*
It was a dark time for Omega Canyon.
A year had passed since The Incident at Judgement Grotto. The rumours about what had happened far outnumbered the facts and the townsfolk were content to let the tales be, as if telling them was like to summon trouble.
While the certainties about what had transpired in the graveyard that night - and about how it had led to the ranch of a mysterious horsebreeder being burned down - were few, there were some details about what followed that were plainly agreed upon.
Logollos and his corrupt ways were gone. Driven out or shot down, folks wouldn't offer a guess either way. He wasn't missed.
The lawman Dexter Washington had given up his badge and taken up residence in the Canyon, opening a small schoolhouse.
The marshal Wednesday Wraith had also unpinned her star and become a part-owner of the local printing press. She had began publishing a newspaper.
Callan Lokk had won The Hanged Man Saloon in a card game, kept the original owner in his employ, and given up gambling.
A new graveyard had been fenced-off and consecrated - the final act of the priest Darius Angelus before he disappeared.
The last of the strangers who had ridden into town the day before The Incident had also disappeared, the bounty hunter Mags Magenta.
Those were the handful of facts but out of the many, many rumours one was generally considered to be true: that when the grave of the strange drifter Sugarcube had been opened that mysterious night it was not his body they found inside.
However odd, The Incident and what came of it had actually changed the fortune of the Canyon for the better. The reversal of that fortune, and the cause of the current troubles, began shortly after when the Office of Frontier Affairs arrived and announced the discovery of oil in the land surrounding Omega...
to be continued
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