The Long Dry — hints

Talk to all three of the people who can open a door — Speake at the mine office, Mrs Vogt at the boarding house, Sheriff Cutright — and find the girl in the wash house behind Vogt's. Then ride out east. Type reckon at any time to see where you stand.

You start at −20 with the Company and −10 with the town, because you are alive and Tom Bree is not. That is the starting position and it is meant to be.

Ask Mrs Vogt about the July coin order — it is the single most important fact in the game and she will hand it to you on the first morning. Read the reward bill on Main Street, and the shift board in the change house, and go and stand in Brewery Gulch and say out loud that the horses were shod.

talk to cassie first, and ask her about her father. Then cassie, follow. She will not go home and there is no combination of words that makes her, and the game will let you ride out without her and will make you say it twice.

Forty swallows, two days, two people. Every five turns the game tells you that you are both dry and you choose: drink, give cassie water, both, or neither. Nobody dies of it. It is a record of how you divided a thing, and there is a reckoning at the end of the crossing.

The tank is twenty-two miles out and it has four inches in it. fill the canteens — it is worth twenty-two swallows and it is the only water between Bisbee and the wash.

The wagon, and what is under the tarpaulin against the sideboard. The tracks — four sets, all shod. And then go down into the bed, follow them south-east to the rock shelf, and walk the far edge of it. That takes forty minutes and eleven men did not do it on the twelfth.

Camp south of the wash and open the tin of peaches Mrs Vogt put in your saddlebag. It is not for you and you have known that since Bisbee.

Forty opens a door and you are probably nowhere near it. Two levers: stand with the company (or the town, or the chiricahua) is worth thirty to them and twelve off each of the others, and tell vogt — or Speake, or Cayetano — trades everything you have found out for eight a fact, and takes three a fact off the other two.

Whichever one you can afford. All three are real and fully written and none of them is the intended one: the Company's brass tag and the cage, the town's eleven men and the old No. 3 adit, or Cayetano's man-way from Cottonwood Spring — a mile and a hundred yards, timbered, out in the No. 3 sump.

You are carrying a carbide lamp. light lamp.

The office map has a stope on the four hundred level hatched in newer ink than everything round it. The boards across it are the colour of a floorboard and every other stick of timber down there is the colour of a nail. take the boards off.

Yes. Four days of cold ash, the brush stacked, and eleven stones laid across the trail. You spent what would have opened that door in Bisbee on the nineteenth, on purpose, and you got a mine out of it. It does not reopen, and that is the act.

Ord Renshaw, and what happens depends entirely on whether Cassie is beside you. If she is, he turns the horse and goes back down the trail at a walk. If she is not, he asks where she is.

If you have told the Company that there is a witness, then sending her away is the thing that kills her, and two separate people said so to your face in Act I. The game warns you again, in plain words, three turns in.

Take the sack to one of them, in person: give the sack to speake on the hill, give the sack to vogt at the long table, give the sack to cayetano on the road east — or ride out and give it to nobody.

Not on the last day. "A man who gives you a thing on the last day is giving it to himself." You needed to have come up that canyon when it cost you something.

The game does not think one of them is, and the endings are written to make that honest rather than coy. What changes them most is not which you pick — it is whether Cassie Bree is standing next to you when you do.