Mid-Logue

If this story were a movie and not a book, this would be the part where you’d see a map of the Old West circa 1876, with a dotted line that starts at Cincinnati and follows our characters from Ohio to what is now South Dakota. Annie, because she was the most direct person, took the most direct route: her dotted line was a train from Cincinnati to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Bismarck, North Dakota, and then a long and dusty 242-mile trail that stretched from Bismarck to Deadwood. This was “the fast way,” but then the wagon Annie was riding in got a broken axle. Then they lost half their supplies crossing a river and had to stop and hunt for a while to make up for it. Then there were a bunch of folks who came down with dysentery and a bunch of other folks who got bitten by snakes. Then the oxen just keeled right over and died. So the fast way wasn’t really that fast.

Jane, on the other hand, had never taken the fast way in her life. True, she wanted to get to Deadwood and be cured of the garou, and the sooner she accomplished that, the sooner she could be back with Bill and the gang, doing the show again, and everything could go back to—if not exactly normal, then the way it had been before. Jane took the train to Chicago also, earlier than Annie did, but in Chicago Jane blew through the rest of Annie’s ten dollars in less than a week, and therefore she had to stop here and there to work for some more cash before moving on. So Jane’s dotted line to Deadwood was a mess of wiggles and curlicues, through some of the most rough-and-tumble places in the Old West, like Dodge (but Jane got the heck out of there), Kansas City, and the seedier parts of Nebraska.

Bill and Frank took the train to Chicago, too, and afterward their dotted line simply followed Jane’s. They always juuuust missed her, and eventually they lost her trail. So they gave up the chase and proceeded on toward Deadwood, where they figured they’d eventually run into their friend.

All this to say, all three of our heroes made their separate ways to Deadwood, where coincidentally (or just because it makes things simpler for us) they all arrived in town at roughly the same time.