Andreas steps out from the courtroom and it's criminal justice atmosphere and its outcomes. He looks up at the sky and sets of on another walk around western Austin. In the street in front of Peacock’s Saloon on Main Street there’s a saddled horse hitched to a rail with a cowboy lying passed out between its four legs. His hat is over his face and he’s too liquored-up to even snore.
The undertaker whom he did job for yesterday has a new hand-lettered sign up:
Barber needed. One-Time Job. Won't take a Jiffy. $1.00 Pay The lumber yard next to it has a sign up as well.
Yard help needed. $1 per day. Day by day employment is accepted.
He turns the corner onto Front Street and sees a building to his with the sign
Stephen F. Austin Public School standing in its grassy front yard. The half-pane windows are raised for the June heat, and he sees an earnest-looking young woman reading from a book to children around 9 or 10 years old.
“...And even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable--"'
`Found what?' said the Duck.
`Found it,' the Mouse replied rather crossly: `of course you know what "it" means.'
`I know what "it" means well enough, when I find a thing,' said the Duck: `it's generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?'
`Ugh!' said the Lory, with a shiver.
The young woman notices Andreas passing and noticing in the street and looks up. To Andreas, he’s quite pretty. Beautiful, really. She looks Andreas a brief look in the eye, a stunned and little long one really. It seems the she may have found a possible-- just maybe possibly-- her prince. And with a bashful smile she turns back to the book and the reading.
From there, it’s another right turn, past Drover's corral and livery stable, and then to Drover’s hotel. He, Doos, DT, Gideon and Paladin and William enjoy chewing the fat (or just quietly listening in) and have a good meal. Paladin has an errand to run in town and leaves the others to enjoy an after-lunch coffee, beer, root beer, or water. He returns, and the party mounts up and heads west toward the railroad construction camp. The newly-laid tracks more or less parallel the highway to Fredericksburg. Which after a ways past the scattered 160-acres farms and ranches isn't much more than two parallel ruts through the prairie grass. The Bullet locomotive pulling its coal tender and a flatbed loaded with steel rails, cross ties, and various wooden crates gradually overtakes riders and passes them. Charley blows the whistle and he and coal dust-faced Floyd waves from the engineering room.
Howdy boys! Sorry, no livestock car in the consist this time. You’ll have ta ride. See ya at the camp!
As the horsemen get closer to the rail construction camp they hear a deep, steady, rhythmic thumping sound. It gets louder with every yard they get closer to the camp. The riders enter the tent hamlet of the camp and see that assistant project manager John and one of the three crews have the flatbed car piledriver in operation driving piles thicker than telegraph poles into the bed of the gulley. The loud rhythmic thudding of heavy metal on wood is about deafening, and the earth beneath the horses’ hooves trembles. WHUMP. WHUMP. WHUMP. WHUMP. Gideon says, deadpan,
That rhythm kind of reminds me of ole Leona. WHUMP. [/dialog]Fallen angel gal I know in Waco.[/dialog] WHUMP. WHUMP. WHUMP.
Another crew is still at work offloading steel rails and cross ties from The Bullet’s flatcar. Most of the crates the riders had seen on the flatcar are stacked outside the cook tent. They've been broken open, and Paladin sees Gao hustle over to one and heft a 50 lb. bag of flour and throw it over his shoulder. He looks up and spots Paladin seated on his handsome horse and gives the man a black look. Then hustles back into the cook tent.
The third construction crew is on the other side of the gully, continuing the backbreaking daily work of laying down ties and rails. Chen’s shaker, another Chinaman, places spikes into the eyes of cleats and holds them for the big man's from sledgehammer to drive into the creosote ties. The tracks continue stretching westward, one length of rail at a time, toward Fredericksburg.
The four rifle-armed railroad guardssit their horses and conserve their energy in the glaring light of the June Sun almost directly overhead. One expertly lines a cigarette paper with tobacco, twists a smoke up, and touches a match to it. Their horses face the grass and shrubs of the savannah prairie to the north, west, and south, and east of the camp.
Where any threats to the camp would come from. Comanches. Robber gang. Cattle stampede. Wild fire. Anything else that's out there that could cause trouble out here in the middle of nowhere. The diners at the Drover Hotel notice Paladin paying particular attention to one of immobile mounted guards. The spy and saboteur one? Probably. If the man is having uneasy thoughts or making traitorous plans, his face isn't showing it. He looks like a man hired to sit in a saddle all day and part of a night to guard a spot out on the prairie. Maybe a little more alert than the bored other three men? If so, not by much.
Moe, with Larry and Curly behind, walks up to the mounted riders with his old revolving cylinder rifle cradled in his elbow. All three's faces are sweaty in the heat. Moe yells above the piledriver’s thumps.
HELLO, MR. PALADIN, GENTLEMEN. NOTHIN SPECIAL HAPPENED WHILE Y’ALL WAS AWAY. Big oafish young Curly with his hunting long tom shotgun yells, THA COOK SAYS TONIGHT WE'RE GONNA HAVE CRABBAPPLE PIE WITH MOLASSES AND REAL SUGAR ON TOP A THE CRUST! AND DON' BE LATER FER DINNER! Larry yells, helpfully, THE BULLET BROUGHT MAIL. MISTER BURNS BAGGED IT AND IT'S IN HIS TENT. IF YA HAVE MAIL TA AUSTIN, NOW'S THE TIME TO POST IT. THA BOX IS ON THE SIDE OF THE COAL TENDER, IF YA DON'T KNOW. THE ENGINEER AND COAL MAN SAID THEY'RE LEAVING CAMP AT 2;30, SHARP. I DON'T GOT A WATCH, I DON'T KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS. He looks up at the Sun. ANYWAY, THEY'RE GOIN BACK TO THE RAILYARD BETWEEN NOW AND NIGHT.
WB, redwarrior! I was just about to have to move things forward and bring William back in later when he can. Glad I didn't have to. 
Andreas can retcon to an action before lunch at the Drover Hotel if he’d like. He has around 1.5 hours around Austin for that.
Paladin's lunch is $.35, DT's beans and maybe Doos's toast ("Cheap meal") are $.25. Coffee - $.05. Beer - $.05. Root beer - $.10. Please update your sheets. 1873 Texas and the entire rest of the frontier is all about money. Nobody would be out here in this hot, rough, violent place if they were content being poor in a less god-forsaken one.
Going forward, I'm going with "Drover Hotel" instead of "Drowver Hotel." The Swedish guy who made the digital map labeled two building "Drowver," rather than "Drover" as is in the rulesbook. Maybe a play on drow elves from D&D?
