[b][u][color=darkorange]Off Chisholm Trail, Near to Selina[/color][/u][/b]

Days heatin' up.  Nothing crazy, but hot just the same.  Type of weather makes a man happy to get back to civilization but still yearn to head back out.  Sleeves rolled up, wipin' sweat from their brows, the driver and the coachman smell it before they see it.  In a heat like this meat spoils quick.

"Whooooooah," the driver calls out as he pulls back on the reins, the coachman already turned to face forward, coachgun scanning about.  As the carriage come to a stop the coachman jumps out moving up past the window.

"Somethin' ain't right out here, you all..." he stops midsentence and instead chokes out a muted "[i]oh fuck, oh Christ[/i]"

"Sta...stay up there Hank," the coachman shouts back to the driver as he approaches the body.

[i]"Shit...oh my god...damn...shit..."[/i]

He approaches the body in a low crouch, not no tactical crouch now, a plum scared crouch.  He turns back as the door to the carriage opens, then turns back to the body.  A young woman, though that is scarcely determinable given the state she's in.  Torn open and spread across the road.  The coachman whispers [i]"Mam?"[/i] to her, just in case, though she is most certainly dead and he knows it.  Closer, now closer still, he bends down to take look at her wounds and grows unsteady on his feet.




[b][u][color=darkorange]Selina[/color][/u][/b]

"Ah," Father O'Flanagan says, trying to affect his usual cheerfulness but falling short, "Sister Aveline."

"I..." he begins as he makes his way toward her chair.  Though a large man it would be hard to find hims in any way intimidating, long nights spent reading "The Book," preparing his sermons, and tending to the sick has given him a neigh permanent lurch.

"Thank you sister for carrying that burden with me.  I don't know if I told you, but the miner he was a friend to me once when I was a young man.  One of the finest men I'd ever known before I found the Lord."

He is quiet for a moment, looking to the horizon, before he sighs and his shoulders sloop ever so slightly.

"This morning I am troubled, by probably the oldest question.  Why do bad things happen to good men?  Old Charles he was surely a good man and that, that was surely a bad way to go."

Straightening out his robes and pulling back his shoulders he continues, in a tone that is almost convincing,

"But it is a beautiful day is it not?  Charles will be missed, but his memory will live on and it is a beautiful day."

Working a smile across his face Father O'Flanagan pats Aveline gently on the shoulder and heads inside the monastery to find solace in the Good Book. 

Now it surely is one of those beautifully cruel things about this world, way these things happen and the world it just keep a moving on.  That miner Charles, he surely were a fine man and he surely did suffer.  Took a long time dyin' that one.  Aveline and the Father they done all they could, Father didn't have no "gifts" but he pray'd his heart out safe to say.  Aveline she done her thing and yet even still whatever it were that were hauntin' him it weren't nothin' that neither of them could fix.  Damndest thing it was.  Didn't matter how much that one ate he were ever hungry, ever thirsty, and ever losing weight.  He were a strong miner all his life, but at the end he were weak as a suckling babe.  Poor poor Charles.