Meanwhile, Sarge has been working his way toward the Smithy, keeping to the boardwalk, peering around the corner of each clapboard building cautiously before continuing..tracking a tracker can be risky business, and the role of predator and prey can be reversed quickly...especially with a man as dangerous as O'Callahan. He arrives outside the blacksmith's shop, and, sure enough, there is the hearse, the beautiful black horses standing patiently, although a bit nervously, their ears and withers trembling every time the lightning crashes. He makes his way to the side of the building, and peers in through a small window. Inside, he see's O'Callahan, and the smith, and what one would expect to see in a smithy..except for one thing...there is some sort of contraption near the back of the shop, made of shiny metal and surrounded by iron rings, and as he watches, blue lightning forms on the bottommost ring, jumps to the one above it, and to the next, and the next, building in intensity until it leaps upward from a polished knob on the apex of the whole affair through an opening in the smithy's roof. Every time it discharges, there is a corresponding flash of lightning in the sky, followed a split second later by a stupendous crash of thunder.
"Whut in tarnation?!?" he says to himself, quietly. He turns his attention back to the two men. O'Callahan is addressing the smith-"And just what, my good man, is that abomination over there in the corner? Some work of the Devil, I don't doubt!" The smith is a big man, as smiths are wont to be, and he retorts hotly, "And just what business of yours might that be, ...Father? The sneer as he says the word "Father" is evident in his voice. "If you don't have need of my services, you'd best mind your own affairs, and get out of my shop...I'm a busy man, a fellow came in here with busted parts for his mechanical spider a while ago, so I've got work to do." The blacksmith is a big man, arms bigger than the thighs of most men, but, so fast that Sarge can hardly follow the action, O'Callahan seizes him, upends the man and, handling him as easily as one would handle a puppy, uses a block and tackle and rope and in short order has the hapless man trussed at the ankles and suspended head downwards above his own glowing fire-pit. Like many true psychopaths, the "governor" in O'Callahan's brain is not functioning, or non-existent..he is easily seven times stronger than a normal man, and quicker than any rattlesnake. He leans in, and, lowering the struggling smith a notch, says again in his whispery Irish brogue, "Tell me what that is, my friend, or I promise you a little bit of Hell right here on Earth..." "OK! OK!" sobs the smith, clearly scared almost witless, " I swear, I don't even know what it really is...that middle part I found in a smoking hole in the ground near Roswell, in New Mexico territory! I brought it back here in my wagon and started tinkering with it...I was trying to figure out how to get it to make power for the shop." "If I let you down," purrs O'Callahan, "will you shut it off? It frightens my horses, and I suspect it has something to do with making it difficult to leave this pitiful hamlet...and I, sir, like yourself, have business to which I must attend..souls need saving, you see, souls of some very bad men." The big smith rolls his eyes in terror. "I can't shut it down! I've tried! Once I got it fired up, though, it shocks the hell out of me every time I try to touch it, and it just keeps getting stronger!"
Sarge ducks back down as O'Callahan, without another word, and leaving the poor smith suspended above the fire, turns on his heel and exits.
(OOC sidebar- MW, you might want to do a small edit above-Thistlewaite exists in this timeline, but at present he is an ordinary Sgt. Major, serving with Her Majesty's Horse Marines in China. He has yet to accidentally kill the little Chinese mage, inadvertently starting the Boxer Rebellion, has yet to acquire the alchemical potions which make him nearly immortal, will not for several years accompany Younghusband to Tibet, or cause the Tunguska event, or become friends with the Curies...all these things are still in the future for Thistlewaite. The fellow in this story is Jedidiah Gunn, who will eventually sire a son, who will have a son, who marries the daughter of Thistlewaite's sister, who will eventually give birth to Thistlewaite's great-nephew and namesake, T.E. Gunn, the detective. See? Makes perfect sense, eh?)
