gather more information.
First we spoke to the train conductor about the derailment and learned that there was no monster springing into the Engine room or lingering about, but that someone had piled scrap metal on the track. The railroad detective who perished, it seems, was investigating some local vandal. We also learned that the small person who disappeared was a bone collector, marketing the commodities of the American Bison.
Things were not lining up. Werewolves were known to behave like beasts— hunting, eating, devouring. What we were dealing with here was calculated. I began to think something was amiss.
The evening came soon enough, and it was time to find the old woman who had said she would meet us by the stables. The air was dry, and the sun was low. You could hear some lay-by fence rattling in the wind. We saw the old woman standing there in the middle of the corral. Her beautiful blanket was like a shroud or darkness in the low light, and the beads filled the darkness with twinkling, like the stars of the sky. She held out her hand to us.
A creature leapt from the shadows and jumped on her. She dropped to her knees struggling, subdued by the figure of a wolf!
" A wolf!" I breathed, barely able to contain myself. It seemed abnormally large. Was it... could it be...? Or, no, it was a man! Or...
I did not expect there to be such difficulty in recognizing a werewolf.
I held my gun to the ready but Percy let out a scream, reaching for his pistol in such a panic that he almost clubbed a nearby horse with the barrel. He fired his gun at the werebeast, and though he came quite prepared for the encounter by equipping his gun with silver bullets, the beast was unmoved. It continued to wrestle that woman to the ground, until it crushed her in its arms.