The dark depths of despair

Well, the four of us - that is, Montana, Teddy, the kid, and me - found Burns. He was quite dead, and whatever had killed him had treated him like a rag doll. Montana had been part of the militia out west (in montana, see?) and had been involved with defense against some raids by the Sioux, led by a young chieftain. He is still out there in the shadows of the black hills, gathering a force that the cavalry will have to deal with, hear they are calling it Red Cloud's horde. Anyhow, even Montana was unnerved by the gristle that had been spattered about.
The kid started gibbering as soon as we walked into the tool shed. We hadn't found the body, but we could ken that something wasn't right from 10 yards away - the smell, y'see. It was a rank odor the likes of which you can not believe. I have smelled it before in an abattoir, something had chopped him open with no care for his guts, and they must of been split open.
We searched his body, and came up with a Smith-Wesson with four rounds remaining, a half-empty jug, and a scroll of strange glyphs written in a luminescent ink. Teddy jumped when he saw the jug and tilted it back, but the contents had been fouled and he sat there spitting for five minutes while the rest of us got to searching the cabin. Course, the kid wasn't much help, he was looking around with crazy eyes trying to catch sight of what did it.
I knew the look of a cold corpse when I saw it. Xavier hadn't been killed recently, which meant that whatever had done it was still loose. Unfortunately, I was running low on ammunition for my Portable Gatling, and I know that the elephant gun Teddy carried was down to its last nitro. Like I said before, burns had run off with my ammo earlier, so I gave the shed a thorough sweep, though I steered clear of Xavier's corpse and the scroll he had been holding. Fortune smiled on me, and I found the missing ammo. It had all been dumped into a trough of clean water. I gave it a whiff, just in case it smelled sulfurous, before fishing out a few boxes. Most of the rounds had been spoiled (or at least, needed a spot of drying), but a few belts had been left in an oiled bag and were still dry. I grabbed what I could before suggesting that we get ourselves clear of the shed. None of my comrades brooked any argument.