Sangre de Madre, New Mexico has all the charm of a broken-toothed hooker on hop, but like the simalcrum, it will serve.<br/><br/>The woods are thinner this far south, with most of the worthy building trees are staked out and guarded and the decent burning stuff was quickly consumed to scare off the night shivers.  Some of the buildings in the dark sprawl of a 50 or 60 building town, unabashedly spreading itself in full view of rolling hills that watch with stoic pleasure, are made of interlocking logs of the pioneer style-- thick enough to stop a cannon shot dead mid-flight and hold it still to light your cigar upon.  Some are patchworked from the red adobe learned from the native people, the sagging dry clay like the skin of a scrawny child's slatted ribs.  Others are the milled-wood siding of a fancier stock, so even and smooth in their repetitive pattern that you might think they were chiseled by a giant's lathe, their flickering orange eyes glaring upon their neighbors with due paranoia as the oil lamps flicker within.<br/><br/>The town has suffered little planning, it seems, and the clutter of roofs becomes a violent knot like Virginia Creeper vine closer to the city center, where the trade must be best.  No fancy gas-lights here, as one might see in London or New York, but here and there a lantern is suspended from a hook on the grip of a shotgun, or dangles from the hand of an axehandle-carrying drunk who staggers his way to piss his rented mine-wages under a stairwell.  A rough-tuned piano jangles out something like a tune at one saloon, and across the square miners are singing an Irish ballad to their new German friends.  Red and white orbs-- paper lanterns-- dot the balcony of a two-story building farther off past a few mercantile  stores, and the new bank sits glaring at its neighbors from behind lattices of iron and heavy padlocks.  The vault within waits like a patient Buddha that has never been tested.<br/><br/>The four of them are either here, or are arriving here... they may call it home, or hell, or an accidental impasse.  But they are about to collide.