In the morning Tobey spends some time questioning the local midwife, and finds her pretty reasonable. They get to see a very young baby that one of the families has - only a few weeks old - and all seems well. Then the posse spends a while sniffing about the corn fields and finds a large burrow full of corn husks and such, but isn't willing to crawl into it. There isn't an obvious animal to have made it. All in all they're mostly waiting for Mr. Lawless to return. Dinner at the Reverend's is also pretty dull, although there is notably no meat, and the undead members of the posse feel hungry.
Late that night Sally once again tries to visit, and this time Bart and Cady are on watch and let her. She sneaks over to Robert, but when she blows in his ear he blows up, and Sally once again flees, this time into the corn fields. A shriek makes the posse chase her, and they catch up to find her being menaced by two scarecrows. Making short work of them, they find a strange corn idol next to another one of those burrows, which is bursting with rats. It seems they have found the source of the trouble. Lawless (who returned that evening) demands that the entire field be burned.
The next day the town works hard to clear the fields around the idol field, and by the end of the day have created enough of a fire break that it can safely be burned. Unfortunately, Tobey has thought to use her periodic question power to ask God whether this was the source of the trouble, and it wasn't.
Dinner is again at the Svensons, and Sally asks whether the posse is going to leave now that the idol is destroyed and the field burned. Robert, of course, says no, because they haven't found the source of the evil. Upon returning to the stable, they stay up late trying to figure out what could be going on, and they notice Sally sneaking away after their discussion. Cady sneaks after her, and listens to Sally, her father, Hiram Guggins, and the Reverend discussing what to do about the posse. It seems they (and the whole town) are complete corn cultists!
Since Sally's plan about the idol didn't work, the cultists try to figure out how to deal with the well-armed strangers. They finally hit on ambushing them in church tomorrow, where they are unlikely to be armed. The "corn pygmies" will also help, whatever they are. Cady returns to the stable to report this. Unfortunately, before they have really decided what to do, the stable is lit on fire! The town seems to have decided to attack tonight rather than tomorrow.
Unfortunately for the cultists, tomorrow would have been a better plan. Lawless and Bart stride out with gatling pistols blazing to make them fall back, and while the corn pygmies - little men armed with sickles - do kill Elder Tanner's horse as everyone tries to escape, that is their only kill. The posse rides out, and while the farmers are able to severely wound Bart's arm and blow off Tobey's kneecap, the other hits they get are on armored targets. Once the posse gets out of the immediate ambush and reveals itself to be so protected (and Dr. Vorpwhistle shoots some lightning bolts into the towns-folk) the cultists panic.
A long night of rounding them up and setting fire to pretty much everything that can be burned follows. Only about twenty of the cultists surrender, including Hiram Guggins the shopkeeper, who pleads with them to just let the towns-folk stay and not bother anyone. He promises they'll stop trying to ship corn. The posse is having none of that, and after patting down their captives for weapons and corn (and finding a lot of corn, leading Lawless to shoot a couple of the captives for having stomachs full of it) they march the captives back to Cheyenne. Behind them, New Sweden and its fields are a blackened wasteland.
TG: Sally was strangely much bolder and more talkative this run. What happened to the shy young Swede? You'd think she'd been possessed by evil spirits.
"It's no good Sven, we waited too long for the chop chop." - Hiram