shiny. Then she dipped her head to pick it up and polished the coin with enthusiasm against the ex-abomination's chaps, pausing every other second to shift grip and see it glitter in the light.

The bird's continuing attention to the coin caused the grime that coated the surface to be removed little by little, exposing the metal glint more fully to the firelight, and to those who would recognize such, an image.

Taking a cue from the bird, the doctor began to inspect the bodies as well, though his inspection was less into whether they had coins or rings inside their pockets, but the general condition of the bodies as well. He had a lantern with him that he used to shed light upon the situation. "Oh, my. This is certainly not good. No, not good at all. From the condition of these, I would have to say the bodies would have been dead for some time now. Not too long, but not a short time either. Long enough to have been buried."

Mansfield moved to the neck, now focusing on the area of the apparent decapitation. "A fairly clean cut on all of these. Methodical. Not a surgeon's hand, though, I can say that much. Thankfully not a scalpel. Something like an axe. Brute force, but one swift blow. No hacking away or anything. Might even have been the blow that killed 'em." The doctor tucked down the shirt on one of the bodies, and frowned.

"What's this now?" He moved from one body to the second, doing the same thing. "Here too," he murmured, before checking the third. "And here again. Not a coincidence, I think."

Looking up to whoever was keen to take notice, he said, "Come now, have a look at this. There's a tattoo, just here, just above the heart on all three of these men. The areas are clean, and they were recently done. Crudely, though."


This message was last edited by the player at 22:59, Tue 07 Jan 2014.

Sky Dog looked over, the tattoo above his own heart looking black in the firelight. "Ah, they are made things?" The shaman looked back at Cora a moment, his tense gravity somehow underlining his youth, as though in contrast, then at Mansfield again.

"Do you know why they were waving the fruit, Mansfield? Sabres, I have seen, and spitting of boiling blood by the plague-spirits, but the fruit on fire, never." He gestured at the corpse Mansfield was inspecting. "Perhaps it would be well to give their hearts to Our Friend," he nodded at the fire.

"Fruit?" Mansfield asked, blinking for a moment in incomprehension, before briefly surveying the scene again, and then looking again in Sky Dog, realization dawning on him.

"Oh, the pumpkins. I don't know about plague spirits, and I don't quite know the why about the pumpkins on fire. There's a legend...a story, and I'm not one for such, but it involves a headless horseman that was an old Hessian soldier in the American Revolutionary War and I think I remember something about a pumpkin being involved, but I can't quite recall the particulars."

Gabby, despite not really wanting to deal any more with this things, was drawn by morbid curiosity to examine the corpses with Sky Dog and Mansfield. He shivers at the tattoos around the heart, and perks up at the mention of the stories.

"Yeah, the Headless Horseman o' Sleepy Hollow. Written by the same guy who done Rip Van Winkle. The Epitaph did a reprint o' that story a while back. Fella named Ichabod Crane was wooing this lady, and his rival, fella named Brom, tol' him the story o' the Headless Horseman to spook him. In the story, Crane done got attacked by the Horseman, who threw his flamin' head at 'im, and Crane up and vanished. The next day, all they found was his wandering horse, trampled saddle, discarded hat, and a mysterious shattered pumpkin. The story kinda implied that it were just Brom in disguise tryin' to murder or chase away Crane, and the pumpkin was what Brom used as his ghost's head." Gabby frowns. "I'm guessin' whoever Quantrill's got who knows Radcliffe's mad science methods, they done some improvements, read the Epitaph, and got creative. I wonder...if we was to cut one o' these folk open, would we find a chunk o' ghost rock where their hearts would be?"

At the mention of the word 'Story', Daniel immediately turned to look at his uncle. He was delighted to hear that some things never changed. Death, taxes, and Gabby telling stories. Well, death seemed to no longer be such a sure thing. But Gabby and stories certainly were.

Having inspected the bodies closely without touching them, Daniel shrugged at the question from his uncle. "Only one way ta find out, now." Daniel went over to retrieve his barber bag, then seemed to remember something. "Oh, anyone get dinged up by those, er, fellas what threw punkins?" He looked for a moment or two among his things, then withdrew a scalpel. It ought to expose whatever had taken the place of a heart. He'd never done autopsy work before. Though perhaps this wasn't exactly that sort of work.

He looked about to see if anyone indicated the need for medical attention before he went over toward the doubly dead bodies that needed opening.

"Yes, that's the story! But...why would you find a chunk of ghost rock in their hearts?" asked Mansfield, curious.

Coraline met Sky Dog's strange and curious gaze with one of her own, before walking closer to observe the bodies. She pulled out her fan, fanning herself while she looked on at the curious symbols carved there, not squeamish at all.

She responded to the doctor's question in a casual, offhanded manner. "A long story, doctor, and I'm not sure you'd believe the half of it. Let's just say a few of us had a run-in with a scientist who had somehow discovered a way to use ghost rock to reanimate the dead." Still, she winced a little bit. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it wouldn't kill her, so she had always told herself. But this time, it would cause her a little bit of pain. She could wait for the most recent mystery to be uncovered before asking for any medical attention for her burned arm.
This message was last edited by the GM at 18:08, Wed 08 Jan 2014.

"If you're gonna cut his heart open and take a look, best get on with it. Bloody work, but if you've seen the like before best to find out now if this is the same. Either way, it's late, and we're for Oakley in the morning," he said.