<hr/><div class="floatleft">(http://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/0/0c/Doomtown2-Recovered2.jpg)</div><br/><strong>Name:</strong>Walter Sinnett (https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=200832.msg9812108#msg9812108)<br/><strong>Date:</strong>May 13th, 1876<br/><strong>Time of Day:</strong>Afternoon<br/><strong>Location:</strong>The Great Maze, just having seen the Gates' Ranch on the horizon.<br/><strong>Tagged:</strong>Letty, Open.<br/><hr/><hr/><strong>“Don't bloody look at me like that. It's just somethin' I gotta' do.”</strong><br/><br/>The sun was burning down and it was hot. It always seemed to be bloody hot out here. People told Walter it got feckin' cold at night but it wasn't night and it wasn't feckin' cold. It was hot. Hotter than pretty much anything Walter have ever experienced before he came to this sodding country. And it was wet heat, drawing moisture from the sea and submerged twisted canyons that made up the Great Maze. It clung to Walter like a second coat, like a heavy shawl draggin' him down. A thick droplet of sweat burst into life on his forehead, hanging there precociously for a second before losing the fight against gravity and sliding over his skin to dangle and drip from his nose before a thick finger brushed it away. It was far from the first to have made such a journey... the streaking lines of dirt across Walter's face told a story.<br/><br/>Oh yes, it wasn't just hot. It was hot and dusty. Walter had thought the occasional sea breeze that managed to make its way inland to him would bring sodding respite but he'd been bloody wrong about that. They barely lowered the temperature, made the air even bloody moister and they brought dust. Tons of feckin' dust. A whole feckin' deserts worth, swept up from the loose top soil of the Great Maze and seemin'ly all dumped directly on Walter's bastard head. He was caked in the stuff. The heat might have been like second coat over him but the dust actually was a bloody second coat, coverin' ever bloody part of him. His boots, his trousers (and they were soddin' trousers not “pants” whatever the bloody yankee-doodle's said), his coat, his shirt under the bloody coat, his hands, his face, even his feckin' hat. Feck it, every time he drew in a breath he seemed to get it up his nose or in his bloody mouth, staining his lips, drying out his tongue, makin' him bloody sneeze. Walter liked the Great Maze, he liked the way the cracked land wriggled this way and that with no sense of purpose or design... in that it reminded him of London. But the sparse flat lands when one rose out of the shadows? Walter bloody hated those. He hated the sun and he hated the heat and most of all he hated the bloody dust.<br/><br/>Walter's donkey snorted. It didn't like the dust either.<br/><br/>Walter's bitter mood was in no way helped by what he'd spent his morning doing. Which was walking back and bloody forth through this bloody place. Pointlessly. He hadn't seen bloody anything, hadn't done bloody anything. He'd just walked up and down getting hotter and hotter and dustier and bloody dustier till he now resembled a bloody sculpture made out of sand. Normally Walter could keep his irritation somewhat under control by falling back on the most traditional of all English pastimes, quietly moaning to himself about his boss and the stupidity of what he had been told to do, but even that was denied to him... he'd given himself this bloody job to do and endlessly railing at your own inadequacies gets bit boring after a while. So Walter just shut up, kept his mouth closed, tried to avoid any of the bloody dust getting in his mouth... and tried to avoid the equally accusing eyes of his donkey, clearly bitter at being taken from the comfort of Stiffies to this bloody place. And when a dump like Stiffies was described as havin' “comfort” compared to what Walter was goin' through then you can realise quite how grim this bloody was.<br/><br/>Redskins and Chinamen. They were out there. Walter knew that. Hell, he could pretty much see the bloody Redskin and their great bloody camp they'd set up whenever he wandered out to take a piss off the side of the Gomorra mesa. But he wasn't here to find a giant bloody Indian camp. What was he meant to do with a whole bloody camp of Redskins? Gather 'em all up and ask 'em nicely if they'd mind startin' a war with the bloody Yellowskins if it weren't too much trouble? Like that would bloody work.<br/><br/>The donkey shot another glance at Walter just to make clear it wouldn't work and he shouldn't try it. You never knew with Walter.<br/><br/>So no, Walter was ridin' out lookin' for other bloody Redskins, preferably less than a feckin' tribeful all at once. And any Chinamen he could find as well... preferably less than a shipload. And he hadn't soddin' found any or any bloody sign of them. Some men could track a swallow through flight, could look at a single footprint and work out every single detail about the owner of the foot, could workout how a fight went down by looking at the damage caused to the surroundin' area. Walter would be lucky to notice the bloody footprint. He wasn't no soddin' tracker which made him feel like a bit of a bloody fool for havin' given himself this bloody task in the bloody first place. Not that it had been entirely wasted effort. Not entirely. Sure, Walter may not have seen a bastard redksin or a bastard yellowskin or franky any bastard skins at all but it weren't just about that was it?<br/><br/>Never let 'em see you comin' right?<br/><br/>Walter didn't know if anyone was watchin' 'im. He didn't know if people knew he was doin' a bit more for Sweetrock then just scarin' some miners. But he knew it didn't hurt to keep up appearences. Pretty much ever since he had first started workin' for Sweetrock Walter had spent each mornin' strollin' around the Great Maze and there was no reason to stop now. Keep a routine, make it all look normal, make it look like nothin' had changed. And get people used to seein' him. When you saw something every day, you stopped payin' attention to it. It just became part of the scenery, like an old blanket draped over a chair. You just paid it no bloody heed. After all, who expected the soddin' old blanket to rise up with a knife and cut your guts out? If Walter kept wanderin' around the Great Maze without doin' much of anythin' then any beady little eyes that might be on 'im were soon goin' to lose interest in 'im. And that meant they were less likely to pay attention when he was bloody doin' something.<br/><br/>Not that such thoughts offered much succor to Walter at this point in time. Because however hard he tried to concentrate on them... and trust me, Walter was tryin' to concentrate on them... all his mind could actually conjure up were a variety of swearwords related to the heat and the bloody dust. He just didn't want to be here, didn't want to have a dry mouth, a sweating brow and a stomach full of dust. He wanted something to drink and he wanted something to eat and he didn't want to be out in the bloody Great Maze. But he was still a long, dusty walk away from getting' back to Gomorra.<br/><br/>But not hours away from the building that had just appeared on the horizon on one of the few wider flatter areas of the Great Maze.<br/><br/>And with his usual tact and ability to understand the needs of others, Walter decided that he rather liked the idea of going to this place and getting something to drink.., and possibly to eat.<br/><br/>Whatever the residents thought.