<hr/><div class="floatleft">(https://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/f/f2/Beardycox.jpg)</div><br/><strong>Name:</strong>Avery Burnham<br/><strong>Faction:</strong>Law Dogs (1)<br/><strong>Date:</strong>May 18th, 1876<br/><strong>Time of Day:</strong>Afternoon<br/><strong>Location:</strong>Dead Man’s Rest<br/><strong>Tagged:</strong>Charlie Flatbush; CLOSED<br/><hr/><br/>Avery did not consider himself a superstitious man.  Quite the opposite was true.  The persistence of such fantasy in an age of reason frustrated him.  He championed logic and what the mind could firmly grasp and understand.  The future belonged to seekers of material truth, scientists and engineers and men like himself.  He believed that wholly.  Nonetheless, he could not help feeling there was something wrong about Deadman’s Rest, something only partially related to the rows of gravestones and ornate mausoleums that awaited their arrival.  There were countless graveyards, after all, and in the end they were all nothing but chiseled placards and rotting bones.  This one felt different somehow though.  If ever there was such a thing as a place well-suited to strangeness and tragedy, this one would surely qualify.<br/><br/><em>Horse flop</em>, he thought to himself, peering curiously at the windows of a distant obscured manse to the north.  Charlie was right though.  This was not a place anyone would wish to live.  Only the mad would be apt to tolerate it for long and of course they were likely given little choice in the matter.  If this asylum was anything like the one he’s seen, it would have made the cramped jailhouse in town feel like a health resort in comparison, upturned offal bucket or otherwise.  Not that he entirely blamed people for isolating them out here, cruel as it might seem.  There was nothing that disturbed Avery quite like the idea of madness, the thought of losing oneself, of falling into the dark recesses of the mind and never crawling back out again.  It upset him.  It upset him more than he liked to admit.<br/><br/>“I have a question for you Charlie, rather important one maybe,” he began while the deputy sorted through his keys.  Removing his hat, Avery used it to fan himself, a mostly ineffectual effort to combat the rising midday heat.  “So it give it some thought before you answer.  I need to know if you’ve ever heard of a man around these parts who goes by the name of Doggy, or just Dog perhaps.  I know how fond you people are  of nicknames out here.  I’ve certainly met my share of Reds and Blackies and Wild Bills, even one fellow who went by the peculiar appellation of Tripod, and, no, I didn’t ask.”<br/><br/>Returning his bowler to his head, the Englishman glanced back towards the rickety bridge and then did a slow circuit of the mesa with squinted eyes, trying to imagine where a man might hide in all this nothing, what could have escaped the notice of Bilton and his deputies.  Had they checked the mausoleums?  “It could even be anything canine related I suppose.  A Wolf or a Hound for example.  He would almost certainly have to be a large man though, possibly with a reputation, although that last part’s pure conjecture.”   Surely a man who had mutilated so many people and raped that poor woman would not be a stranger to violence though.  “Anything that comes to mind along those lines, no matter how tangential, might be of a great help to me.”<br/>