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Redbird

Summary:

You're on the run with a secret, and you end up exactly where you don't belong: with a broken blue-eyed outlaw who didn't expect someone like you in his life. Neither of you has a prayer of getting out unscathed by what's to come.


Chapter 27: The Last Trail Part I

"We are on a fated road, Miss Riordan."


Chapter 1: The Shot

Summary:

You had never felt more desperate in your life.

You lay bleeding on the ground struggling to aim. Frantic. Panicked. Furious. You fired again and again with your left hand at the last man as he advanced and fired at you, and you yelled, and tears flowed back on your temples, and then, like he was never there, he dropped away, and suddenly it was quiet, just a blue bird flying high above you and the first flecks of rain, and you lay heaving in the grass thinking that was how it felt to die.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

You had never felt more desperate in your life. 

You lay bleeding on the ground struggling to aim. Frantic. Panicked. Furious. You fired again and again with your left hand at the last man as he advanced and fired at you, and you yelled, and tears flowed back on your temples, and then, like he was never there, he dropped away, and suddenly it was quiet, just a blue bird flying high above you and the first flecks of rain, and you lay heaving in the grass thinking that was how it felt to die.

When hooves came pounding close, you tried to check your chambers but your hand shook too hard and the last cartridge tumbled down somewhere by your side. 

You pushed yourself up to sit. Right arm numb. And you, so very tired. 

Some distance away, your horse was screaming. Then a gunshot, and then only the echo of the gunshot. 

In that dying sound you began to weep. A man’s voice was talking to you, at your side. The sky slowly tipped, and you were leaning into strong arms laying you down. He called over to someone else. 

Hands grasped the plackets of your shirt and ripped it open; you hardly noticed because the sprinkling rain fell with your tears and you were so cold and tired you couldn’t move.

Someone patted your cheek, demanding something. A man’s face was above you with concern, not rage, in his eyes like the sky. As your ears began to ring his arms scooped you up and wrapped something warm around you smelling of leather and woodsmoke and work. You didn’t remember him lifting you up on his horse or most of what he said, talking to you the whole time. You only wanted to sleep against his chest, alive by the beat of his heart and the low reverberation of his voice. But he kept slapping your face.

At some point, other voices talked over you while you shivered and tried to sleep.

You escaped from Colm? Miss?

Give her some room, Dutch.

Where was he?

I…I don’t know.

How far did you ride? It can’t have been far - she can’t have come that far, look at her.

Get the hell out of her face, all of you. You too, Mister Morgan.

She shot three of em. 

In the beginning, there you are. Well and truly fucked. Stuck worse than before, back to nothing but you and a gun. 

And a hell of a lot of trouble, the two-inch stack of which you have folded into a leather sack secured in a lockbox in the crumbling sheriff’s office, and you lie on the floor to stuff it as far back under the boards as you can possibly reach. 

Then you stand in the midst of that burned-out village in the meadow below their camp with your Cattleman in your left hand. The town is burned so black the charred wood crumbles and squeaks underfoot. Roofs all burned away. Glass melted. Licks of soot rising from the windows. 

You stand and check your chambers. Your right arm is still useless and bound against your chest tighter than the bodice of the dress one of the girls lent you to wear.

You draw back the hammer and raise your arm at the line of six pinecones you have set in the middle of the town. And this is how you will start over, in the midst of that burned-down, dead-black place. As fitting a place for you as any. At twenty paces.

Of your six shots, you hit four, each recoil jarring you like a kick to your opposite shoulder. You sit on one of the crates and reload one-handed, with the barrel clamped between your knees. 

You waste five shots on the last two. Lightheaded, you have to sit down again. 

“That ain’t exactly the fancy shootin I heard about.” The Irish accent is thick, and it hits something in you like an ax.

You spin around, your gun shaking, thinking about your last round and scanning for where to send it. 

“Whoa, be wide there!” The boy ducks, hands up, behind the remains of a wagon, his bowler, his rusty hair just visible over the side. 

“Get the fuck away -”

“I just come down to see what all the fuss were. Thought you was a stick of the town still in flames.” Acting clever, he gestures at your hair, auburn as a chestnut roan, thick and wild when you can't tame it in a braid.

“You're one to talk. Down from where.”

“Up there.” He nods at the overlook and the smoke rising from the campfire. “I heard there were someone new about.”

“I didn’t see you there.”

He steps out from behind the wagon, keeping his hands visible and moving slow to take his matches out of his pocket. “I was detained,” he says, lips clamped around a cigarette as he lights it.  He keeps his hands up. “Just rejoined to the fold. Not exactly a knight’s welcome.” He flicks an idle middle finger back at the overlook. “Think you might put that down?” 

“You’re not with Colm?”

He jerks his head back in surprise. “Not a chance.” 

You let your arm fall and you sit back hard on the crate. 

“What, O’Driscoll’s got a claim to us all?” He keeps a slight distance and prowls around your right side. 

“Safe guess out here.”

He shakes his cigarette knowingly at you, an unserious squint to his eyes. “What should I guess wrong about you?”

“You Dutch’s bloodhound?”

“So suspicious! Anyway you can’t hide nothin from me, I see through you plain as glass.” He walks jauntily around to your other side, getting the full survey of you.

“You can’t see shit.” 

“Well yer no ciotóg, I can tell you that.” He draws his pistol out and aims lefthanded up the street and mimics an exaggerated wobbly shot before switching to his right hand. 

He holds it in a graceless way, like his grip never quite feels right. From the wear of the varnish, you guess he probably has sweaty palms. When he aims at the door of the stone building at the top of the road, his shot goes so wide you can’t tell what he was trying to hit.

“And you can’t shoot either way.”

“That’s no way to talk to a friend now is it?” He talks sideways to you, like a part of his mind is in constant search of the next target for his blather. 

“I ain’t your friend.”

“Yeah you could use one though. A bird like you so far from home. So why don’t you tell us what you’re about.” He holsters his gun and crosses his arms.

“Why would I tell you anything?”

“So’s I can help.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“Sure you don’t. I’ll wait while you reload.” He makes a show of checking an imaginary watch. “Unless you’re too intimidated.”

“Is that a challenge?”

“Is it?” He grins like he’s never turned down a chance to get himself in trouble.

And you don’t mind the chance to put this blowhard in his place. But you drop two cartridges while trying to load. He tuts and shakes his head. Bastard. 

“Maybe you’d rather practice until my arm is healed.”

“Sounds like I’m better off taking you on now while I have an advantage, I reckon it’s rare.”

“You lick everyone’s boots or just mine?”

“Ooh, you’re makin me blush, love.” He crouches a little, relishing this, and throws down his cigarette.

Even offhand, you’re a better shot, and his bluster is, as ever, sharper than his aim. Six more pine cones. Eleven shots, five of them made, all of them yours. 

“Straightest shot in town,” he praises in his loving-sarcastic way you will eventually come to enjoy, as he swings his arm exaggeratedly around at the empty street, and in spite of yourself, you smile.

His last shot burrows into the charred ground, and then he turns at the sound of an approaching rider slowing, and seeing him, he swears under his breath and rubs his temple with the butt of the gun. 

“Christ here we go.”

And that’s when you meet him.

“Arter Morgan, the big man himself,” he calls, his voice both theatrical and mildly unwelcoming to the figure dismounting and walking up the blackened road, backed by the afternoon sun.

If your memory was at all to be trusted, you had stammered nonsense at him as he checked where you’d been hit, and he had gathered you up like a tumbled-down tent and carried you bleeding. What he had said to you, you could not place or even know if he had really said it, just the sound of his voice and the feel of it through his chest. More vibration than sound.

Show me those pretty eyes, darlin. Don’t go to sleep just yet.

Then when you woke he was gone.

“Sean, you ain’t back ten minutes and you’re already tormentin the poor girl.”

A rush flares through you to hear his voice again, and now he's standing there in a passing-through way. He touches his brim, but it seems to take him a while to look at you.

“She teachin you a thing or two?”

“I’d call it an even exchange.” Sean resigns his revolver to his holster with a forced and surly shrug. “The lady can shoot.”

“I’ve seen her shoot. Haven’t seen you hit anything yet.”

“Shows you must be goin blind, old man.”

“What d’you say, can he shoot worth a damn?” he asks you. He rests his hands on his gunbelt. 

Everything about him, standing next to the boy, is bigger and readier for the world. He stands knowing no other way to be, with all that is natural and capable in him, and all that comes with being such a way. Fists hit him harder. Burdens are greater. So are bounties, so are the needs of others. 

“He can shoot his mouth off, anyway,” you say, and Sean sulks good-naturedly at you, stepping back, hands up, as Arthur moves around him.

He leans sideways to get a peek at your revolver before reaching in his satchel and tossing a box of .45s on top of the barrel between you. 

“Well, let’s go, killer. I don’t have to tell you what to do.”

“Don’t you ask a lady first?” Sean calls over, finding himself rightly ignored and finally just perching on the side of the wagon. 

You didn’t,” you say, and Sean starts in with some amused bluster when Arthur shuts him up with a glance.

“Your lead eye the right?” he asks you.

“Yes. You?”

“Never thought about it.”

You roll your eyes, but you see him suppressing what might have been a smile.

“Shot for shot,” he says, taking off his satchel and loosening up his shoulders. “Offhand only.” There is something on the edge of daring in his voice. 

“And when you lose?”

His smile is crooked. Charming. Slightly provoked and enjoying it. 

“Make it interesting. Loser does the winner’s bidding for a week.”

“My money’s on the lady, Morgan. Be the thrill of my life, to see you darnin my socks.” 

“You don’t have any money, you dumbass.” But he isn’t looking at Sean; he’s watching you load one-handed on the barrel top. He spills the whole box there and loads his own.

“Need help?”

You snap the loading gate shut with a sharp flick of your thumb. “What with?”

He tips his head and gives you space. “Ladies first.”

That’s when something sparks in you. You get piqued at deference to your sex, for one thing, which he will quickly learn. And the spur of competition never fails to rile you up. Your horse was just the same; he was fast, but coming up on another horse at a gallop, he would show you something you didn't know you were asking for. He will learn that, too.

Your arm feels stronger as you stand there sensing him behind you, parallel to you, not two paces away. “Call it.”

He is silent for a moment. “Pinecone in the tree up there.” He nods at it.

You trust your eye, you know your hands, your left side steady when it counts. You spot it, you get your eye in, and fire. It explodes in pieces from the branch.

Arthur scratches his jaw. He isn’t as impressed as you thought he might be. In a way he’s even unimpressed. 

And so the spirit in you that would race a horse doesn’t just want to beat him; now you have to stun him. Show-off.

“There’s a high bar set for you, English. Better go press your apron.”

“Shut it and go scare up some targets or I’ll take you back to Skelding,” he says, a little bark in his voice now. “Okay, miss, call it.”

“Top branch, leaning tree.”

“Which?” 

“By the brick building. Topmost.”

He jostles the grip in his left hand and coolly takes his aim. The branch breaks but hangs by a thread, swinging, and then falls, as if convinced to let go by the irritated tilt of his head.

“Too close for comfort, Morgan.” Sean is picking up tin cans from the edge of town and downright sullen. 

More seriously now, Arthur scouts around the thoroughfare and walks backward, eyeing the storefront across from him. “Come back up over here, and then the center of the O there.” He nods to the PROVISIONS sign.

“There are two.”

“Hit both.”

When you stand next to him, you can smell his leather jacket, the one he wrapped around you that day, and have to steady your breath. You get both targets, but to the right of where you intended on the second one, and he sees your nose wrinkle in disappointment.

He matches your shots, putting his second one nicely center, and coughs to hide a smile. “That me, then?”

“Call it.”

He walks up the middle of town, looking around. “So what’s your name, Red?”

“Nell. Riordan.” It’s never as reflexive as you want it to be, that one.

“Is that so.”

“Would I lie?”

“I don’t know, would you?” That playful roguish sneer in his voice. 

You stare at each other, bridged by the plain understanding of ones who use aliases and ones who are told aliases. So after a moment he nods, leaving your reasons unguessed.

“Okay then, Red. ‘Nell Riordan.’ The period there on Co.” He aims at the upstairs of the saloon and you walk over beside him.

“Branch keeps moving in the way,” you mutter as you aim.

He stands closer at your side, as if to see your point of view, and leaning toward you, he practically growls, “Better to give no excuse than a bad one.” 

He might as well have shoved you. You drop your arm and gape at him, and he stares back with an appalling lack of shame.

And so you hit that dot dead center, and his shot goes wide by a few inches. 

“What’s your excuse, Mister Morgan?”

He grits his teeth but lets it pass. “Bad aim.”

He leans against a crate and takes two cigarettes out of his pack, lights both, and holds one up in a casual pinch to you. The way he settles there, a hand resting on his lap as he smokes and picks a fleck of tobacco off his tongue, hat down against the afternoon sun, and watches you take a grateful drag on the cigarette, you are uncertain if he’s about to interrogate you or confess something.

“How’s the arm?” 

You don’t want to admit that it hurts, and it hurts enough that you can’t think of a breezy thing to say otherwise, so you exhale smoke and shrug, and immediately flinch.

“That good, huh.”

You try to pass it off as nothing. “I meant to thank you. Just haven’t seen you around.”

He nods, hat down, as if a little embarrassed to be thanked, but drags on his smoke and looks up again, clear-eyed. So clear-eyed he’s a little captivating. A face of experience. The slight chip in his tooth, the scars on his chin. Shade of a few days of growth on his face. The broken shape of his nose. His dark blond hair, long uncut and unwashed. A hard brow. And unwavering, slightly sunblind blue eyes. “Just glad you made it,” he says.

You are reminded of his hands on you. “I wouldn’t have.” Hurried and more gentle than they had to be. You glance down from the intent stillness in his face, and peer up again. "So. Thank you."

He smokes, still watching like he’s reading you. “You thanked me back there.”

“Did I? Well.” You dig your toe into the dirt and blow smoke to one side. “Hope I didn’t say anything crazy.” 

He looks at his hands again, though you can see the creases at his temples and the way his lips purse at a certain memory. 

“I did, didn’t I.” 

“I believe you asked if I was real.”

 Goddammit.  

“That so?”

“Gave me a good scare there, too. Eyes rollin back, goin gray in the face -”

“You don’t have to go on, really.”

“What’d you do to those fellers, them huntin you down like that?”

“Do O’Driscolls need an excuse?”

He salutes your point with his cigarette. Then he clears his throat. “Hell of a scare for you.”

“For most people, I’d think, wouldn’t you?”

"Sure,” he says, and then he looks at you straight on, cutting through the smoke and the chitchat. “But you’re here practicin.”

You get the sense, from his eyes on you, he knows the feeling. When everything you have is not enough.

“Well, I don’t have a marksman watching my back just every day.” The less either of you thinks about that whole business, the better. You glance around that dead town, the bluffs in the distance, seeking anything to veer away from the subject. “And you apparently live in a camp on an overlook, just waiting for women in distress, or what's your game?”

He has a way about him you have noticed in a few men who have had enough barrels aimed their way to know something different about the world. Of searching for things. They see through the first layers of people, unhindered by insult or bluster. Time ticks slower for them, the space between the seconds. Jaws clench in that time and tell them things. Fingers twitch. In that moment, you find yourself being seen-through in that ill-fitting dress, your arm cocooned, feeling nothing like yourself. Shooting left-handed. Hair untamed. Only your boots feel right, and even then, the ground is spongy underfoot as you drop your cigarette and step on it.

So that thing in you, something you’ve always seemed to share with birds, tenses up in you, alert and ready to fly. 

Then he rubs the back of his neck and glances up at you that way he does, that way you will come to go blind for as if you’ve just glanced at the sun, and when he shifts his stance you have to force yourself not to notice the rather considerable asymmetry below his gunbelt. A flush runs up your cheeks. 

“Well I don’t know about a woman in distress, miss. I watched somethin of a shootist get off three of the best rounds I’ve seen in a long time. She just got wung, and then some fool stole the last shot. I ought to apologize.”

“Well maybe so,” you say, feigning haughtiness. You can’t help but imagine him apologizing on his knees right below you, and you turn and squeeze your eyes shut to smother that thought.

“In that case, I believe it’s your call, miss, and god help me.” He finishes his smoke and grinds it out in the charred ground. 

Sean returns with a crate of empty bottles and one half-full bottle of whiskey he drinks from before he sets it on the crate nearby.

“Am I up so far or down?”

“Not sure who’s betting against you, Sean, but you're losing your zero cents today.” His tone is pleasant, though, and he picks up the bottle to take a swig and hands it to you as he wipes his lips.

By the time the sun is getting low, there are at least two dead rats, two dead pickerels in the stream, one shattered whiskey bottle, seventeen shattered beer bottles, numerous rusted cans shot from fenceposts, and twenty twinned holes in the side of the burned saloon like peep-eyes staring back at you from the western sky. A minor fortune in spent cartridges lies scattered at your feet. All three of you are slightly drunk.

“I’m disappointed in you, English. You’re no gentleman. Should of shot your right arm to even the odds.” Sean slouches splay-legged on the steps and rolls to one side to get up.

“Sorry you made a bad bet.” He watches you wiping down your revolver one-handed on the crate, having learned not to offer help as he stands beside you taking out two more cigarettes and denying Sean a third. “Won’t mind havin my needs attended for a week.” 

He hands you one, and you wonder if his ears redden slightly as he holds the match for you, hands so near to your cheek. Some thought crossing his mind.  Or maybe it’s just the sun behind him.

He untethers the buckskin and loops the reins on her pommel. She follows on his right side obedient as a gun dog as the three of you walk back to camp, where they're celebrating Sean's return already, and he eats it up like he expected every bit of it.

In reality, Arthur can’t bring himself to order you around. Not with a wounded arm. The one time he makes a harmless gloat of his victory and suggests you fetch him some whiskey, the other girls around you berate him until he backs away with his hands up. 

The next day, you hear he’s gone again, sent on a job like always, they say, and while you begin to feel stronger through the week and finally get out of your sling, you begin to wonder about leaving too. The suspicious watchful eyes of Dutch and the older man on you make you think more urgently of it. You practice lifting things, at first unable to do any more than lift the arm itself a few times before you are exhausted, and wonder if you will ever lift a knife again, much less a gun. The longer you stay there, the greater the weight of all things begins to feel.

It is easier to be anonymous. You can make yourself liked when you are a stranger. Names have a way of getting unwanted attention. The other time you tried to strike out on your own, and your name changed and for a short while so did you, grew into a chamber of safety and new life, and for a moment you believed the sunlight through the little window and the person by your side offered all the hope you needed to think of life beyond the present moment.

But hopes pass, moments pass, the lovely chamber passes into darkness, things fall apart.

You find yourself thinking you might take it as a sign, as good as any other, to make your way if you don’t see him by the next morning. And like the fool you are, with a flutter in your sides, you imagine encountering him in your path, the sunlight behind him, and his shadow facing you.

You’re washing the plates after supper having that electrifying thought when the old man, Hosea, wanders over to you, deliberately casual, inviting you to play dominoes and share a drink with him. 

He ushers you to the table as the sun goes down and lights a lantern and overturns the tiles. He asks you about your shoulder, how you’re coming along, and all the while you sense the time-biding of fishermen and hunters watching bait, and wonder what question he’s pacing himself to ask you. 

You also get the feeling he isn’t the only one interested in this game. Dutch, leaning against the post in the mouth of his tent, distant and attentive the entire time, might as well have binoculars trained on you.

“I was thinking I’d be on my way soon,” you say, to broach the inevitable. “With thanks for everything you all have done.”

Hosea nods in thought as he lines up tiles on his stand. “Of course we’re glad you came out all right. But one has to wonder about your next destination. In the name of caution.”

“I understand.” You line your own tiles up, trying to use your right hand as much as possible, and although you have mulled over the same question all that time, you are no closer to an answer. So you tell him that.

He’s quiet a moment, and muses, “Big wide world, ain’t it.”

“Could put down anywhere, if I can make a little money to get there.” You clear your throat and lay a six-three.

He plays a three-blank. “Funny you should mention it.”

“Is it?” Blank-five, all you can manage.

“Well, miss, we don’t always take in strays, but Arthur tells me you’re a regular Hickok.” Six-ace.

“Does he?” Staring at your tiles, you can’t seem to manage basic arithmetic.

“I believe his words were ‘shooting star.’ You made quite the impression.”

Your cheeks flush a bit as you lay the only tile you can, five-four.

“You understand why a person might be careful in wondering about your background and your intentions, miss. With skills like yours, and having crossed the moral line, so to speak. Not only able, but willing.” Four-three.

“I do, sir.” Three-ace.

He doesn’t play. He tilts his head, those sharp, un-foolable eyes on you. 

You take a sip of the whiskey and plan your words. “I’ve had to make my choices, sir. Out here, it isn’t kind to women alone. I manage, my way.” You search your mind for what other delirious nonsense you might have said that first day.

“You ain’t run with other gangs?”

“For a job, here and there, not for any stretch of time. Done a bounty or two when I needed the money.”

“Any bounty on you?”

“I’m careful.”

He plays a three-four. “What can you tell a man that will put his mind at ease about you? And you can’t con me, miss; don’t even try.”

You lay your three-five, with a twinge of pain shooting down your arm. “I pay my debts, Mr. Matthews. I figure I’m in yours, or Mr. Morgan’s.”

“How upstanding of you.” 

“I may have a past, but I’m no snake.” You match his brazen, doubtful stare. You are plain and open. You are used to suspicious men.

“Then you must understand there is a certain need for you to prove yourself.”

“I would expect to.”

“We have enough women to do their share of things. But we’re currently short a gun.” He nods toward the green tent, which has largely remained closed during the time you’ve been there. “Think you can get your arm up to speed?”

“Seems better by the day.”

 He lays a five-blank.

When you look up, a buckskin horse noses into view from the edge of the trees, and astride her, Arthur. You feel the heat spread on your cheeks. Hosea sees your face, checks behind him, and turns back to you, hawkish.

Blank-deuce from you.

He draws.

Deuce-three. 

You lay a four-six and start to sit up straight with your victory when Hosea suddenly reaches across the table and firmly takes your wrist. It strains your shoulder, and you grunt but pull against his strength despite the pain, and stare him straight in the eye, your breath shaking. 

“I mean it, Miss Riordan,” he says. “Prove yourself.” Whatever unspoken threat lies underneath, it is yours to discover. 

“I heard you.” You jerk away and resist the urge to hold your burning arm as he stands and nods and leaves.

Arthur removes the saddle and sets it on the hitching post, and spends a while brushing down her sides. When he turns, you notice his face is bruised, his lip cut, his clothes dirty, the shoulder of his coat ripped, and his whole posture says he is tired and doesn’t want to encounter anyone between his horse and his tent. You pretend not to see him. You know that look. But behind you Dutch calls to him from his tent, and you feel Arthur’s reluctance to go near.

“How’s the other guy?” There’s laughter in Dutch’s voice.

And tired tolerance in Arthur’s. “Two.” 

“You back to that crazy business?” Dutch says more seriously. “That was the last time I’m bailing you out.”

“No. Just a disagreement in Annesburg.” 

“Were you asking for it?”

“Not sure what you mean, Dutch.” His tone says he's been pushed far enough, and he wants nothing more than to fall onto his cot, but first he has to listen to some scheming or other. When you turn to glance at him, he’s standing in Dutch’s tent looking beaten, and you walk away towards the girls’ tent so he doesn't see you watching him in his state. 

Lying in the darkness listening to the sounds from the campfire outside, you try to put the old man's tacit threats out of your mind. Every sound around you feels like the presence of someone watching. Putting the pieces of you together. The longer you stay, the longer you risk the trouble that nips your heels, and as you lie there, and the strains of a guitar plink softly in the night, you feel the constriction of time, unwanted attention, questions unanswered. You consider leaving in the middle of the night, struggling to get a saddle on one of the horses, and riding off. You consider all the directions you could run.

You consider leaving on foot. 

But unavoidably, he’s there, every way you imagine it. As if he had the same notion to step outside, and now stands in your way, and you in his.  

He seems to catch his breath. His voice is graveled but soft. Where you goin.

Away.

The singing outside gets louder, and your heart races, but he looms in your mind, immovable. 

He steps closer. Why.

I shouldn’t be here.

Why.

I don’t know.

And with the sound of someone approaching, he looks behind him, then snags you by the wrist, and does not break stride. He leads you through the walls of his tent before anyone else can see. And you imagine how, in the dim lantern light, he would put his finger to his lips one second before he kisses you. How his hand would cradle your neck and pull you toward him, gentle but intent. The smoky taste of him, the faint tempting musk of his body, the scratch of his scruff on your mouth. How fine his lips would be, firm and then yielding with yours, parting with yours, closing, and then pushing apart with urgency. The dart of his tongue, testing you, and when you respond in kind, the soft sound you get from him, and the ravening tilt of his head as he kisses you then in earnest. 

If there were any doubt as to what kind of lover he could be, he shows you the instant his hands begin to move up your sides, soft at first but deliberate, knowing what he wants. Wanting to know you.

You consider his hand on your back moving lower and rounding over your right hip, about to go further but for now lingering, kneading, content to discover the curve of your body he has wanted to touch for days. You hold the back of his neck, your fingers clawing up into his hair, your other hand loving the taper of his back to his tight waist, finding him sensitive there when you touch him, the way he moves into you, his breath suddenly hot against your cheek. 

The rustle of someone turning over on their cot is so loud you both freeze, and you hear Uncle’s snoring across the camp. Your hearts pound. But whatever alarm you feel, it’s forgotten when he brushes his thumb over your cheek and guides you back to him. 

His kiss is more forceful now, and when he breaks away from your mouth you are left gasping up at the ceiling of his tent as his lips trail the underside of your jaw and down the channel of your neck.

Shhh, he whispers into your collarbone before he kisses you there and takes a full, firm handful of your ass, pulling you closer. How a person can remain quiet under the circumstances, you have no idea, but if it prolongs this thing happening now, you are determined to try. 

When he pulls you in, you feel him hard for you, and he stops for that breath of silent confession and doubt, do you want this, do you know, until you dig your hips toward him and press the ridge of him against your lower belly. You feel his moan in his chest. 

Now you are the one to shush him. He seems flustered, unsure what to do, running his hand down his face as if he realizes where you both are and how unsatisfactory a cot would be for anything a person might want to do. 

So you slide your hand around his waist from his back to his stomach, and watch his eyebrows knit up as it dawns on him what you’re doing as you begin unfastening the first button of his trousers. You imagine if his hands are any indication, it would be more than the size of your wrist around, were you to grasp it. Which you certainly mean to.

You sure? he mouths, his expression of extreme compunction melting as soon as you skim your hand down his hip and up the inner seam of his trousers, up to the fullness there, along his solid length, and suppress your own sound, realizing the size of him.

Very, you mouth back, at which point he has to sit against the table as you pry the front of his trousers open, and the buttons of his union suit, his chest rising as you run your fingertips over the trail from his navel down to his pubic hair and you slip your hand under the fabric and feel the stiff naked shaft of his cock. His stomach tightens as you do. He watches every move you make as you ease him out of his union and see him fully, the dark head of his cock bloomed from its taut skin. He looks down, and if the lantern were not so dim you would see him blush at your expression and the way he fills your grip and rises far past your wrist when you take him underhand and stroke down to his base, inducing a light pant from his open mouth. He pulls you in by the small of your back to kiss him as if he can’t take it alone, and you straddle his thigh where he guides you.

You imagine he would rather be the one taking charge, but for the fact that he’s too overcome by your caress to do much else. 

So you grind yourself against the hard muscles of his upper thigh as you kiss his neck and work your hand up and down his shaft, avoiding the head as long as you can, or just brushing it lightly with the soft skin of your wrist, hearing how he likes it in the way his breath falters. You draw away from his neck to see the head of his cock shining with fluid in the lamp light, his hips jerking slightly in need. You glance at him briefly through your lashes, his eyes going wide with marvel as you let a long line of spit drizzle onto his cockhead and slick it down around his shaft, twisting your hand as you do. You thumb the last drop off your lower lip. His gaze trails up from your hand stroking him so well to your face, amazed at you, perhaps disbelieving.

What do you want, you whisper into his ear, the tent getting a little airless as you begin to feel wet against his thigh. He grazes your ear with his teeth and then can't seem to speak. Just his strained breath. 

Keep goin. Please. He barely gets out the word, and you have to smile at the afterthought of manners. From the rasp in his voice you sense that if you tasted him, the way you very much want to, the whole camp would hear what you’re doing beyond any shadow of a doubt. 

You like that? Just to tease him, you skim your tongue up his throat the way you would do to his shaft, and his head falls back, his Adam's apple bobbing with a swallow. 

My girl, you have no idea.

One-handed, he yanks the volume of your nightdress up out of the way of your junction with his leg and juts his hip against you, his lip twitching in a kind of pained, blissful sneer. He will touch the wet spot there when you are gone and feel both gratified and utterly deprived.

You stroke more deliberately, a pace steady but not too fast, feeling your own heartbeat, and he leans harder against the table. It creaks. He can’t do anything but grip the side with one hand and knead your bare left ass cheek under your nightdress with the other, urging you to grind faster. You are making him forget about everything but the one thing he wants and is on the verge of pleading for. But later. Just now, you are stroking him with everything you can give him through the pressure and increasing pace and occasional twist of your right hand, shoulder be damned, and it seems impossible that he could get any harder, but he does, full and tight. You think about him stretching your cunt and almost lose yourself. The table creaks louder. His neck strains and he tries to hold his shuddering breath, hips beginning to twitch. His expression contorts into something different, urgent, helpless -

Jesus christ, you have to get up and leave the girls’ tent before you make any sound you will regret. The camp is quieter now, fewer people around the dying embers, the moon high as you get dressed in your own clothes and pull on your boots with trembling hands. 

Tilly repaired your shirt, and you thanked her with your necklace, nearly the last thing of your own. Somehow having nothing but your satchel now makes you feel lighter. You buried the one thing from it that could damn you, and although you are fairly sure they didn’t notice it while you were unconscious, your shirt is still stained brown with blood as if to remind you nothing is safe for very long. Nor ever the same as it was before it was damaged. 

When you emerge, the old man is sitting in the lamplight of Dutch’s tent with his elbows on his knees as they talk late, and glances at you. He touches the brim of his hat with a knowing nod and you nod back just as surely. They are silent as you pass.

There is an overlook away from camp that juts out with a view of the burned-out town, and in the moonlight you walk out, through the dense foliage toward the train tracks, and then turn right along the path. Lenny is standing guard and greets you cautiously as you head out. Just a walk at night. You suppose that appears suspicious, as now everything you do seems to arouse suspicion.

From that overlook, you can only halfway hear the sounds from camp, the light guitar playing and singing from the ones up late, and you know it’s past the time for you to leave. Not just because you are sitting with your legs swinging in open air feeling freer and stronger than you have in days but generally by the way the camp knows you and how they seem to have a collective watchful eye on you. 

You wince when you move your shoulder. You still can’t pull yourself up into a saddle if you had one or a horse to put it on. You can barely lift a goddamned domino without your shoulder feeling hot. So flying off, at least for the moment, will have to wait.

You jump when the brush behind you crashes with footsteps. 

A hammer cocks back. 

You grip the rocky ground and freeze. Stones tumble from the ledge. They clatter in hollow echoes, careening down the face of the cliff, your pounding heart just the same.

“Jesus, I could’ve shot you.” 

Arthur in the moonlight is a tall black silhouette uncocking his revolver and holding his hand out unthreateningly. “Didn’t think anyone would be out here.”

“I can leave,” you offer, though not entirely confident you can stand up without slipping.

He seems unsure of how to respond, and you start to scoot yourself backward. 

“Don’t get up,” he says. He walks over, towering before he sits beside you with a painful grimace, staring out at that town you both shot to pieces a few days ago. Cracks his knuckles. Seems distracted by his thoughts. He’s different when he’s quiet.

“You okay?” you ask.

“Sure.”

“Don’t look okay.”

He snorts as he takes out a pack of cigarettes and shakes two out. “Now what do I say to that?”

“What happened?”

“A little drink after a little job.” He tips his head to light his smoke, and holds out the cupped flame to you. In the light you can see the knuckles of both hands scabbed and bruised.

“Turned brawlin?”

He bats his smoke away like it has just formed the shape of that foolish memory.

“Does it ever work?” 

You’ve long known it’s the ones without a conscience who don’t have to go out and do something self-destructive after a job. 

He looks at you with vague surprise, and sees himself discovered. “For a little while.”

“Looks like it wore off already.” You gesture to him being out there, trying to be alone. “I can leave, really.”

“You’re fine.” He smokes, and sniffs, and dabs the back of his hand to his nose to see if it’s still bleeding. “I guess I interrupted your peace and quiet. If you want me to -”

“No, you’re fine.”

You both clear your throats, smoke at the same time, blow smoke at the same time, and smirk at your synchronized awkwardness.

“How’s that shoulder?”

“All right.”

“You’re still smokin with your offhand.”

“Wore it out, I suppose.”

"Doin what?"

“Dishes, maybe."

“They got you doin -” He sits up with real concern.

“I don't expect to be put up.” You switch to your right hand as if to show him you can manage to pull your weak arm up without wincing. The air is so still, you feel a bit too warm. 

“I had a chat with Hosea,” you say, facing ahead, feeling him turn to look at you.

“You did, did you?”

“He said you had a need for a gun, if I could manage it.”

He looks out again, as if he’ll have to have words with someone later. 

“I could," you say.

He is looking down on that burned-out hole-riddled town that proves you right. “You don’t strike me as the robbin type.”

“Well how do I strike you?” (The hell are you doing asking him that, in that way, so coy.)

He exhales a long stream of smoke in the perfectly still air. “Strike me different.”

“Different.”

He coughs. “Above it, I mean.”

“Trust me, I'm not above it.”

“That’s what’s got me mixed up about you.”

“Oh?” (Get a hold of yourself.) 

He rubs the back of his neck. “I just can’t figure a woman like you has any use for stealin.”

If only he knew. 

You try to reckon with your plan to steal a horse, and how it’s impossible to think about that while he’s sitting there, seeker of moments alone, intolerant of bullshit, admitter of faults. And with such lovely, strong legs. 

You take another drag and lean back on your left hand trying to be casual, contemplating that burned-out town below, that silent abyss, nothing reflecting the moonlight, all of it black and lifeless. But just beyond its scars there are deer drinking at the edge of the river. There are fox kits tumbling in the long grass. There are pronghorn grazing in the yarrow and bats fluttering high above, and little silent pinpricks of fireflies winking near the water. 

He stamps out his smoke and leans back on his palms beside you, and that is when his thumb grazes yours. 

You reflexively start to move away, but he stays there, and so you stay there. Touching. A shock shoots up through your sides, a little flush of heat between your legs.

“There's a job comin up." He clears his throat, looking out at the town.

You are incapable of thought.  

"Charles and I are headin up tonight to scout it out, back in a couple of days."

You recover enough to find your voice. “What kind of job?”

“Train.” When his thumb hooks over yours and holds it, he glances back at his hand, but he doesn't quite glance at you.

“Need a lot of guns for that.” Slowly, you unpin your thumb and curl it over his. The rush of that small risk takes your breath away. Just that contact, and his thumb then sliding back over your thumb, running along the inner side. 

“That’s true.” 

His hand moves, fingers now grasping more of yours, curling with yours, and lord you are trying not to breathe hard but your heart is racing. Your mind flashes with scenes of what you would have him do to you. Where else his fingers could go. 

You tell yourself you’re both grown, and used to certain realities. You have no need for attachments, promises, or being true. New freedoms spread out wide before you. And it has been so goddamn long. That he wants it too is enough to make your mind race to the point of dizziness.

Then he moves his hand, and your heart nearly sinks, before he spreads his legs a little wider, closer to yours, and then he looks down, his hand brushing the outside of your thigh, and when you stir into his touch, his hand slides over the top of your thigh with more pressure, inviting your leg toward him, met with the slight rise of your hips, and his penetrating gaze gets the lay of your body, up to your face in the moonlight -

Footsteps in the brush break you both apart. It’s an interruption so impossibly cruel you feel stabbed, and not a small flash of anger at the intruder.

“English, you out here?” Sean calls out.

His chin drops to his chest for a moment, and then he raises his head like he’s addressing the whole sky for this injustice. “What is it?”

“Dutch was askin.”

“When ain’t he askin?” he mutters, getting up to a crouch and stretching up tall, sore. He offers you his hand, and you take it and he pulls you up beside him, holding your fingers a second longer than he needs to without a word as he walks away.

And the last you see of Arthur before he disappears into the night is his silhouette, and you can’t tell if he is facing away or glancing back to get a look at you. 

But what you do know for certain, in the pit of your stomach, before you get yourself into more trouble, is that now you really must leave. With some painful effort you can saddle one of the horses and be gone. Arthur would come back, see right away what you had done, and weather any passing disappointment the way a person forsakes a stolen trinket as the toll for not having known better. He really should have. 

Here’s a thing about you: You tend to ignore notions of fate. Find little point in virtue. Often can’t tell good judgment from bad. Despite your best intentions, you seek out the dangerous and dare providence, living in patterns that curve the lines of your life into spirals, and it’s usually too late by the time you notice what you’ve done. You hellion.

So as the sound of them walking away in the bushes fades, overtaken by the crickets and the frogsong, and the stars overhead really do strike you speechless to view them, you face yourself and the sky. Your life has been a long, winding strand of bad choices so far. In the moment, they always feel right. 

You walk along the path back to camp, knowing that for certain too.



Notes:

Thank you for reading! Kudos and comments are never required, but always deeply appreciated! Best writing fuel there is. Sometimes I'm also over on tumblr sketching a certain outlaw, and I'd love to hear from you 🖤

Chapter 2: The Falls

Summary:

In the aftermath of a violent job, you and Arthur get to know each other.

Chapter Text

Of course it had to be on a bridge. All man-made things are prone to fail. 

When the bullet zaps against the steel of the car, you don’t take time to look around. It came from overhead. You make your mark and fire. You fire again. Down the line, you hear the occasional pop of another shot. From the passenger cars, just the whimpering of obedient, muffled terror as the men stream down the aisles and take every ring, every watch, every billfold they can pry from them. A harvest of a sort. The train is a straight branch stretching twelve cars long. Stopped on the Bacchus Bridge.

Far below, the thunder of the falls becomes the churning river, and the mist in the air billows up chilled and glowing in the moonlight. The wood of the train bridge creaks under the stopped iron and steel cars that threaten to overstay its physical limit. There is the feeling of squirrels on branches bending.

Passengers flee in both directions, ignored by the gang and the agents alike stealing careful shots from cover, answered in kind by Arthur’s Schofield alongside the crack of Javier’s double-action and the occasional boom of Charles’ sawed-off. Close calls have slipped past all of you. You wipe sweat from your eyes as you head back toward the cargo cars to clear them.

But the instant you step into the freight car, something clubs you hard in the stomach and you are falling on your knees holding your ribs, unable to breathe. An arm snakes around your neck, squeezing. When you weaken, he grabs your braid and jerks your head back to get a look at you. 

“What a fuckin surprise.” 

That bastard’s rabid growl is as known to you as his scarred-up face. How he found you, how he got here, you don’t know, and it shakes you to your marrow.

And a month ago you put a bullet in his side, so you elbow him there as hard as you can, and he flinches enough for you to break away from his iron grip.

As you scramble toward the next doorway he claws at your pant leg and fires after you, and you swivel on your heel to take a shot of your own before you run into the shadows. 

“Stop right there you fuckin bitch; I ain’t askin again.” He holds his side as he lumbers behind.

You are too terrified to speak. Shaking, aiming in the dark toward his silhouette.

“You’ll come breathin or not,” he says. “Your choice.”

When you sprint through the moonlight to the next car, he fires. His lead sears the side of your neck and pings off the steel door frame. When he aims again, charging from the car with murder in his eyes, you drop to a knee in the dark and fire. He lurches forward and tackles you, straddling your chest with his knees on your arms before you can get another shot off, and clamps his hands around your neck. He squeezes so hard he shakes, and black spots drip in and out of your vision even in the dark of the car. You dig your heels into the floor and slip, and then his strength begins to lighten, and he sags to a hand, and then slumps lower and lower. The warmth soaks into you before the wetness of his blood.

You lie there trying to muffle your strangled gasps and struggle to get out from under his dying body as the voices outside grow louder. Pull yourself together, goddammit. Outside, you hear Dutch’s voice saying something, loud and indistinct, and you slide down to your back on the cold floor again. You are so tired. This long fight, the running. The brief, fragile sanctuary. How fast it comes apart.

“Shit.” Bootsteps. A hand is on your cheek, your jaw, turning your head. 

Arthur is talking to you but he is distant, and then he’s dragging the body away and crouching in front of you. Helping you to sit up. You can’t look at him, only the body and the stripe of moonlight reflected in the trail of his blood.

“Jesus. Are you hit?” Calmly but with quick hands Arthur smooths your hair back from your face, checking you over in the dark, your chest, your legs, and leans you into him to see your back. “This bastard do anything?” He shoves the body farther away with his boot.

You shake your head, still unable to catch your breath.

“Hey,” he says as your shoulders tense, and he glances around worriedly, releasing, regripping your arms, and then he begins to utter shhh before he kisses you. Lips brought soft to yours, the scratch of his scruff against your chin.  He swallows. His lips press yours again. Tentatively opening. Tasting you. As if he could cool a burn. His hands are gentle on your cheeks. Smell of gunpowder. Smell of tanned hide.

It stops your heart. It nearly stills your explosive mind. Against every shred of your will, it spills your tears and they run over his fingers, but it suspends you in that moment as if there is nothing else in the world but the two of you. Your hand hovers up and you feel the heat of his face and almost touch him.

He breaks away and you blink in that cool absence like waking.

“I’m sorry. I -” He looks down, one hand falling to your shoulder. 

You begin to shiver.

“Can you stand?”

"Of course I can stand."

He lifts you on your unsteady legs and moves you out of view from the doorway when he hears voices outside and utters another shush. Your mind is a wreckage of gunfire and narrow misses. You can still feel the crush of hands around your throat, and hold back tears as you sniff and wipe your nose. He stands you against the crates and stoops to get you to look him in the eye.

“Is that his blood or yours?” The seriousness in his voice gets your attention.

Your shirt is soaked with it, heavy and clinging to your skin. “I don’t - his I think.”

“Better be sure.” He’s trying to be polite about it, but glances several times. Your shirt is so dark and drenched it shines in the low light of the moon. 

You’re shaking now, from shock or the sopping shirt or your pulse still speeding. With trembling, blood-glossed hands, you undo your buttons, and he looks away. You peel the shirt off your arms and check your chest and stomach under your chemise. “Nothing.” 

He’s crouched over by the man’s body. “You got him right under the throat. No wonder he drained all over you.”

You drop your shirt with a wet slop onto the floor. “Lucky shot.”

“If luck is bein a good shot.” He glances at you sideways and then quickly away, and without looking back, he rises, takes off his coat with the wolf-fur collar, steps over and drapes it halfway around your shoulders. You drag it on, and his hand brushes your hand, sticky with blood and sweat, and you find yourself grasping it like you will drift away otherwise. His fingers bend around yours. Under the warmth of his huge coat, you stop shaking quite so much.

He steps to you, stumbling over his own boot, seeing your hand on his as permission enough not to face away. You pull him over, and you stand chest to chest not quite looking at each other. He faces down, and slowly lifts the lace on the front of your stained chemise with a delicacy you did not expect from those hands. His index finger bringing it slightly away from you as if he has never seen anything quite so nice, excepting its gruesome color. The strap falls. His finger travels up and draws the strap back to your shoulder and remains on your skin. Continues along your collarbone to the notch. 

He touches the bruises forming on your throat, sees the nick on the side of your neck. “He do that?” A pinch of concern between his brows.

“Well he won’t do it again.”

His thumb moves as if to wipe the bruises away, and in the dark you can’t see how he’s looking at you. He watches your breasts rising, falling; his hand hesitates, and when you lean in, softly trails down to your left breast. The silk whispers under the slide of his calloused palm, your own soft sound with it.

You hardly know what you’re doing when you kiss him. His breath quickens with yours, and he braces one hand against the crates shieldlike while his other hand moves to your back and pulls you in.

He wants you; from the set of his jaw, the sigh he can’t hold back, he wants you. And with relief running wild in your veins you madly want him too. It wipes your mind of panic. The dead man on the floor might as well be any other piece of cargo. Now there is only Arthur, and he is pushing you up against the crates, filled with the energy of the heist and seeking anything to get it out of him. 

A flush spreads through your sides when you press closer and feel his hardening cock against the groove of your upper thigh. He halts, flustered, breaks away from you as if he’s pained to lose your touch, checking your eyes for any hint of reservation. His hands drift down your arms as if he’ll be prepared to let go, should you only say the word. A feeling akin to losing your balance on a ledge.

In a reflex, you grasp his shirt, and he steps into you, breath ragged in his mouth on your mouth. Your hands find his neck, the muscles of his shoulders and back as he lifts you, your legs hooking around his waist. Fast, hungry, desperate kisses now, and you scarcely have the presence of mind to wonder if you’re really about to fuck right there, with the men outside, and already long past caring. You’re both grappling for the buttons of his fly as steals a rough kiss down your neck, when Dutch’s voice outside hollers throatily for him.

He stops, tense, and you can feel the sinking of his broad shoulders as he breaks away from damn near biting your collar bone and stands silent, chest pumping against yours, letting your legs down. He reaches to adjust his cock and swallows hard.

“Arthur, dammit, get down here!”

“I’m comin, Dutch,” he mutters, holding out a hand for you to stay behind while he waits a few moments to fasten his fly, gather himself, then steps out onto the gangway and jumps down.

“Everything settled?”

“Lenny and them cleared out the last of the passengers. I’m finishin up with the cargo.”

The impatience in his voice is faint but palpable, like a deep growl before it turns to warning.

“Where’s the girl? Miss Riordan. She survive the battle?” Dutch chuckles, and Arthur does not.

“I saw her back a ways. We’ll tie things up here and head out. You go on ahead.”

“Get this thing moving at least. Knock em off the scent.”

“Always do.”

Most of the men are already off the bridge, and you hear the last of them coming out, voices loud, energy high after a successful heist, and Arthur sees them off, stepping up to the gangway, watching them go.

For a time, just the breathholding stillness of the night and the distant rumble of water.

“Still there?”

“Yes?” 

Silence, another while.

“Come with me.”

You step over the dead man as if he is nothing more than a patch of mud between you. Arthur heads swiftly through the next car, where the passengers have abandoned their belongings in their fleeing terror. Mostly useless suitcases toppled and open, strewn clothes and lacy bags. You’re not sure what he’s doing, going up the aisle, until he finds an open case with feminine-looking things spilling out of it. You search through it too, and another, and find a shirt with sleeves that appear long enough, and Arthur digs out a chemise top that resembles yours, awkwardly tossing it your way. 

It looks like it might fit you, and as you hesitantly shrug off his coat and let the straps down from your shoulders, he glances away for your modesty. By now, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, whether to turn away or not, and your mind tortures you with the hints you would send him either way, and finally face sideways and pull it off over your head, goosebumps on your exposed skin, and slip the new chemise on, which fits loosely but is dry, not stained with blood, and then the shirt, which fits like a tent. You try to give him his coat, and he shakes his head, so you put it back on, heavy and smelling like hide and him.

And then he tells you to follow him. He is hurried, to the point of seeming hot-tempered as you pass from one car to the next, but when you reach the engine he finally turns.

He grabs you by the waist and kisses you up against the back wall like he can’t hold back another second, and in his arms you melt to him, his ravening strength, and his tongue in your mouth is such a live, wanton sensation you ache to feel him everywhere, your body against his, needing to feel his cock, needing to hear him moan. He’s already clumsily working at the buttons of your shirt, and you skim the front of his trousers and before you think about what you’re doing you run your hand along his length and feel him getting hard. He exhales at your touch before his eyes meet yours.

Forget shirts, forget everything. You let the coat slide heavy off your arms and back away just far enough to undo your gun belt and lay it down; you might as well have disrobed, the way he looks at you then, and he pulls you back to him, his hand cupping your cheek, his mouth meeting yours with the same furious need.

“Where can we do this?” You gasp up at the steel-riveted ceiling, his lips traveling along your jaw. The smell of his body makes you want to inhale him.

“Here, anywhere,” he pants, every bit as crazed as you are, and neither of you can speak now. He’s trying to undo his gun belt and lets it clank to the floor. With jittery fingers you work at the buttons of your pants and curse at the problem of clothes at a time like this, and before you get them open he turns you around to the wall and you grunt as he shoves them down over your hips. There is a rustle of cloth as he undoes his fly. His hand on your stomach jerks you tight against him, your spine curving of its own will to fit him, to make way for him.  All at once his full blunt head stuns you, his rigid length in his hand like something live, gliding along your sensitive wet slit until he feels himself aligned, and he has to catch himself on the wall. In the radiant heat from the coal furnace, he wraps his arm across your pounding chest, and your breath dissolves to helpless panting as his massive cock pushes into you.

There is hunger in him. As if he knows he’ll lose you. As if he has to expel the darkness that builds up with every gunshot and moment of terror he incites, and through you is a blaze that will burn him clean. In his grip on you, he seeks pain, he needs release. He would bury himself in you.

Something in you needs it too. In all those ways you are his opposite.  You are profoundly empty after violence. Alone. Formless as air. And there, in that car suspended above the falls, with his hand sliding down your front, between your breasts, your legs, his cock gliding deep inside you, his mouth tasting your neck, his chest and belly fitted to your spine as you writhe together, you feel your own shape come back to you. He fills you. You are so full that tears blur your sight. What else wells inside, your mind is beyond knowing.

Complete urgency takes over. Straining tight against his chest, one arm braced on the wall, you are overcome with the frantic surge in your gut that you are going to stream through your cunt or piss or fall apart from this thing that feels too good to survive as your hips move into him automatically and he thrusts harder. You steady yourself against every heavy smack, and then he falters.  

He clutches your waist and he grits his teeth, and when he pulls out all at once the fullness drains, and he pushes your shirt up as an afterthought, holding his cock firm against your ass. You freeze as the spurts of his warm spend spatter your skin, cooling as it drips slowly down your hip and leg. You feel his jerking hip. His thumb frets an unconscious arc along your spine.

Both of you stand just breathing, a little blown away, unsure of what to say or who should move first, or if you should look at each other even though you can’t, as if you don’t know whether that’s what the other one meant to do.  He unties the bandana around his neck and wipes up his spend from you. When he does, his hands are coarse but their touch almost doting, and he holds onto your left hip a while longer. 

You pull your pants up, still facing away, and he fastens himself and goes to lean against the coal bin across the gangway, wiping his face with his sleeve. 

The vastness of the air around you is overwhelming. For one second you had forgotten you were on the bridge. Might as well be flying or falling. You have to sit on the steps for a minute and drag your gun belt back on. When you look down, the air through the slats below is just as vast and you feel the sweep of falling. 

“I, uh -” he starts to say. “I hope -” Gravel in his voice. 

“No, it - of course,” you say, without any idea of what you’re saying.

He notices a white drop on his knee and swipes it away, clearing his throat. 

“That nick is worse than I thought.” He crouches on the gangway next to you, where now in the moonlight he can see the full sear along the left side of your neck, still bleeding. When he lifts your hair away from it with the backs of his fingers, you flinch.

You put your hand on it, with a sting. “It’s not bad.” Truthfully you had forgotten about it, though it has dripped blood in a damned dramatic fashion. Concern lines his face, even as you notice the lower edge of his coat has a new round hole in it. 

He gives you his hand to help you down the steps. “I’ll get her started; go on and wait for me by that ladder.”

“The ladder in the middle?”

“Just go, you’ll see it.”

And while you walk down the line and refuse to hold the railing, which is far too close to that misty moonlit void, you’re reeling from what you’ve just done, and you force yourself to stand firm on the platform off that side and not look down where all the volume of nothing wants to show you how you ought to feel. Arthur scoops shovels full of coal into the furnace to get it stoked again. While he works, you glance back. He takes care to do it well, and has certainly done it before, knowing the mechanics of the thing, the tools used to close the boiler door, and how to start the train. It chugs to life with the slowest of groans, the coupling rods crawling grasshopperlike, shedding clouds of steam, and the whole bridge seems to shudder under it. You grab the rail. The engine moves with the waking fearsome power of pressure building in its belly, the heavy first footfall of a giant.

Arthur rides on the steps, hanging off the side, his gun belt slung over his shoulder, knowing what a goddamned sight he is as it carries him to you. He hops off into a burst of steam, stopping himself in front of you with a guilty smile. For a minute, he watches the train snake away off the bridge, careful to see that it doesn’t stall. Something live and destructive now released beyond his control. When it rounds off out of sight, he turns to you. 

“Let me show you somethin,” he says, not quite meeting your eyes as he sidles past you to the ladder and goes down.

A ladder, that high up on that rickety goddamned wooden bridge - you are forcing yourself to move, you are silently ordering yourself, one foot down at a time, squeezing your eyes; you will not let him see this ridiculous fear in you, you will not. You were born and raised on land, and plan to die there too, and your resolve has been tested twenty times in the last hour, but you will not let on about it now.

When you glance down, he quickly looks away as if he wasn't watching your ass as you descend. 

You wobble on your legs getting down, and his hands steady your hips and linger there a moment before he steps back and leads you down the long walkway under the bridge, and you’re counting the trestles and staring far ahead at the cliff wall, so when he takes your hand it surprises you, covering yours, gripping you not enough to hurt but not about to let you go. He guides you to a small outcropping that faces the falls, lets go of your hand, and stands at the railing to light a cigarette. 

“Come on.” He nicks his head.

You tell your protesting self to stand the hell beside him there in the magnificent setting of the falls and the hazy moonlight, and he leans on his forearms to take in the view. 

“Incredible, ain’t it?”

“Very.” You don’t see what he’s looking at because your eyes are shut tight.

“There’s an elk, drinkin.”

“Amazing.” You could faint. Just the feel of the breeze stirring under his coat is enough to make you dizzy.

“You okay there?”

“Maybe I’m not as accustomed to train robberies as you are.” You grip the railing.

“After what you done to those O’Dri -” And then it dawns on him like a mystery he’s been puzzling over for an hour. “You scared of heights?”

“Not heights, I just...don't care for bridges…”

“You are kiddin me.”

“See if I am.”

As if it wants to expose you, the bridge croaks like a goddamn ship in a storm, that constant settling of gigantic wooden things, and you grab his arm before you can stop yourself.

“Well this must’ve been pure hell for you,” he says, with a laugh.

You swat his arm - that strong arm, jesus - as if he had something to do with it, and suddenly he hooks it around you and you yelp.

He holds you, his right arm firmly around your side, dragging your hip tight up to his, pointing toward the pool between one falls and the next. There, lowering its immense rack as it dips down to drink, the bull elk. White and striking and in his prime by the looks of him.

“I won’t let you fall. Just watch it.”

“I’m going to throw up.”

“Aim over the side then.” His head is close to yours. 

The elk, its improbable rack catching the moonlight, is such a calm, kingly presence it seems to command the setting. You wonder if Arthur, perhaps not aware of it, feels something in common with it for all his interest. Though at the moment he is turning to you. His nose is an inch from grazing your neck. The panicked flutter you normally get in your stomach while staring down from a span of wood in the air is confused by the thrill you feel now. He speaks close to your ear, his breath warm on your skin.

“If I leave you here a minute, you won’t jump, will you?” he says, voice low.  Then he takes your arms and wraps them around the post and leaves you, stunned, speechless, with a pat on your back. 

His footsteps quickly fade in the sound of the falls, and you stand facing that wide-open view clinging to the post, and whereas you would have been trying to find any escape from there to solid ground, now all you can think of is the second he kissed you and the sound of his sigh when you touched him. 

A huge hawk soars through the open space underneath you, a warp in perspective that seems to invert the world and how things ought to be.  

And you hate the idea of Arthur coming back to you like that, clinging there like a monkey. Get a hold of yourself. The bridge won’t break. You won’t fall. You can sit on an overlook for god’s sake, so stay here and get straight about something, which is this:

Of all the things you should be doing right now, fucking Dutch Van der Linde’s right hand man is the stupidest possible one. If you valued your own hide, you would take the thirty-two dollars you stole today and run the opposite way off that bridge right now.

But you won’t. You’re stubborn like that sometimes, so you won’t. Or maybe, just maybe, you haven’t felt this way before. Like falling, but somehow believing you’ll be caught.  One way or another.

You force yourself to open your eyes to that wide scene before you. Watch the elk. Watch the moon. Those powerful falls plunging a hundred feet or more to a moment of calm in a pool, and then off the second ledge another hundred feet or more. You feel the trace of his hands, his arms around you, and suddenly you’re out of breath again. It’s enough for you to wonder if it really happened, the longer he is gone.  You gradually lean away from the post, until you are only touching the rail, though you are shaking.

With the beat of his footsteps again, a flint strikes in you, what could spark fuses or passions, and you can’t really tell fear from excitement anymore. You bite your lip to keep calm.

“Ain’t so bad once you get used to it, huh?” He’s got a canteen strap over his shoulder, and a bottle of bourbon in his other hand. He sets it all down on the crate nearby and stands beside you to your left, facing you. 

“Not really.” You ball your shaking fingers into a fist when you release the post.

He splashes water on a handkerchief, holds it up to clean the graze on your neck and hands the canteen to you. You take a deep drink and cough. Then he wrings the handkerchief out over the side (you watch drops of your diluted blood fall soundless into the air), spills some of the bourbon on it, and offers you the bottle. You try to take the cloth from him but he holds it back as if this is his most solemn job. When he touches it, stinging, to the wound, you drink from the bottle and drink again, and feel the warmth that spreads in your stomach, though whether it’s the bourbon or the fact that he’s standing right next to you, gingerly cleaning the wound on your neck, or that you’re standing on a few flimsy sticks of wood bolted together a hundred feet in the air, you aren’t sure. Your whole body is swirling by now. When he’s finished, you pass the bottle to him, wondering if he needs it as much as you.

He takes a long drink and clears his throat, shifts to lean on the rail beside you again, boot heel propped on the ledge. “That was - earlier -” He rubs the back of his neck. “Not what -”

Your heart falls like drops of you over the side. 

“It’s been a long time,” he says, digging out his cigarettes. “I was, uh -” He keeps his hands busy getting out his matches, lighting the cigarette. “Hopin we might start over.” His voice is hoarse, and he blows smoke away from you. The burning match tumbles out of sight.

When he passes the cigarette to you, your fingers brush his, and again when you pass it back, each touch a spit of flame trying to flare to life. “It’s probably not a good idea to.” You look away from the scene, and don’t know how to finish your thought as your voice is swallowed up in the thundering mist.

He listens, smoke rising from his cigarette. “No, probably not.” He drinks again, hands the bottle to you, and watches out over the gorge. Like he’s trying to remember everything that just happened. 

That hawk again, gliding below you, upending the world. The elk turns away from the pool. The falls pound the rocks in their eternal plunge. You might as well be falling, woman, for all the things you can’t hold onto. 

You drink and cough, wiping your lips on your wrist. “I’ve never been one for good ideas.” 

The way he looks at you then, eyes searching you for traces of cruel reversal or irony or whatever it is he fears, if he fears anything, finding only you, gripping the rail with one hand as you turn to him, could melt your wayward heart. 

When you hand the bottle to him, your hand shakes so badly that it slips before he can grasp it, and he takes one long faltering swipe at it over the rail as it drops soundless out of sight.

Without a thought you grab him by the shirt and yank him staggering back into you.

He starts to laugh as he gets his balance but sees how hard you’re gripping him, and haltingly puts a hand over yours. 

You let go of him, but he keeps your hand.

“It’s no good getting attached,” you say, unable to quite face him, as he looks at you with an expression you can't name. “I don’t have to tell you, in this line of…work -”

His rueful half-smirk. 

“And when I have the money, I’ll be heading on.” Where the hell are you going with this? The whiskey, the bridge, the man in front of you, you the liar, all getting mixed up.

He waits patiently, sweeping the hair out of your eyes. 

“But with that understanding, and no promises or strings…one more time -”

He lifts your chin with a knuckle.

“Would be…acceptable.” (You said that. You said that to him.) 

And that sharp gaze will always seem to see right through your defenses. All the bullshit you’ll tell him. The ways you’ll break his heart. Somehow, you always expect him to know already and somehow he takes you anyway. 

He tosses the cigarette down and kisses you. The lightest slip of his tongue. Sweet parting, closing. He breaks away, and with his nose still touching yours, says, “That ‘acceptable’ to you, Red?” Pure roguishness in his eyes. 

When he pulls you to his chest you rear your head back, glaring. “Not even close,” you mutter as you grasp his face and kiss him back.

“You ain’t makin a bit of sense," he says against your lips as if you make enough sense for him.

“Well if you’re not going to try -” You gasp between the press of his lips on yours, your chin, under your jaw. His hand dispels any remaining sense, sliding down your side, your hip, and grips your ass, wrenching you flush against him. When you press into him and feel his hardening length, a sudden rush sweeps you both, panting, grappling for more, and he roughly spins you, grasping you from behind.

“Try what now?” He lightly bites your earlobe, his whiskers scraping your neck and cheek. 

“Is this what you mean, acceptable?” he asks into your neck, and nips you there in a way that siphons a sigh from you.

“H-hardly.” 

His face scratches hot and rough against yours, and his hand slides under your arm, kneads a firm handful of your breast. “Well tell me then.” 

“You’ll have to god -” His hand passes down your front and grazes between your legs. Your hips roll forward as his fingers feel you lightly through the fabric and then press you with the weight of his full intention. “Have to find out,” you breathe, gripping the rail.

“Can I do this to you, Nell?”

“Don’t stop.”

You think he murmurs Yes ma’am into your ear as his hand rises to your waistband and his other hand sneaks around, and he’s undoing you button by button until he can slip his right hand under, and the heat of him, the certainty of him touching you makes you rock into him. His breath comes jagged too as he feels you already wet and he starts to circle your clit with his finger.

You wonder what girl he learned this from, and if she liked it too. No man has ever touched you like this. Your own hand is like a different act entirely, beyond all ways to compare. At first you jump with sensitivity, and he lightens his touch and whispers Sorry, and you shake your head.

“No, it’s -” 

“You like somethin else?”

“No, I like it. Just -” you swallow, “lighter at first.”

He runs his middle finger through your slick and then lightly circles your clit again, so light he could be tracing circles on the surface of water. His left hand gently releases the last button and then rises up to grasp your breast and you lean harder into his chest. As you turn your head to him, his fingers circle with more focus, and your neck goes weak. Every harder stroke of his fingers makes you sigh, and your lip trembles as the first hints of your high begin to flicker up in you. The more he strokes you, the faster it builds, and the more your head starts to whirl with all the rawness of something wholly unfamiliar. A grinding creak settles through the bridge. Your breath shakes and he holds tighter.

“I've got you.” He kisses your neck.

You grip the rail, and your head is spinning, what happens when you let go, you’ve never come with a man, and you’ve never lost control the way he means to make you. Distressing pleasure rises in your core, the feeling that you will break and spill over, and you want to, and you can’t. The bridge creaks and the falls rush down to the river far below, and if you let go you will drop, you will lose yourself in front of him and never get it back. You stagger, suddenly dizzy. 

“What is it?” He steadies you, stops the swirl of his fingers.

“I don’t know -”

“Do you want to?” 

“Yes.” 

He slowly draws his hands away. 

“Don’t have to.”

“I want to.” You discreetly button your fly, and he moves beside you, leaning on his forearms on the rail, and he’s quiet for a time, just glancing at you sideways. 

The hawk has come to perch on the cliff edge across from you, its head focused on the world below it.

“I ain’t askin to be serious, if that’s your worry.”

“Well that’s good, can’t be.”

“With you leavin.” He sniffs and exhales long and easy. Nothing bitter in it. Just a man watching the falls with a girl. 

He’s not asking anything, not expecting, and at length his silence draws the admission out of you, a strand of honesty you’re willing to let go. “I just haven’t...”

He cranes his neck to look at you gravely. "You’ve never…”

“No, I have.” You squeeze your eyes shut. “Just haven’t… for anyone.”

He clears his throat. “Well that’s no surprise, we’re generally pretty rotten at it, case in point.”

“That’s not it.”

He nudges your arm as if he wasn’t entirely serious.

Then, straightening, with a slight pull on your arm he coaxes you backward and groans pleasantly as he sits down against a crate and you settle in between his thighs, reclining against him, and he sweeps your hair out of the way. 

He breathes deep, and his arm is heavy over you as he exhales and watches that hawk for a minute. 

“Bridge ain’t come down yet, has it?” he says, knocking his knee against yours.

You smirk. “I guess not.”

“Guess you ain’t lucky enough to die today, Red,” he clears his throat in his pleasant way, shifting.

You lie there for a while wondering how he means that until you realize you’re breathing the same as him, rising and falling the same, the heat of his body and the heat of yours together as you lean on his chest, held between his strong thighs, his arm that you smooth your hand along, and you think right about then with a skip of your heart you could suffer any amount of uncertainty if it feels like this.

You lift his hand and see the scrawl of his scarred knuckles, the bruised nail beds, the lines of his palm. Bring him slowly back to the waist of your pants and undo your buttons, and guide him between your legs. His other hand trails up to your breast, and when his fingers spread on either side of your clit, you hum with his touch starting as light as you need it, but with the weight of want in his hand. Reverent to feel you but unrestrained. He responds to the rise of your hips, stroking you with less gentleness now, learning you, holding you as you begin to agonize like he won’t let you fall apart.

As if he knows how wild your mind is spinning, he speaks soft in your ear, breathe like aimin, before he kisses your neck, and you feel akin to the diving hawk as it takes your breath away.  Your head rolls with the burgeoning heat rising fast through your hips and belly. It bends you hard against him. 

You want this, Nell?

Oh god yes.

You reach up and seize his neck behind your head. And when he slides a finger deep inside you, his arm rounding tight over you, suddenly you’re panting, hips lifting, and it’s more than you can withstand. His voice shakes.

Show me how you come.

It sweeps you as you cry out and you gush a little in his hand, but you’re too overcome to care as you succumb in his arms, gasping. He moans slightly to feel it, speaking soft praise as you suffer into him.

The falls pour down like a neverending sigh and you sink back. When you look down, you notice your fingers entwined with his. 

He discreetly wipes his hand on his trousers and smooths a strand of hair from your forehead. “You okay?”

You nod, pensive for a while in the wake of it, about to feel embarrassed.

“Beautiful,” he whispers, and presses his lips to the back of your head.

“Don’t go talkin sweet like that.”

“I meant the waterfall.”

You shift your hips and notice his cock rigid against your back, and good lord it stirs you up to think him aroused by you just now. You squeeze his hand, and lean back into him.

“You liked that?” you murmur.

He coughs, and doesn’t know how to answer you at first, but his thumb has been stroking the back of your hand for some time. “Did you?”

You nestle yourself a little stronger into him. “Quite.” You trace your finger up his thigh bracing your side, and you can feel his heart beat faster.

“Already?”

Right about now, you would do just about anything to feel him inside you, and you glance at him over your shoulder, and meet his somewhat startled eyes with rekindled fire in yours.

“Would that be more than once though?” he says, grunting, chastised, when you shift against him again.

You turn around to him, kneeling between his legs spread wide, and slide your hands up his thighs. His sharp gaze resting only on you as you lean forward, touching your forehead to his. “Shut up.” 

He’s got your shirt off and is sucking your tit, kneading your ass with both hands as you straddle him, undoing his shirt and union suit and sliding them both down off his arms. Your hands run over his broad shoulders. When you lift his chin to kiss him, he bites at you, the devil in his eyes.

You crabwalk back, and he’s crawling with you, and when you lie down he’s sliding up over you, and you whine to feel his fully stiff cock when he lowers on you and your hips push into him, and his silent curse forms on your throat. For a moment, he has to back away from you, resting on one elbow and recollecting himself, running his hand over his face. Then he’s kissing your neck, careful to avoid the side you were grazed on. His hand reaching down between your legs obeys you slavishly, those slow, deliberate circles again, tightening, strengthening. It cambers you, as if all you can do is breathe in and rise higher. Your quickening gasps tell him enough of what he needs to hear. Before you can say anything, he’s on his knees in front of you, prying your pants down, yanking off your boots as if he doesn’t know which order to undo things in, and dragging your pants off inside-out while still working you with his thumb, and then he slides a finger into you and you arch like mad.

“This acceptable, Red?” His voice sinks to something raspy and dangerous. You could fly off that bridge if he keeps this up. 

“You’ll never let me live that down,” you sputter, up to the beams.

He hovers inches over you now, his hand grinding you, stirring up your pace, and kisses your forehead. “Didn’t hear you, what was that?” That smooth, threatening, teasing edge in his voice will come to be one of the quickest ways he can turn you on. With that, he glides two fingers into you, loving your helpless moan.

"Yes Ar-”

His fingers work steadier in and out of you, and you can’t hear anything but the falls.  

When he undoes his fly and eases out his beautiful cock, and he sees your yearning face, he looks unwavering at you like there is nothing on earth that would keep him from you. The first time, you were hardly able to take him, and now you want nothing more than to be wrecked by him.

You reach down to guide him to you and feel the sigh in his chest. The first touch steals both your minds away, the hot head of his cock glazed by your slick, and he has to collect himself. It’s when he hikes your leg up and looks at you again, and waits for you, eyes all but demanding you, that he says what he says and might as well have killed you, for you’re dead gone with his voice at your ear. Let me fuck you right, Red.

He pushes slow into your cunt, and watches your bliss-pained face. 

He will learn quickly he can ruin you with a few dirty words uttered low, among other things. You will learn he loves to see you under him, loves to take you rough, but there is tenderness he never shows anyone else. 

You are still buzzing when he draws out his glistening shaft until you feel the rim of his head about to leave you, and then thrusts hard, driving into you with all the drumming of the falls in the air and the heat inside, gradually giving you every inch of him. You can only manage to make half sounds as every muscle in your body tightens.

You roll up as you start to come, gasping, and with an unholy glance at you, he only ruts into you harder. You’re already clenching tight on his cock as you push up into him and you hear yourself making sounds you’ve never made with every fuck of his cock and something as intense as desperation and euphoria and sadness floods through you, different from before. He is just as helpless now, eyes squeezed shut, teeth clenched and bared as your release grips him, and he can’t speak when he pulls out of you with a soft grunt and lets his seed pulse onto your stomach. A momentary shadow crosses his face as you’ll come to find it does after a hard fuck, but passing. He falls to a forearm, and then down at your side, catching himself so he doesn’t crush you, and you both sprawl with each other. Thunder coming back to your ears. The still air and mist cool on your skin. You shiver, and he draws you in. You smooth the lines of his forehead with your thumb until his brow unfurrows again.

When he comes around he kisses your shoulder, near the wound that has almost healed. He presses himself up, falling onto his back, working a cramp out of his hip. 

He buttons up still lying down and his hands fall to his sides again. When you untie your bandana to clean yourself, he remembers and finds the handkerchief, with an apology like he’s embarrassed, but his touch lingers on your stomach before he wipes it all away, as if it’s all too temporary, and he wants to feel you a little bit longer.

He gives you your pants and watches you put them on, and one boot, but he holds the second one away from you.

“This here was just -” he says, as if he has to know.

“Just a passing thing.”

“Right.” He gives you your boot.

The thundering falls fill the silence between you.

“And you’re leavin soon.”

“Right.”

He nods and sits up with a groan. "But your shoulder ain’t quite healed yet.”

“Oh? You a doctor now?”

He pulls on his shirt. “Saw you droppin a couple of your shots.”

You face him actually provoked now.

He covers up a grin, clearing his throat. “So until you do leave -”

His eyes glance down your body before he can stop himself, and he looks away.

“We could -”

He stands, takes your hands, and pulls you up, enough force to get you to stumble into him.

“Do more of that nothin, I mean.”

The way he looks at you. Those blue eyes seeing into you but glinting, god, that bittersweetness rushes over you. You want to kiss him, you want to laugh, cry, want to stay, want to run. Want some kind of settling that you’ve never had before, so you’re unsure what you think you’d want about it now. But for his eyes seeing you. You might be tempted to stay wherever that feeling is. Though you’d ruin it, first chance you had. 

“All right, Mister Morgan. If I stay.”

“Of course.”

As you walk back to the horses, you start to consider rules for this very temporary, entirely passing arrangement. 

Never in camp - that’s the first one. And the first to be broken.

Never during a job, only after.

Never tell the others - the only one neither of you breaks, though more likely because a secret told is a secret ruined.

“Lotta nevers,” he muses, as he rolls the blanket up.

“Well you think of something.” You climb up on his other mare and draw back a little, thinking of the time you’ll have to spend in the saddle.

You can almost see him turn red in the dark.

You make it as far as Cumberland Forest before he’s fucking you against a boulder among the birches, giving you a nice scrape on the small of your back he apologizes for, and then near the Twin Stacks, while the horses get a rest, despite feeling bruised and travelworn you’re riding him as the sun comes up, taking your pace and watching him take in all of you. Fucking like a couple of wild kids, jesus. He tries to thumb your clit but is too entranced by the sight of his own cock disappearing into you, and your stomach he can’t keep his hands off of, and your breasts he wants to get his mouth on. His chest and neck flush red as you take your pleasure on him.

With a mischievous grin, you squeeze his sides with your legs, and he laughs, breathlessly.

“You askin me to speed up somehow?”

“No, I’m tellin you.”

His eyes go wider at the seriousness in your tone as you plant a hand on his chest and begin to half-seat him hard, and he groans, his head falls back. He works up into you when he can, but you balance yourself on his chest and he can’t keep up. The suffering panting you get from him could scandalize a whole convent.

When you feel his hips jump under you and he strains that he’s close you rise off him, his cock smacking his stomach, and then ride your slit slow along his length, seeing him grimace as his seed pools, and he lies there flat, exhausted by you. His hands rest on your thighs. It takes him a while to come back with a wide blink, and he stretches his jaw from clenching it so hard. 

“You didn't?” he asks, running his hand up to your hip.

You shake your head and ease off him, sitting naked on the coarse prairie grass and enjoying the feeling of your skin warmed by the sun. While he’s quiet, he seems disappointed, or trying to figure something out. You will come to learn that pleasing you matters to him a great deal, and he keeps a kind of note in his head.

With a wink, you hold out the now rather used-up handkerchief for his stomach. “I guess you’ll have to get me back.” You reach for your clothes and start to put them on. 

"If you stay."

"If I stay."

He runs his hands over his face.

“Where’d you learn to ride so fine?”

“What, like that?” you laugh.

He reaches for his shirt, tangled on a yucca. "I seen you riding. Nobody who rides like that learned it anywhere near here. And now that I know how the horse feels,” he says with a groan as he puts himself away and buttons his trousers, “I’m sure you didn’t.”

When he sits up, you straddle his lap and shoo his hands away as you button his shirt. “If I told you, maybe you’d kill me,” you say, dangerously. 

“Doubt that’s possible,” He props himself back on his palms and lets you finish. “Jail you, maybe.”

Both of you meet eyes and blush at ideas getting into your heads. 

You don’t want to go back. But they will wonder, and they cannot wonder. The story you agree on is this: Arthur split off near Cumberland Forest to hunt. You haven’t seen him since last night. You’re tired, you will brush and feed his mare, you will put your money in the box same as everyone else, you will wash the graze on your neck, and will be cleaning up (noticing with mild panic a trail of dried spend on your shirt) before heading to your tent when he arrives with a buck strapped over Georgia’s rump. You try not to look at him longer than that before you duck under the canvas and are asleep on your cot almost right away. 

You wake in pitch darkness with a start. You always have falling dreams when you’ve been conning and lying. In this one, Arthur had pushed you off the bridge. Commanded by the man from the train, standing there with the hole you put in his throat. Just a finger stabbed into your breastbone, sending you plummeting through the air. You had fallen with all the emptiness of air around you, and the strange certainty that you would be caught, one way or another.

 

Chapter 3: The Mayfly

Summary:

What happens when it's time to move on. Or: Guess Once More Couldn’t Hurt.


He can have this for a little while before she’s gone. Shooting stars. Summer days. A flash of fish scales in a stream. All beauty wild and fleeting.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Why is the last morning in a place the most beautiful? 

The sky is as blue as you’ve ever seen it, rising clear and forever deep above. The slight chill on the breeze through the trees warms as it passes through that radiant sunlight. All the June greens still bright and shining. The river still full from the snowmelt. A cardinal flies past, a shock of red in the midst of it all. 

You’re stifling a yawn as you stand down on the southern overlook preparing to leave such a sight when you hear steps behind you and turn. Arthur carries two steaming cups of coffee he’s trying not to spill as he digs in his heels down the short incline, swearing when one of them splashes on his hand. 

He’s sleepworn himself as he hands you one of the cups with a nod you might almost call formal, and stands a few respectable feet away sharing the view.

All the other sounds from camp fade in and out around you. The cook, shouting about something. The boy, playing. Arguments far away. The ones on guard duty passing the time. As the two of you stand that short distance apart holding your coffee, facing a perfect scene, you are the only ones who are silent.

Because for the love of all words under the sun, what does a person say to the near-stranger they just fucked? Four times. Five. A strong shimmer through your sides leaves you out of breath. You came in front of this man, you moaned in his arms. Jesus, he came on your ass. There just aren’t words to follow that, and now you’re standing next to him feeling lost for a single thought to stretch between you.

“You, uh -” he clears his throat. “You plannin on leavin today?”

You turn to him, more because you can’t really think of how to answer when a whole river of thoughts is bearing against the dam of your lips.

“Like you said,” he prompts. And what he means is what you said yesterday. When you were riding his cock and gasping into his ear about you leaving. 

A mayfly lands on the rim of your cup as you drink, and you almost flick it away but let it stay, no harm in such a short-lived, delicate thing. “If I can find a way to the station, I guess it’s time.”

“Pretty far. Without your horse,” he says. 

That’s as much as you manage to say to each other before he’s glancing up to see no one else coming, and dropping his cup at the base of the tree, and you’re dropping yours, and his hand is stroking up the back of your neck as he kisses you deeply, his free hand already cupping your breast, brushing over your nipple, and you can’t pull yourselves close enough to each other. 

You manage to break away when you hear the boy somewhere nearby hitting a tree with a stick, and the morning coughs of old men erupt in camp like a weak battle, and you read each other’s faces for what to do next. He searches around calmly, and then his eyes, when he takes your hand, put the whole damn sky to shame. He skids down the incline and helps you down after him, absolutely meaning to grab your ass the way he does. And you’re racing him down the hill, over the small rise there, and before you even reach the trees he’s turning around and hooking you with one strong arm, falling to his knees with the pull of your momentum and dragging you down on top of him in the long grass. 

He’s kissing you madly, both of you breathless. You’re trying to get his shirt off while his suspenders are still on. 

I thought - if - he’s saying between kisses down your neck. By now he’s got you straddling his lap and is tugging your shirt untucked, and you have given up on the tangle of suspenders and sleeves half off and are content for now running your hands up his bare chest, over his round-muscled shoulders. Jesus christ, seeing him in the morning light you need to touch every inch of him. 

No need to h- you pant as he starts to undo the buttons of your shirt. The scratch of his scruff is such a wild feeling against your neck, the constriction of his steel arm around you, the soft groan he makes when you roll your waist into him.

Plenty of time, he says, strained, as he picks the last buttons free, so small between his fingers, and he’s jerking your shirt off with a snap of fabric like a sail, pulling down your chemise and practically dissolving between your breasts, lifting you up to get his mouth on you. The slide of his hot tongue around your nipple spreads your shoulders back like a reflex, and when you sigh he switches to the other side, and the cool breeze on your relinquished breast gives you goosebumps. You are pressing into him, on the verge of reckless to feel his cock inside you. 

He loses balance and falls backward, pulling your hips with him until you’re sitting on his pumping chest, and he grunts in suffocating bliss with your weight on him, like he might gladly smother this way, so long as he could watch you. Affectionately, you draw a finger from his lips down his chin, down his neck, while he gazes at you with a glint in his eyes like a picture of divine mischief, and then he snakes one hand around your back under your waistband and grazes a finger up the very the top of your ass crack. You shriek as he sits up into you, lets you fall back down to his lap, muffling your protest with an ardent kiss, cradling your jaw. 

You grapple his arms and he grins with an apology against your lips. He lets you hold him captive by his wrists with his arms crossed behind his back while he sucks a light bruise over the pulse in your neck, and then, when he’s given you enough of the upper hand, he gets free of your hold on him, wraps his arms around you, and rolls you onto your back. He straddles your hips to pin you down, not putting his full weight on you. Enough to hold you there. 

While he wrestles out of the tangle of the sleeves and suspenders, you run your hands up his thighs, lightening your touch and tracing the backs of your fingers over his length as if you don’t notice his complete arousal, and continue up to his stomach. Dear god, the live heft of his cock through his trousers is a sensation you never want to forget. That chest rising up above you, that face fixed on you with a look of total possession, the look of not bothering to hide anything, leaving nothing uncovered in these last minutes together.

It’s a strange freedom you’ve seemed to unleash, and as he almost sweetly takes your hands from his stomach you wonder if it’s because it’s fleeting that it’s so pure, or if such a thing could last. He pins you by your wrists above your head, shading you now with his upper body as he curls down to kiss you and slide himself back, separating your legs to put himself between them, and you tell yourself it must be. 

Since the Bacchus train robbery two days ago, and the dizzying day after, when you couldn’t look at each other to such an extent that Dutch took Arthur aside and asked if anything had happened, you had been in a state. You had to stand against the back of the wagon by the scout camp and calm yourself and the fierce bloom in your stomach every time you so much as thought of the way he kissed you. Let alone all the other ways he touched you. 

Your agreement never to do anything in camp fell apart within minutes of the first nightfall. As soon as he had the chance, he caught your wrist and stole you away. He couldn’t keep his mouth off you once he could pull you into his tent, nor his fingers from working your pants open.

You know, if you wore a skirt, he whispered, hissing in frustration at your buttons.

That had better be the last thing you ever say to me about skirts, you whispered back.

Probably ain't. His attention on you was entirely rapt and likewise entirely divided as he watched your lips move with the most intent expression on his face and also followed the curve of your back with his marveling hands as if he had discovered living clay. 

You have other opinions on the subject?

What? His whisper was muffled by your breasts he was purely in heaven between, and already both of you were realizing his tent was the worst place you could be, and that you were trapped there, seeing the boots of people walking around on all sides as if they were drawn to the area by the heat, lizards to a sunny rock. You stood between his legs where he sat on the crates, his erection against your hip making you want to beg as your undergarments began to cleave to you. He was giving your breast a wet suck and about to do the same to the other as if he was compelled to be fair.

You started to palm the hard contour of his cock through his trousers, causing him to straighten up in an uncontrollable stretch, pure regret on his face for what a terrible idea this had been as he heard Javier singing at the fire and the wooden step of a boot on the floorboards of Dutch’s tent when Hosea stopped by to chat. Which only tempted you more to stroke him, and he had to snatch your hand to hold you still.

Easy there, he murmured into your chest, half laughing, half in pain at having to resist the urge to turn you around and fuck you on the spot. 

What, can’t I just - you whispered back with perfect innocence as you traced your finger slow around the fully erect shape of him toward his hip, not quite touching him. The light relief of his veins palpable through the fabric. God, it was like walking around a landmass. Could take you all day. 

He seized your hand and held it tight, and so you brought his fist up to your lips, pried his middle finger up, and stuck it in your mouth. He shook his head in wonder as you sucked it and let it drag out between your lips, licking it lightly, your teeth barely touching until the tip, when you bit down a little harder to get him to focus. You smiled before releasing him, and of all the moments leading up to that point, when his amazed eyes met yours like something locking in place, maybe that was when you both fully plunged down this hopeless pit. 

He whipped you around by the waist and shoved your pants down past your hips, worked himself out of his fly, and pulled you back between his legs until you felt the head of his cock nudging through your slit, and in a gesture so hot you couldn’t hold back a devastated moan, he clamped his hand over your mouth and lowered you onto him. In that slow stiff glide, you balanced yourself shakily gripping his thighs, and behind you, the quiet vexation of him trying to hold himself together, his face pressing into your neck. With your knees touching, you were so tight around him he admitted later he thought his legs would give out. You remembered his hand had sought yours, and clenched it against his thigh with a strangled sigh as he came on the small of your back.

He’s kneeling in front of you now in the grass with your legs wrapped around him, and you’re getting one hand free and trying to get your clothes off. He straightens upright, jerks you by your legs to stay with him, hucks your boots away one by one. He lifts your legs to his shoulders and works your pants up and off you, running his hands over your curves as he does. The breeze licks your bare skin and you shiver.

While he planes one hand up your thigh and kisses your calf, he’s busy trying to undo his fly and the buttons of his union with the other hand. There is something about seeing him handle himself that electrifies your spine. You lie propped on your elbows and feel the sharp rush through your center and your seeping slick when he eases out his cock and readies himself with a couple of long familiar strokes. Such a primal lift of your hips, wanting him beyond sense.

His uneasy expression asks if you’re ready for him, as he slides the deep pink head of his cock up your slit, takes a slow bite of air with the sensation and your deprived sound. 

Then he enters you with that raw and wounding stretch that heaves up your ribs and you moan. He drags out and pushes heavily into you again, deeper. You move together naturally, his hips driving yours, riding the curve back, his back rounding as he thrusts, the power in him, the sublime fluid fucking of his cock that hits you so deep it aches. The intimate press of his stomach into yours. Quiet gasping, strained breath. And in the newness of all this, neither of you can possibly last. The heat of the sun warms you, the breeze cools your sweat, and he fucks a faint stream of profanity from your mouth that rises like you’re pleading to hold on, but you don’t have a prayer as the urge of your bodies takes over. You couldn’t stop if you tried.

You begin to come, tensing into him skin to skin and grabbing his working back, whimpering, and he’s holding you tight before he is overtaken by his own rising high, that hard grit of his teeth before he comes, when he pulls out of you - that rigid thick subtraction - and grips himself and breaks with a quiet grunt, jetting his spend on your stomach as he braces himself over you. He kneels back, drained, hand running along your calf up on his shoulder, and he rests his forehead there as if he needs the contact or the cover.

When he ducks out from under your leg and falls to your side he pulls you close for a last and lingering kiss, then lies there beside you in the grass. 

His skin in the sunlight, your skin, his arms loosely wrapped around you, glowing in a way you’ll never forget. The span of his brow, which you run your fingers over, lined by the unyielding demands of his work, the hidden weight of it, under your touch relaxes into an expression you might call relieved, if only for a moment before he opens his eyes.

“You’re leavin then,” he says after a while spent listening to the birds, the breeze stirring in the trees. He kisses your inner arm as your fingers comb through his hair.

“It’s been a pleasure robbin with you, Mister Morgan.”

“Likewise, Miss Riordan.” He swipes a strand of hair out of your face with the backs of two fingers like he is making a study of you, his face serious, and his fingers stop behind your ear as he gets lost in an idle thought.

For one second, you fear he’s about to say something tender and ruin it all.

He breathes deep. “Damn shame.” He pulls his hand away, and yet it finds the back of your knee, pulling it up between the two of you, smoothing up the underside of your thigh. Warm in the sun.

Yeah, spills your involuntary sigh as you melt under the sweet slide of his hand from your hip, dipping down the curve of your waist, up your ribcage. He’s caressing your breast and grazing your nipple with his thumb, and then he’s kissing you again. Harder. His hand on your lower back coaxing you to him.

It becomes a kind of secret code, after that. 

“You leavin today?” 

“If the weather is right.” (He met you by the river and you bathed in that cold water and fucked on the sunny shore.)

“How about today?” 

“I think maybe I will.” (He had his fingers in you in his tent and made you come so hard you nearly smothered yourself to death in his pillow.)

And before you make even the slightest move toward that destination you still haven’t figured out, you’re riding with him to a secluded spot and gasping among the wildflowers or up against a tree like it’s the last time you’ll ever see each other. Even when the reasons become more jokes than excuses. Too hot today. Can’t travel when it’s dark. Can’t travel when it’s light out. Too much to do around here. I can’t; you see, this bastard of an outlaw has taken me hostage.

He can let himself have this for a little while before she’s gone. Shooting stars. Summer days. A flash of fish scales in a stream. All beauty wild and fleeting.

He wakes up slow, thinking of her shoulder of all things, the scar still bright red, a star in her skin marking the day he first saw her. The warm smooth weight of her breast in his hand, her heartbeat drumming. God, her cunt. Her fucking beautiful cunt. Tight and wet for him in such a way that he has never felt so wanted. What he wouldn’t give to put his mouth on her. From the very start, he was done for.

He could almost ride that thought to its conclusion, lying there, the memory of her lovely open mouth as she came in clenching waves on his cock the night before. Her face as she opened her eyes again. Flushed and young and her smile on him like he had just given her everything. But he grips himself and forces that beauty to the back of his mind, jesus, man, you’re not a kid anymore, until he’s come down.

He sits on the edge of the cot yawning, and reaches for his jeans, gets his feet in before standing, and lazily buttons up, letting the suspenders hang. He steps out barefoot on the cool dewy grass to get coffee, and he’s still squinting hard in the sunlight when Dutch calls him.

“Arthur!”

His own name makes him flinch. Ever since Blackwater. Maybe before that.

“Get your boots on, son. Ride with me this morning.” He stands at the front of his tent as if he’s been waiting.

“Just got up. I could use some coffee at least.”

“There will be coffee when we get back.”

Without complaint, he gets the saddles on both their horses and steals a glance at the girls’ tent still quiet as he tugs on the cinch. He thinks he sees Hosea giving him a strange nod as they head out, but doesn’t know what to make of it. The kind of nod you would give to someone to let them know you’re with them even while they watch you walk up the steps to the gallows.

“Tell me how things are, my boy,” Dutch calls over his shoulder once they are away from the camp.

“I don’t know, nice not to be runnin for a while.”

“Yes. That is nice.”

Dutch leads him down the path to the river road, and his mood is bright, even good-humored, as they ride at a brisk pace and in about a half hour come to the mouth spilling into the expanse of the lake, and Dutch stops to take it in. Beyond the fog burning off in the morning sun, Blackwater is little more than a shadow.

“For how far we’ve come, we ain’t gone far at all,” Dutch says. 

“No, that’s true.”

“Trains and coaches are thin pickings.” When he is about to make a point, he talks around the bend like this.

“It’s what we got for now.”

“Not enough to live on for any great stretch.” 

“No.”

And he damns himself for not seeing it every time, like he has a blind spot. As long as he has known Dutch and can hear every change in his voice, notice every flicker in his eyes before he pulls off a con or wins an argument, there it is again like he’s just too close to see around him. Dutch has him out there, still bleary-eyed with sleep, needing a piss, without coffee, without cigarettes, without a shirt, without even his gun belt, unguarded and caught off balance, the way he likes it.

“We can’t risk any threats to the plan, son.” He lights a cigar.

“Course not.”

“Even if they’re pretty and an unusually good shot.” 

He looks ahead at the town across the lake and has to shake his head. This feeling of defeat before even getting started. “She’ll be gone soon anyway.”

“Know where to?”

“No.” He watches the back of Dutch’s head and spits quietly to the side.

"Puts us all at risk, her being here, knowing where we are."

"I don't think she's a risk -"

“Should I consider myself understood on the subject?”

There it is, the unspoken warning. Hazards can be removed in the dead of night, should it come to that.

“Yeah.”

“Wonderful.” Dutch reins about and faces him. “My, how a morning ride lifts the mind and spirit. Enough to make a man grateful for everything he has.” With a meaningful final glance, he clicks to The Count and heads back up the road.

It takes him a moment to follow, knowing he has to, and when he catches up Dutch is working his charm again, remembering aloud some funny story of a bygone time when things were ideal, though they never were. Never would be. But his dreams would sweep you up into their tow before you ever knew what had grabbed you, out to sea without hope of getting back to shore.

He gets to camp and unsaddles their horses and is brushing The Count when he sees her again, and a new kind of pang shoots him in the chest. Her auburn hair drifts across her back in the breeze. She smiles at him over her shoulder. Gives him a wicked look when no one else is watching. A picture of every prospect he’d once dared to hope for, in every way free and glowing with possibility. Not knowing the threat to her now.

He hasn’t ventured near you all day, an abandonment you feel strangely sensitive about, and you think back on what you might have said or done, then try to shake yourself out of whatever fear that is. It’s the signal to move on, that’s what it is. Nice as it was, it couldn’t have lasted, as you always knew. It’s too late in the day now to head to the station, though from there you suppose the nearest city is the place for you. West is progress. East is retreat. Santa Fe, or Strawberry, or Colorado Springs would do. You have thirty-two dollars to your name. You have no idea what you want. Somehow there’s a pointlessness to that whole notion, and it weighs down on you over the hours.

When you walk through camp their eyes follow you, their heads turn as you pass, and you feel as conspicuous and talked-about as a stage-lit oddity, and when the old man at his paper turns down a corner and settles in his chair to watch you across the hitching posts as if he's waiting for you to make your move and divining your unconscious intentions, a familiar restlessness rings through your bones. Defiance tangled with the need to take flight, pulling at each other. Your jaw tightens and you stare back for a long breath before you nod, and he turns up the corner of his page.

The deer are out grazing when Arthur finds you sitting on the southern ledge again, watching the first colors of sunset. For a moment, you think he’s going to say the words and take you into the woods, or you’re hoping he will.

“I uh -” He clears his throat like he does when he’s being polite. “I got something for you.”

“Oh?” You’re trying to be casual.

“Up here,” he says, nicking his head toward the horses. He needlessly helps you up the incline, but you like his hand, and he holds yours even after you’re up on level ground, then lets you go before anyone can see.

He stops by the hay bales to pick up a saddle and turns around to you. It’s yours, where your initials are tooled in cursive, years of grime now scraped from the grooves. The broken cinch and latigo have been replaced, well soaped and oiled, and he carries it to the horses, past his two mares at the hitch. You don’t have time to thank him before he stops beside a handsome paint stallion, you’d guess thirteen hands sizing him up to yourself. He runs his hand down the horse’s blaze and gives him a solid pat on his neck. 

“What do you think of him?”

“He’s lovely.” 

"Found him up in Ambarino." He's checking his teeth, then hooves, probably hesitating to say something, and doesn’t see you beginning to feel the first wave of melancholy. "I'd put him at about eight to ten years." He walks along the right side of him, running his hand down his back.

"Not any older." You let the horse get the scent of you, the smell of your hand, and he noses it, trying to get under it. 

“You can have him,” he says, coming around to you and standing at his shoulder. “He spooks easy, hates ducks for some reason,” he half smiles, “and he’s got some fire, so…be careful. Never did quite get him broke all the way.”

“That’s very kind of you.”

“Just should’ve done it sooner,” he says, and you're speechless, a sense of gentle detachment and sadness building up in you.

You’re determined to focus on the horse’s attention, and so you don’t notice Arthur’s dry swallow. The horse swings his head to you, his deep brown eye on you. “What's his name?"

"Been callin him Apollo," he says. 

"Hey there," you murmur as you let Apollo lip your hand and shove you with his nose, and his ears haven't stopped paying you full attention the whole time. Neither has Arthur.

"Seems he likes you." He stands behind Apollo’s head, checks over him to see if anyone else is in sight. “You gonna learn to mind a real rider now, boy?” He gives him a good admonishing pat. 

And then he turns and kisses you. A brief kiss. Long enough for him to taste you, and you him. To smell his washed skin. Feel the nervous breath from his nose on your cheek. Feel like something is letting go. To lean into him until he cups your jaw and pulls away and clears his throat, looking down. He runs his hand over Apollo’s withers. 

“I ain’t gonna tell you what to do. Dutch knows. When things don’t go his way -” He speaks low, a little faster. “He wants you gone.” 

“My train is long overdue, Mister Mor -”

“I don’t.” He says, and his eyes meet yours, dark and daring to see clearly. “Want you gone.” 

As if to obscure any ideas you might have had, a distant train whistle blasts and dies off, like a memory or a forgotten plan.

Your voice shakes. “What do you want?”

“Right now?” He glances past your head at the barrier of tents and wagons. “I want to get out of here.”

“Anywhere.”

Within an hour you’re lying side by side on a low mesa east of the Twin Stacks with a bottle of bourbon between you as he tells you about Dutch. The gang. Not complaining, but overwhelmed by the magnitude of responsibility. Caught in the middle of an aging leader set in his ways and the needs of the ones caught in his net. For all the trouble you two have with small talk, it’s a surprise to hear him now describing the life at length, the frustrations, the clarity he gets when he’s away from it. 

The small fire he built slowly dies and you let it die in the warm night. The stars overhead brighten as it dims. Maybe that tells you something about short-lived intensities obscuring broader possibilities, if you feel like thinking about it that way.

You tell him you understand, and of course this was all supposed to be temporary anyway. You face the limits you set on yourselves in the beginning and feel nigh-on virtuous not breaking them, well, all of them. It will end when you leave, as you’ve always known.

That’s before he touches your hand, and you’re about to clasp his when a loud rumbling sound comes over the rise, and you sit up. It could be the prospect of broader possibilities after all, or the heat of his touch or the buoyancy of the bourbon or the pull of a force outside yourself that makes you curious about the sound. 

You get up, grab the binoculars lying on his satchel and crawl down onto your stomach to view the road.

An oil wagon.

“The problem is money, right?” 

Money would set him free? Money would loosen the bonds just enough to slip out into his own life for the first time?

“When it boils down to it, yes.” He’s propped up on one elbow watching you.

“What if you made good money? Would Dutch turn a blind eye then? Give his best horse more rein?”

“It’s more complicated than -”

“Well I know that, but say you grease the wheels.” Things would always be more complicated with Dutch Van der Linde. 

He’s up looking where you’re looking now. “You ain’t thinkin of robbin that?”

“Why not? Plenty of rich farmers around here could use the supply, fence’ll be easy.”

“Wouldn’t be a drop in the bucket.”

“It’s a start.”

“They usually got guards on that kind of a target.”

“You see any?”

He crouches and takes the binoculars and scans the road. You are already heading toward Georgia and hoisting his carbine out of the holster. 

“Now hold on, it ain’t safe -”

“Isn’t Dutch always saying you need to get out there and work?”

“Smart work, not some crazy idea to rob explosive tanks of fuel whenever you come across em.”

"I had you marked for more of an opportunist, Mister Morgan.” You dig out his ammunition and start to load, and find he keeps it loaded.

“It ain’t safe -” He gets to his feet.

“Since when do you care about safe?”

“Since I got this hellcat tryin to rob every wagon in sight.” He swipes his hand angrily out at the road.

You level a tolerant stare at him. “Make enough and you’re out. You’ll get a hundred and fifty on this if it’s even half full, I’m tellin you.” 

“And a bullet in your head if you make a mistake!” He stands across the dying embers from you, in the echo of his anger.

The creak of the wagon below on the road passes between you like all your chances fading.

"Now I ain't said I want out. And I ain't gonna get caught up into some chase that gets you killed right in front of me."

You stare at him, trying to put a word on what the hell you’re feeling. Strong. Lucky.  He stands there like a decision. A crossroads. A reflection or a shadow. 

Under that massive dome of stars over the high plains and all the possibilities between, you realize right then you can fight him or you can win him, and the sudden thrill of courage and nerves stirs up inside you like a snake’s rattle. You pick up the bottle of bourbon, take a long swig, and dry your lips on your sleeve.

“You don’t get to have it both ways, Arthur Morgan. Sounds to me, we could be in this together wherever it leads, or I’m on my way tonight. Now, I'm going after that wagon. Are you with me?” You hold the bottle out to him across the glowing coals. “Partners?”

She just said that, standing there in the goddamn golden moonlight with his gun. 

If he lives another hour he could spend the rest of his life trying to draw it.

He takes a huge drink and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, then walks up to you chest to chest, snatches the carbine out of your hand with a firm glare before going to his saddle and pulling out his Lancaster with the good ammo and shoving that into your hand. He keeps the old carbine for himself. 

“I’m point.” He says, a new heated look in his eyes you hope to see more often.

“Like hell you are. I saw it.” You cinch Apollo up a little tighter and slip the repeater in the holster, trying not to appear as giddy as you feel. 

“You got a shoulder.” He’s tying his bandana around his neck, in no way thrilled to be doing this.

“Well you’re old.” You work your shoulder loose and raise an eyebrow at him.

“Ought to tan you for that when this is over.”

“I’ll hold you to it.”

She said that too.

The minute you’re on Apollo he senses what you’re up to, and goddamn that horse wants to run. His restlessness sends a shock of pure fun right up into you, and you can’t help but grin at Arthur as you hold back the reins and utter a whoa. 

“Fine, take point.” He tries to sound exasperated. “No shots unless you have to.”

“Is he gun broke?”

“No…” He has one foot in the stirrup and seems for a moment like he’s rethinking all of this. To reassure him, you make as if you would take off your gun belt, and that doesn’t settle quite right with him either, from his renewed glare.

You hold up your hands. “No shots unless we have to.”

There’s a long creak of the saddle as he mounts up slow, watching you. You wait for him to say what he so clearly wants to say, maybe something patronizing about being careful. He walks Georgia up next to you.

“Alright, partner,” he says. The muscles of his jaw twitch. It’s in his blood to want to do something for you in this moment - check your rifle, give you some kind of warning, remind you how to ride a horse. You can see it in the set of his mouth. But he doesn’t. “Your lead.”

You ask Apollo ahead, and Arthur clicks and follows. 

The two of you race hard over the plain, side by side in the night. You split off around the stack, and you glance over to watch him. Skilled and almost motionless riding the surge of Georgia’s gait. Apollo gallops like he hasn’t run in weeks, and he stretches under you with a powerful stride that shows he couldn’t care less if you stay on, but if you do, he’s yours. You make as little contact as possible and let him carry you, and you feel like you are flying.

In two eternal minutes, it’s over. You’re sweating and jumping down from the saddle at a trot as the driver simply runs away, not about to give up his life for a little fuel oil, and you shout praise after him for making the right choice.

Then behind you, a few faint pops and cracks of gunfire echo around the stacks, and you freeze to listen. Rifle fire and a revolver. You set the brake, tether Apollo, grab the repeater, and sprint back up the road around the bend.

When you see Georgia standing there alone, your heart stops; you feel the shock of it down to your fingertips. You call out for him. No answer.

You call out again, and the sound of his name in your voice echoing off the mesa walls is a plaintive, empty reflection.  It is a lonely sound. Incomplete, a hand held out to nothing but air. A damning remnant. You continue up the road reckoning with what you’ve done. Ahead of you, a man on the side of the road is staggering up to a knee, aiming at the ground in front of him. You lever a round in the chamber, and when he cocks his gun you shoulder the rifle and drop him; the kick to your shoulder almost knocks you down in kind. The crack of your shot echoes lonesome too, like you’re now the only one in miles left alive. 

And in the fading wavering echo, you hear a groan and run over to the washout off the road, skidding on your knees in the gravel to his side and tearing open his jacket, pushing up his shirt, hands searching his chest, his stomach, his sides, as he struggles to get his wind back. 

“I’m okay -” he wheezes.

“Are you really?”

“Sweetheart, it's okay.”

You realize your hand is gripping his and that word sweetheart is slow to fade in your ears.

The watch in his pocket bends up around the bullet like a tuft in a pillow. The glass is powdered on the face of it and snows to the ground. He already has a fist-sized bruise on his stomach, and is about to get up when you hold his head and kiss him. With a wince, he kisses you back. He lets you help him up, covered in limestone dust and stiff from the fall. 

“J. Tenor-Somebody, thanks for the watch.” He reads the perforated engraving inside and then drops it like it hasn’t just saved his life, and walks over to his hat some yards away.  

You’re both quiet on the ride back to the wagon, and for a long time after, too, as you drive it and he rides alongside, watchful. When the wagon is safely stowed for the time being, you head back to the mesa and unfurl a bed roll while he restokes the fire, and the crackling dry wood only amplifies your silence.

The longer you go without words, you wonder if something is changing, or finally uncovered beneath the outer layers. You nearly got him killed with your fool plan. You dismissed your own safety but disregarded his. Getting unseated, a near-miss, the wind knocked out of him - maybe it leaves a man like him vulnerable in ways he would never let you see. He’s still moving a little sore while he unsaddles the horses, and you remember how you usually manage to hurt the ones within your range. 

Coming down from a heist always feels this empty and unsteady. 

Then he turns back to you.

You have seen flash floods from a distance. The way the water seems to rise out of nowhere and flow through the channels it has cut before. Once, you watched a flood sweep a hundred-year-old oak out of the ground in its roiling current, carrying it on water gathered from rain falling miles and miles away. You never see it coming until the ground is suddenly wet under your feet, and in minutes the place is filled with water churning and carving a place for itself in the earth.

The way he looks at you now, you’re put in mind of that.

Since hitting the ground, it’s been weighing on him. The hell are you doing, Morgan. 

Nothin nice comes of this. Every moment that approached this kind of feeling was caught up to by its consequence. Always worse than he expected.

He’d shut them out of his mind. Things he hadn’t thought of in years. Sworn he’d never risk that kind of pain again.

Then in a matter of weeks, during which he had done his damnedest to find any reason at all to mistrust whatever god there was, this woman had flown into him like she had been sent, and just then had shot the guard aiming at him, and knelt beside him, and instead of that near-death flash of sickened relief to put out of mind before it started to dwell too much, it all felt more like waking. 

Old man, you are past your chances for a good life, but she ain’t askin that. It ain’t courtin or settlin down. 

Looking up as he lay in airless agony, he saw her facing him with a hand on his, like she was bringing him back. And here unhidden under the wideness of the sky, she stands across the fire as if she would stay by him, consequences be damned.

He feeds the fire and says Sit with me, and when you step near he takes your hand, guides you in front of him, sitting with his arms around you, watching over your shoulder as the new sticks burn and sparks spew up wild and vanish. 

Between his knees, feeling the warmth of his chest, you don’t know how to tell him.

“What is it,” he asks, the way he asks without asking, as if he just can’t leave well enough alone. 

“Maybe I…I was thinking it’s best if I leave after all.”

He's holding your wrist firm as if he’s not falling for whatever you think you’re saying. “Because of that back there?”

“Dutch. Common goddamn sense.” Your tears drop onto your knees hugged to your chest. You try not to let on to it, and breathe without sniffling. “Being this close to all of it goin wrong back there.”  

He is silent for a moment, then kisses your shoulder and keeps his lips pressed there as he looks on. “I thought you said we was partners,” he says half muffled.

Which only makes your tears fall harder. 

He nudges your head with his head, sniffs, seems to be gathering his mind. “You see things pretty clear when it happens,” he says. “I think you know the feelin.”

You lay your hand over his hand holding your arm.

“When I was layin there, I remembered someone tellin me I’d never change.” He clears his throat and stretches his hand like he does when his fingers go numb and he’s testing out a thought. “And you ain’t askin that.” 

He sighs. “And, I reckon, it ain’t fair, me askin that of you.”  

“Damn sensible of you.” You wipe your face on your shirt collar.

“So it comes down to, when it goes wrong again, there ain’t a gun I’d rather have by my side, however long you'll stay.”

You watch the coals dying out for a bit, and you smirk. “What’d I say about sweet talk?” 

“Didn’t say I wouldn’t duck behind you.”

You elbow his arm.

He drags over the bedroll and moves to recline on it by the fire, and you lie with him, watching flames lick slow at the wood, charring it, glowing in its cracks.

You must have been dazed by the same patch of stars when a flash sails in and out of the sky like a stitch. You both see it, a fade of gold gone so fast you could start to doubt you really did, but there’s specialness in a sight like that, and you’re both left admiring the sky. After a while spent watching the constellations, he kisses the back of your head and pulls the blanket of the bedroll over you both, and is asleep almost immediately.

Nothing is permanent. Not things said, especially. You know this as you lie against him staring at the last lively embers and the spread of stars beyond them. With the weight of his arm over you, his slow breath on your neck, his body a close fit behind yours, you remind yourself your whole life has taught you about the temporariness of things, inhabiting the vast dark before and after them. You hardly want to reach for something knowing you might squander what’s precious. 

Four hundred from the oil wagon goes into the box, saving only fifty each otherwise. Enough for Dutch to say nothing when he sees him coming back to camp with her. But he glares like murder, taking all disobedience personally, and won’t talk to him for a few days. There’s a sense of an ax swinging, but always has been with him. Always a careful dance around his moods and favor, and so in camp she agrees they won’t speak much beyond what’s formal. 

She sits with the girls, the widow and Karen, shelling peas by Pearson’s wagon, humming something pretty. From where he sits by the fire, he thinks he’s never met a woman so fine, and still can’t quite allow what that feeling is, when all that follows hurts worse than being alone ever does, and he wouldn’t ask for much more than to watch her singing to herself, her fingers busy, her occasional secret glance at him that captivates him like a spark in the sky, as long as the world will let him. 

He draws her sitting there, never quite capturing the fullness of that glance. She ain’t meant to be kept by anyone’s hand. He’d count himself lucky just to hold her for a while.




Notes:

*here's another scene from the first part of this chapter fleshed out as a one-shot just because 🖤

Chapter 4: The Distance

Summary:

You lie back on the blanket spread over the grass, half in the dappled shade, letting the breeze cool you off before you get dressed. The drifting clouds form shapes of ships and birds and other things that leave.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

You lie back on the blanket spread over the grass, half in the dappled shade, letting the breeze cool you off before you get dressed. The drifting clouds form shapes of ships and birds and other things that leave.

A little distance away, he's sitting down, pulling on his boots, his suspenders looped on the ground, and you find yourself wishing at the sight of his strong, scratched-up back he would be a little rougher like this more often. It was just the one time you had cried out in pain, when he did take you a little too fast, but he’s been more hesitant ever since, like he will hurt you just by being near you. This time, the fact of him leaving, perhaps, or how you scratched him, was what got him to fuck you to the point of feeling faint. You only want it more.

And wonder, stretching out long on the blanket, how such a thing is asked.

And what he would look like, could you manage to make him take you rough. The cool, still threat in his body, the hardness in his eyes. The squeeze of his hands on your arms, or the iron weight of him holding you down with more strength than you could resist. Not playing around this time. Jerking you into the position he wants, and if you try to move away, the sting of his hand smacking your bare backside. The bite of his voice demanding -

“What’re you so busy thinkin of?” He picks up your sock, somehow flung into a bush. 

“Future things.”

He searches around him for his shirt. “What, years from now or next week?”

“Maybe next week.” 

“You gonna let me know?” 

“Suppose I might.”

“Well,” he groans, rocking to his feet and stretching up before finding the shirt he threw on the branch. “There’s a lot between now and then.” He steps over you, straddling you, facing your feet, and bends down to yank the one sock onto your foot. “You might change your mind.” 

“Doubt it.” You scissor your leg up high between his legs and he grabs your foot before you can make contact and forces it back down with a fool-me-once shake of his head at you.

Then he turns you over like a log and swats your bare ass. “C’mon, scamp. I gotta get on.” 

He has Georgia packed and well-fed, and his own self supplied well enough, at your insistence that he bring a few more provisions.

When you’re tucking in your shirt, he picks up your gun belt and can’t help himself checking your hardware, in spite of never having any faults to comment on. “Don’t let him get to you. Stick by the girls, much as possible.”

“Could just let me come with you.”

“Dutch said keep it simple. You know I’d want you there any other time.”

You wait for a better excuse.

“I don’t trust what’s gonna happen, Red. I more than halfway hope it gets the snake killed anyway.” 

“Think I can’t handle myself?” You accept your gun belt from him and pull it around your hips.

“Can you?” He dodges as you swipe your boot at him. 

It’s awkward, saying goodbye for a time, neither of you feeling sure of the right thing to say or do, not liking the new prospect of being apart, nor thinking yourselves inseparable, two habitually independent fools like you. He throws his saddle bag over the back and checks the cinch while you stand with nothing occupying your hands, so you hook your thumbs on your belt, and when he turns back he sees you standing there and just looks at you, long enough for you to tilt your head at him.

“You forget something?”

He smiles a little crooked, taking stock of you. “Don’t see how I could.”

When he kisses you, it would almost be sweet, but for the brutish handful he takes of your ass, and then he swings up on Georgia and clicks to her. 

You watch him ride away, the easy roll of his hips in the saddle and the growing stretch of road between you, and you just ain’t sentimental about it, not at all.

It’s a deep midsummer light, that evening, lively with the chirps of insects and the air sweet from all green things warmed by the sun now cooling, resting. Night blossoms opening. One of those evenings you mark in your mind as the perfect kind of evening, one you would compare others to for the peace in it. Makes all worries on your mind seem manageable, even dispels them, to consider sharing a scene like this with someone, or living many such hours together in the unfolding years of a life. Something about a moment like that, when dusky plum colors brighten all the green and the world takes a breath and glows a little, makes everything else more possible.

You stand on the overlook at camp, and across that great distance, he’s somewhere in those foothills, making camp, perhaps, in that same sweet air.

“Miss Riordan.”

Dutch’s thick voice startles you from behind. He steps up beside you, preceded by the smoke of his cigar, and you think of Arthur telling you to stay with the girls, but they have all gone off. Hosea sits at the table far away reading a paper by lanternlight, and there is no one nearby besides him and Dutch. You feel as if you’ve stepped on a trapspring and can’t move.

“Mister Van der Linde.”

“Fine evening with a fine view.”

“Yes it is.”

“A time for industry and a time for leisure,” he says, like he’s quoting something profound.

“Or just a time.” Dammit, just mind yourself for once.  

His eyes narrow with his withheld smile out at the view. He puffs twice on the cigar, blowing smoke out over the scene as if to paint in storm clouds. 

“I was thinking how I haven’t gotten to know you, Miss Riordan. Arthur’s always taking up your time, it seems.”

One more glance around, and you see no one coming who can possibly give you an excuse to get away. Your feet are a stumble’s distance from the edge of the cliff.

“Your shoulder, is it healing?”

“Healing fine, thank you.”

“Good. Very good.” He takes a long moment just to let the silence between you settle. To let you know he is in control, and you are at the mercy of his favor, of his mood, of his patience, which is not infinite. You smile blandly, not about to let him make you feel adrift, the first and sharpest tool of a man like him. It takes some resolve not to step back from the ledge.

“Where did you come from, Miss Riordan? I find myself trying to puzzle it out, and realize I could simply ask.” Genial smile.

“Back east, Virginia if you must know.”

“I must,” he says, as if he’s having a clever spar at dinner. “What drives you in this direction?”

“Prospect. Perhaps it’s a place more suited to someone like me, or me to it.”

“And what are your prospects?”

“To be honest, narrow and uncertain at the moment.”

“Good answer.”

“Is it?” Cool it.

“It’s honest.”

He gazes at you again, a knowing gaze intended to make you think he has you all figured out. You wonder if he is about to tell you how you’re just like him, or unlike anyone he’s ever known. Both roads lead to the same junction of flattery and entrapment.

“They teach all their women to shoot in Virginia?”

“I couldn’t tell you; I’ve only known a few.”

As you expected, his smile tenses at the corners. You have ventured beyond what’s polite. You meant to. 

And as expected, the pleasantries begin to fade.

“Arthur said you were running from Colm’s men when they shot you.”

“I was.”

“Do you know I have something of an interest in Colm O’Driscoll.”

“I might have picked up on it from the talk in camp.”

“He was recently at Six-Point Cabin, I heard. Scared off.”

“I’m so glad to hear it.”

“Lots of his men in these parts. You must feel the need to be cautious.”

Side by side with him on that overlook rim, under such prospecting words, the drop in front of you is long, and there is little doubt in your mind he intends for you to feel aware of how close you are.

“What things have you been up to, Miss Riordan, with Arthur?”

“Just a few jobs here and there.” 

“I’m sure. I’ve known him a long time.” He has a mirthless way of chuckling.

You try not to consider what he is insinuating, and anyway it’s no business of yours, what Arthur’s past was or his predilections. He would be no different from other men in his position. You have let yourself think, or idly not question, that he might be different, based on nothing more than the way he is with you, and so it stings a bit to think yourself wrong.  

“A man like him needs purpose. He’s loyal to this purpose.” He clasps his hands in front of you as if you could not possibly understand his full meaning without illustration. “A better life for these people. So much hangs on his shoulders, such work to do this the right way, I have to protect him. We rely on him. Any additional burdens or distractions or temptations jeopardize not only him but everyone. Down to little Jack.”

“I’m sure Arthur can do for himself just fine and knows what he can take.”

“There’s where you’re wrong.”

“I don’t think I am.”

When he shifts his weight to tower over you, his boot knocks some pebbles over the edge. They hurtle far, almost soundless as they fall.

You wait for him where the Little Creek spills into the Dakota in the sandy river shoals, and spend the heat of midday under the pines setting up the tent and gathering branches for the fire. In the sweltering afternoon, you’re walking barefoot up and down the strand alert to any noise at all. Whenever the woodpecker stops its racket or the deer on the opposite banks raise their heads, you scan around. You wade in the shimmering shallows, uncovering small colorful stones with your toes and tossing them farther and farther away upriver, which does nothing to distract you from the concern building up inside. As daylight turns metallic and the air grows heavy, a thunderstorm darkens the distance in the late-day heat. And just when you’re walking to the tent to get your boots and your gun belt and considering which route to take to find him, a violent bolt of lightning divides the sky to the south, and you see him coming that way.

He lets Georgia walk along the shoreline path, and from that distance already you can see the way he leans in the saddle. When you walk toward him, trying not to appear as worried as your thumping heart would make you, he gives you a weary smile, but you see pain in his eyes and the rain begins to fall.

“You lost, pretty girl?” he calls across that separation, his voice ragged but mild. "Lot of wanted men in these parts."

“So I heard. You'd better be careful,” you shout back, pretending not to notice him looking so worn.

Where you expect a smart reply, you get none. A wince only, as he shifts in the saddle.  

You reach each other, and you walk back alongside him. His boots are scraped up. Mud down one side of him. Traces of blood from somewhere. A bruise on his temple. You’ve never seen Georgia so dirty in streaks of drying lather and dust.

“What’d you do, get the whole town coming after you?”

He smirks grimly ahead, and his eyes briefly unfocus like he’s caught up in recalling it. After a moment, he blinks back, and as you walk he tells you how it happened, and how that fool fucked it up, and although he doesn’t say it, you can hear it in his voice, how he hates what happened after that. He won’t tell you everything.

“Next time I’m going.”

“I won’t argue with you.” He stops Georgia near the tent and dismounts stiffly. You send him to the tent, and he’s so beat-up he doesn’t even try to protest while you unsaddle Georgia and get her cleaned up, brushed and fed, sheltered well under the pines. By the time you duck under the tent and get out of your rain-soaked clothes, he’s asleep, though his exhalations are tight like he’s in pain. You crawl under the blanket behind him and gingerly wrap your arm over his side; he flinches once, with a low hum as he takes your hand and pulls you to him tighter, and sleeps again. To the canvas of the tent wall and the entire stormy sky beyond, you make a personal promise as intentional and detailed as a square of fucking embroidery to let this Micah Bell die a slow death someday soon.

You wake alone in the tent. The air is fragrant with pine in the aftermath of the storm and you pull on just your long shirt as you stumble outside. In the morning afterstorm light, the river sparkles, but what strikes you most is the man standing there in the water up to his knees, naked and bruised. When his hair is wet, it hangs nearly to his shoulders. The muscles of those round shoulders taper down his back to his tight waist, his ass you often find yourself admiring, the muscles in his hips that turn you on just as he stands there. His thighs, thick and strong.  A huge bruise wraps across his ribs on the left from the front. Another on his lower back. An obvious bullet graze marks the meat of his right shoulder. 

He picks up the bar of soap balanced on a rock, lathers up his hands, and goes through the efficient motions of washing his face, scratching his nails through his scruff, soaping up his neck, behind his ears. He has his eyes closed and is scrubbing up into his hair when you step into the water with him.

“Just me,” you say as soon as you see him tense up, listening.

From the front, he is a sight. The way the soap drips thin like rivulets of milk in the grooves of his muscles, the hair of his chest, the line of his hip, and you realize as you wade a long arc to him you haven’t ever seen him plain naked in front of you when he wasn’t immediately about to fuck you. His handsome cock hangs heavy, suds beginning to trickle onto it, a sight you relish while he stands there with his hands up, blinded by soap.

“Troublemaker. Shouldn't sneak up on a man when he’s washin.”

“Why.” You take the soap from him and dip it in the cool water and make a good lather between your hands before you give it back.

“Bit exposed here.” 

“I’d say so.” You put your hands on his stomach and press up his chest, work up to his neck, and he squeezes his eyes tighter when you daub extra suds over them. Your hands spread out along the channels of his collarbones to his shoulders, and you turn him to see the graze in the muscle on the right, the angry score torn through the skin.

“Looks sore,” you say, softly.

“Ain’t much,” he murmurs, his face close to yours, and his hand brushes the side of your thigh, fingers pressing, staying.

You kiss him high above it, and move to his front and slide your hands down his chest again, sketching light circles around his hard nipples, which makes him jump, before you put your hand on the front of his ribs and the deep bruise spilling there around him. He doesn’t move, and seems to want to keep that contact despite the ache he must feel. You stray down the lean cords of muscle at his sides, narrowing down his front to his pubic hair, and branching your stretching fingers off to his thighs. You smile to see the quiver of disappointment on his mouth. 

“Is it so bad, being exposed?” you say, teasing again, and when you drag your hands back up, his stomach tightens, and you take his cock two-handed, slipping your grip down his length, and watch his neck draw up slightly. 

He can’t answer. The silky slide of soap on his cock has him entranced, and his shaft pulses in your hands, quickly growing harder. You leave him in that state to soap your hands again, and then while you continue to stroke him with one hand, you work your other around to his back, and you slide yourself around him to see the bruise where he landed on something or was hit by something. The few other marks besides. Your fingers trail to his hips, your hand skimming over the muscles of his ass. 

By the unconscious tilt of his head, the way he holds his breath listening to you, the stillness of his hovering fingers, you hold all of his senses captive right now. He bends to try to rinse his hands off and you pull him back upright, and take all your ministrations back around to his dick, which hangs huge and full as you stroke and soap around him, then up and down, cradling his balls, watching the twinge in his cheek with each change in sensation and the seeming neverending glide you can render on him with enough lather. In almost no time you’ve worked him up hard as a rock, and the sight of the veins scrawling around the column of him makes you ache for him to take you, which he keeps trying to do, but you push his arms back firmly, and then you lightly wring your hands in opposite directions around his shaft and his back stretches up. 

“Jesus, Nell gonna make me come.”

“Well don’t do that,” you say dryly. “Hang on there, cowboy, you missed a spot.” You slow your strokes and survey around you.

"I meant before we -"

"I know."

“Let me rinse my eyes at least."

“No.”

The pines mostly hide you from the road. As a bathing hole, it’s secluded, as long as no one else is of a mind to come down to the water in that spot. You can’t deny a certain pleasure in the thought of someone seeing you, for all the pressured secret-keeping in camp. There’s something about the secret of it that you hold special, but just as much a part that has made this thing unreal, and the chasm of uncertainty between them starts to widen, the longer the days between seeing him. Out in the open sunlight, you feel free to have him like this, as if there is nothing to hide.

You pause to appreciate his squinting face, and feel only slightly guilty when you splash two quick large scoops of cold water to rinse him off below the waist. He shouts, of course, and opens his eyes for a second, getting stung by the soap, but all of that is entirely forgotten the instant you sink to your knees on the sandy river bottom and lick the head of his cock.

The expression on his face and the tensing of his entire body, the light, shocked pant you get from his mouth, is worth all the cold water rushing between your legs and the dull pressure of the current against you.

“You don’t have to, ah -” He swallows and loses track of his thought as your fingers fan down over the base of his thick shaft in your hand.

“But if I want to?” You give him the lightest flicker of your tongue, and his eyebrows rise.

“I won’t stop y-”

He doesn’t finish because you are licking him again, letting the warm flat of your tongue support the end of his weighty cock before you begin to lap the length of the underside of him while you hug his thigh, as much for the contact as to brace yourself against the flow of water that wants to put you off balance and drag you away. When you tease your tongue featherlight under the weight of his balls, his face tics in uncertain pleasure, then you fully taste one and the other in turn and watch his smile press up into one cheek. You travel in soft, wide kisses back up his shaft toward the head, and then you press your full lips to the tip and suck him slowly in.

Fuckin christ - His whisper breaks as you slick him up with as much spit as you can summon, stretching your mouth as you indulge his rigid length and let him feel your mouth before you suck just a bit more. 

You’re aroused just to see him so undone by you right now. He’s damn near emotional, from his shivering breath to his twitching mouth, his troubled brow, and you get a rush to hold him so entirely at your mercy as you bob with the fullness of your intention on his cock and hear him unravel.

He finally swipes his fingers over his eyes to clear away the soap so he can watch you, and the sight of his shaft sliding between your taut lips, and your eyes glancing up seems to overwhelm him. His head drops back and he utters something you can’t quite catch. You come off him with a quiet pop and hold him firm, running his rim over your wet lips before you open up again.

His hand reaches to the back of your head, fingers just starting to grip your scalp, and you take him deeper with a push from his hand on your head. The groan you get from him then, and like an afterthought he takes it away. You stop, releasing him with a sloppy suck, and look up at him.

“Do that again,” you say, panting.

“What?” he rasps, as if you’ve just told him to fly off a bridge.

“Put your hand on my head.”

He wipes his soap-wet face with one hand in disbelief, and as you slick your tongue around the rim of his bright head he places his hand on the back of your head and presses ever so gently, and you sink your mouth on him again. 

The pressure of his hand, the new force of him on you, turns you on so fast you moan over his cock, which gets a soft hum of want from him above you. You work your jaw open as wide as you can and grip the base of his shaft as he only gets harder. You could never take all of him, but you gag yourself a little just to see what it will do. From the control of his hand, you sense him liking it more than he would admit, so you bear into him until he hits the back of your throat and he damn near cries out, and his eyes roll back. When you choke and shiver slightly, you can practically feel his pang of guilt, but his hips jut into you in spite of himself and his fingers curl into a tight grip of your hair, and you claw his ass with one hand to get purchase as you guide him deep. His sweet suffering then.

You glance up at him, and despite your watering eyes and the salivation and qualmishness of your reflex, you have no intention of slowing your pace. His legs are tensing, muscles jolting, feet surely just as numb in the water as your legs, which you don’t care about because goddamn the sight above you is all yours, and you wish you had thought of this the very first time. When you can’t take much more and it seems neither can he, you give him a strong suck and watch him melt.

His breath quickly strains and he pulls himself out of you, and you take hold of him then with one firm slippery stroke down his shaft as he comes with an open-mouthed grunt. The first spurt hits your cheek, and he looks mortified but you hold him there and let his spend coat your neck, and, breathless, gather the last of his seed pooling on your lips and tongue before you lap it up, and he looks about to pass out the way he locks his eyes on you then. You taste his salt, the residue of soap, the unnameable flavor of him, and let him out of your mouth gently, kneeling there in the river looking up.

He’s holding your hair, soap all over him, like he can’t fully grasp what just happened.

You wash off your mouth and cheek and kiss his upper knee. “You liked that?”

“My girl, you’re killin me,” he says, his voice completely hoarse.

He untangles his hand from your hair.  When you shiver from the water he pulls you up, and notices the dribble of spend on your neck and quickly cups his hand full of river water to clean you. Then he smooths the water from your cheek and lips before he kisses you, holding that tender point of touch, and lets you go. You step over to the shore to sit in the sun and warm yourself up again.

He wades into the middle to wash off and plunges under, letting the current carry him a ways before he stands up again. 

“Don’t go floating away, partner. I won’t be able to catch you.”

He wades back, coming out of the water with a slight stagger and sits on the flat rock next to you to dry off, watching the river, still fazed, and so you dig his cigarettes out of his satchel and light two. He reaches over and tugs on the hem of your shirt to get you closer to him. 

For a while he just smokes out at the river and then rubs his forehead and glances sideways at you. He coughs lightly. “Dutch is sendin me and John up north awhile.” He’s not quite bitter, but there’s regret in his voice like he’s lost something. You won’t deny in that moment feeling similar.

“You haven’t even seen him yet.”

He shrugs. “Said soon as I got back, we’d go.”

“Tell the bastard to go himself for once.”

He jostles your thigh with the back of his hand. “It’s my work.”

“You do a lot of the work.”

He nods, and he can’t keep his hand from touching your leg, the knob of your knee, the curve of your calf.

“Do you know how long?”

“Ain’t sure.” He smokes, hanging his arm heavily on your bent knee. “Couple days up, couple days back, don’t know how long up there. Wants us scoutin a place more permanent.”

“Say no.”

“Tried. Come with me.”

“Can’t. He wants me in camp.”

Now he’s twisting to face you, and the pain in his ribs makes his voice tight. “He what?”

“Told me the other day. You see what he’s doing, don’t you?” 

His cheek jumps with the clench of his jaw. “You don’t have to say yes.”

“You know I do.” You stab out your cigarette on the rock.

“He say why?”

You shrug. “Says it’s O’Driscolls; he just doesn’t trust me is my guess.”

He finishes his smoke and groans lightly as he stands, holding out his hand to help you up. “He’s got to be careful. When I’m back I’ll have a talk with him.” 

“How much longer am I just waiting for you in camp?  Thought I was your gun.”

“Won’t make you wait next time.” His blue eyes take you in, holding your gaze, unafraid to stay on you while he traces a finger down from the notch of your throat and frees the first button of your shirt. 

For all he doesn’t want to see in the rest of his life, he might see it someday. Not anytime soon. You won’t tell him what else was said. 

He hooks your finger and takes you back to the tent.

That afternoon, you don’t bother to conceal the fact that you return to camp together, although he has to answer Dutch calling him to his tent to tell him all about it. You watch him head over, hear the usual easy tone he takes with him, and realize the distance he would have to put between himself and Dutch to see the breadth of his manipulation is greater than Dutch would ever allow, and if having you there keeps his best man coming back, then you are part of his manipulations too.

Within an hour, he’s gone again.

They make camp on a rise somewhere near Granite Pass. A thin pine rises straight up from the edge of the outcropping, its roots clawing into the rock it’s grown a part of. The view from there could put a poet to shame to see the inexpressible grandeur of the rounded distant mountaintops and the spread of trees between, moss and orange poppies bright and hardy in the chill. 

He’s building a fire while John goes on about Abigail and the boy, selfish as ever like he was owed something he never got, and Arthur wishes to god he would shut up. He wishes to god she were there instead. If not her, then at least being there alone would be less lonesome than listening to Marston carrying on about how he just can’t take all the bitching and expecting him to do what he seems to think he shouldn’t have to. 

“At what point does me not sayin anything make you think you ought to shut up?”

“Am I boring you, Morgan?”

“I was bored six hours ago you whiny bastard.”

“Pardon me if I got a lot on my mind.”

“You’ve had that on your mind ever since before you run off and you ain’t come around any closer to figurin it out. Starts to look like you want it that way.”

“Fuck you.” Marston sits against a rock and sulks like a goddamn kid. “See how you like it soon enough.”

He looks up slow. “You had better be real clear about your meanin, next you speak.”

Marston’s always been fool enough to strike out, just trying to get hit back. “That pretty thing you brought back to camp.”

“What’d I just say.”

“Abigail knew from the minute she saw you two. Said you got it bad. I thought you and Mary was seein each other again. Guess you get around.”

“If you wanted me to kick your ass off the cliff over there, you should’ve just said so.” He narrows his eyes at him. “Dutch put you up to this?”

“I’m just bein your brother givin you fair warning. You barely know her, and next thing you know you’re stuck. In your position, I’d run fast as I could the other way before I got into the kind of trouble I’m drownin in.”

“You’d drown in a puddle.” He leans back against the tree and watches the sunset die out. “And what kind of piece of shit are you, to see that boy as some kind of burden you wish you never had. If you lost him, would you feel a thing?”

They won’t speak after that, not until after sunrise, saying only the necessary things to each other as they pack up to get on. For all his damned stupidity, Marston knows enough not to say a word to him about losing a child. Not enough to learn something, but at least enough to shut up.

And it’s the second time he’s had to think about that in the last few days, a pain long kept beyond range, so sleep doesn’t come easy, if it comes at all in that uncertain summer twilight. 

That precarious evening on the overlook, Dutch had smoked his cigar down until the ember shone in the rings he wore, and he looked out over the valley as he made his point clear.

“As long as you’re here, understand one thing. Ensnare my boy in the oldest of traps, or lure him out away from his duty here, and I promise you, the next time he’s back he won’t know where to look for you.” He stepped close, and finally let you see the dark unflinching clarity in him, unconcealed by all his guile. 

You have never had much of a poker face, and so the rage building in you was all but blazing in your eyes. “So I can’t stay, and I can’t go.”

“You just can’t get in the way.”

He backed away, the corner of his mouth curving at how deeply he’d struck a nerve, and how easily you take bait. When you walked away from the ledge, you saw Hosea watching you from the table, knowing full well what was said, and you realized just how friendless you were. You got three paces away when Dutch’s voice followed you. Calm. Icy. 

“I’m glad we had this talk, Miss Riordan.”

 


 

In the aftermath, the heat on the road shimmers, distorting the view down both ends of it. He squints to see that far-off horizon, some harbinger or shadow or nothing at all darkening the road, but it doesn’t come closer.

How he finds himself here, he can’t quite piece it back together in his mind. Everything is coming apart. Right there out on the road in broad fucking daylight, no cover in sight, this ungodly mess.  He would almost be impressed at her anger if he weren’t the direct target of it. And the way Marston had watched him with a knowing lift of an eyebrow as he rode out after her - he’ll cuff him for it later, the hell would he know about it.

“This is your fault.” You hold your hand up to calm the bay but it’s spooked and splintering the hames, still pulling on the stagecoach.

“My fault?” He stares at you in disbelief as he deals with the woman screaming in his face.

There is blood on the road. A terrified horse with its harness half broken. Three passengers scrambling around you.

“If you had waited like I said -” he shouts. “What the hell was this for?”

“I’ve waited long enough!”

He’s trying to get out of the way of the plump, tightly bodiced woman shrieking insults and scripture at him. “What was I supposed to do?”

You’re no longer arguing about the stage, if you ever were.

“Say no for once!”

The woman stands a foot shorter than him and when he tries to get around her, she puts herself in his way, and when he takes her by the wrist to move her she screeches about being violated. He finally stands there with both hands out wide as if he’s waiting for her to make her point.

“Can’t just drop everything for you, sweetheart,” he says to you, and as God is your witness, you would have thrown something at him if the Bible lady hadn't beat you to it.

When she smacks him in the face with her handbag, he straightens up so galled and rage-eyed at her that she freezes in sniveling terror. He has to shoo her to run away. Her ridiculous hat flies off her head as she gathers her skirts and scrambles up the road in the way of a panicked turkey. The hat lands graceless beside the dead shotgun rider and the few suitcases full of nothing but clothes.

“Goddammit!” He kicks the wheel of the coach. He doesn’t even want to look at you. “A man is dead because you couldn’t be bothered to wait.”

“He shot first, if you forgot.”

"Because you had to fly off the handle."

“It was fine until you showed up!”

In camp, the minute you’d heard him talking with Dutch about going to find Micah, the searing burn of it set you off. Days on end being captive on that overlook, and him back just one night. Well he could fuck himself, if he was going to try so hard to. You had saddled Apollo and jumped on, and he tried to catch your reins as you passed him.

“Nell, please wait. Just…wait for me a minute.” He held up his hand to you before he stormed back toward camp, and you had given Apollo your heels. When you heard him galloping behind you, the stage was already slowing, and then you felt like ruining something, just like you do now.

“He’s just going to keep doing it, and you’re too stupid or too much a coward to see how he plays you for a fool.”

His eyes flash. “You know everything about it, bein here a few weeks?”

“I’ve seen enough to know the type, and how stuck you are.”

He drops his arms at how impossible you are. “If you knew half of the trouble that’s breathin down my neck, eighteen people I gotta look out for -”

“I didn’t ask to be the nineteenth!”

“Am I supposed to be sorry?”

“Yeah, well would've been less trouble for you and me both.” In the quiet breeze, with the road between you, that realization hits with an ache in your throat, and you have to admit what you know is true, and you sigh and smirk bitterly to keep from crying. “It was nice, with you, for a while. Nicest few weeks I’ve ever had.”

“Hold on -” 

“I even thought it might last. But the trouble we make always catches up, and I can’t help making more somehow.” 

You walk toward Apollo, feeling stupid, feeling hurt, wanting to just fly away from the wreckage of this whole thing that’s strewn out in the open as sloppy as the debris from the stagecoach on the road. A familiar kind of scene, of the ones you run away from.

The sight of her leaving, the stolen breath of her turning away, feels just like grief he’s felt before and grief he’ll keep on chasing.  

Behind you, his silence leaves you colorless and weak, like you’ve drained yourself dry. And after all the miles put between you, every one of just twenty steps more distant feels liable to tear you apart. When you get on Apollo, you can’t bear to look back.

Then a sharp whistle pierces the air, and the horse goddamn turns.

You pull on the reins to back him up and make him mind you, and you shoot a glare at Arthur as you try to turn him ahead.

“I told Dutch I ain’t goin.” 

You hold Apollo steady. 

“Said I wouldn’t go unless you’re comin with me.” Quiet pain in his voice.

The clouds across the bluebird sky drift eastward, going toward him.

“What’d he say.”

“Don’t matter.”

You dismount, and he stands by the stage like he wouldn’t have known what to do at all but wait, and you see what the distance has done to him too.

“You’ll catch hell for it.” 

“Don’t matter.”

Slowly, you step back over the tracks of your boots in the dust as if to erase them. 

“Sure it does.” 

“I’ve caught hell before, I’ll catch it again.” Slight smile.

“It’s not just that.”

“I know.” 

You point at him, finding a few embers inside you still hot about it. “I didn’t put you in the middle. If that’s how it’s gonna be, I won’t stay."

“It won’t be. You’ve got my side.” He clears his throat, glances down, and when he faces you, it’s with the resolve of his whole mind. “If you’ll have it. I’d rather have you with me if all we got comin is trouble.”

“Mean it this time.”

“I promise.” 

He waits. Why’d he have to be so goddamn sweet. You reckon there are times in a life when you make a choice knowing it might be the end of you. If nothing is permanent, then maybe you last the duration together. Somehow you’ve never known anything more certain than you know it right now.

That stupid hat sags in the middle of the road between you like a flattened cake. Taking another step toward him, you pick it up thoughtfully, shake off the dust, wipe your nose on your sleeve, and place the hat on your head with a rueful smirk. 

“You rotten heathen."

Several expressions cross his face, of confusion, hesitation, wondering what the hell you’re doing, perhaps relief, perhaps a squint of derision.

“The Lorrrd smite thee,” you say, mimicking her disdainful preaching.

He snorts in spite of himself, and then laughs. It’s enough to light your heart on fire, and you would prolong that flash to the end of your days if you could, that picture of him, his eyes crinkling. 

So you take a bit of a chance, as long as things are being asked and given. You make yourself dead serious and drop the hat.

“You had better leave my innocence intact.” 

As the smile freezes on his face, you watch your hint take form, and he coughs and watches you, to be sure of what you’re saying, wondering if that’s really what you’re saying, and then his expression darkens as subtle and live as a finger laying on a trigger. You feel a clutch of fear in spite of yourself, the way his eyes narrow, his jaw sets. You have seen him stare men down and seen them caught off guard, and with that self-same glare aimed at you, when he growls Get over here, you have never been so immediately turned on. You reflexively take a step forward before you remember yourself.

“No.”

“I ain’t askin.”

“I won’t.” 

“Get over here. Don’t make me tell you again.”

“Not on your life.” 

“Then it’ll have to be on yours.”

He reaches for you and grabs your arm and practically hurls you up against the back of the coach, bullish breath through his flaring nose as he rips off your gun belt between you and lets it drop. He doesn’t even bother trying to undo the buttons of your shirt and tears it open, jerking you back into place when you stumble forward. You gasp at the thrilling violence of it as your cunt begins to drench. While he’s already wrecking your clothes, he rips your chemise down the middle, muttering an apology that you smack his cheek for. His eyes dart up to you, searing, and then he shoves you back against the coach. You’re soaked and panting by now. When he kisses your neck, his teeth graze there as if he is doing everything in his power not to bite down.

“What are you going to do?” you rasp.

“Shut the fuck up.”

Dear god you can’t get your breath and sag against the back of the coach. He unhooks your fly in two swift jerks, and as he kneels he hauls your pants down so fast the hooks scratch your thigh. He doesn’t apologize this time. You’re fully exposed in the daylight on the side of the road and he’s already got your boot off and one pant leg and he’s forcing your legs apart. You resist him just to provoke him, and whimper when he muscles himself between them. You’re so wet by now, it darkens a spot on the shoulder of his coat. He lifts your left leg higher over his shoulder, and your calf presses down on his bandolier; you hope to see a row of marks the next day shaped like shotgun shells.  

What he does then stuns you. He takes one last hellborn look up at you, already stunning in its own right, those fireblue eyes, before he leans into you and fully kisses your cunt. Your legs jerk in surprise but his body is locked between them.  His eyes close, brow furrowed, his hot tongue carving into your slit, tasting you like you are the food of the gods to him. 

Arthur! For one lightning-fast second you remember you might be on a road somewhere, entirely visible, and then you don’t know what the hell is happening. Your hands grasp around you, desperate to hold onto something, and you brace yourself on the ladder over your head. 

He kneels under you, licking, sucking your clit, unbalancing you with every forceful push of his mouth and chin; even the coarseness of his scruff is giving you sensations you have never thought existed, and you’re gasping, first in goddamned disbelief, then neck-loosening surrender.

His tongue enters you, a long savoring lap, a low sound from his mouth and you feel its heat through your very core, before he draws his tongue out of you and up. Your body jumps as he grazes your clit. Then he pulls back a moment, and he wipes his mouth and gazes at you coolly, knowing damn well what he’s doing, and his eyes darken again, like he is going to do this to you until he has had his fucking fill, and that promise alone makes you writhe. He sucks his middle and ring fingers down to the knuckle and slides them up through your sensitive slit as he puts his lips on you again.

You can’t speak, can’t think as he wholly takes you with his mouth and hand, though for a while you’re unsure if you're about to cry or come; it all seems to well up from the same source inside you. 

Sunlight blazes through your eyelids, painting your mind in watercolor, with all the free-fall feeling of a daring near-miss, heartbreaking relief, hope, mixed up with thick pleasure and this new intense, rising need, and the fury of his hold on you, the heat of his hunger. The deadened rumble of a train going past might as well be rolling thunder.

He’s kneading your ass as he eats your cunt with such ravenous intensity that you grab for the wheel, panting out in choking gasps, no idea what you’re saying. His fingers work in and out of you with a steadiness that suspends you on the impossible verge of your release, while his tongue steadily implores your clit for you to let go, as if you’re filled, about to spill, held back to the point of agony. Your supporting leg shakes and you accidentally knee him in the chest. He grunts, and you are met with a sharp spank, and when he hears your ruined moan, another, harder. 

Christ you can’t take much more. He unhooks your leg from his shoulder and rises chest to chest with you, kissing you passionately as he takes off his guns, undoes his fly, hitches your leg up, and he starts to take out his cock but you shove him back. The stunned objection on his face darkens to want as you turn around.

"Again." 

He swallows and recovers his voice. “Face the fuck away,” he growls. You’ve been on the whimpering verge of coming for a full minute. Even the rough touch of his fingers on your hips threatens to push you over.

He staggers you with a heavy smack, and another, and you can hardly breathe. Your slick is dripping down your inner thigh, both of you so goddamned overcome by the strange excitement of what’s happening that when he pushes his cock into you with a groan in your ear fuck you feel so good and begins to fuck you fiercely against the coach, neither of you can hold on very long, and suddenly you’re starting to keen and arch back, grabbing behind you for his neck as you come, wet and wrecked as he begins to stiffen into you, unable to stop or pull back from your grip as he holds you and your bodies jerk tight together, warmth erupting inside you, melting you, and you stand there panting, coming down, realizing.

He pulls heavily out of you with his arm still around your waist as he tucks himself away. His spend slips down your leg. He seems to want to do something for you, touching the bruise ripening on your backside the size of his hand, picking up a piece of fabric from one of the suitcases to help you wipe up the trail on your inner thigh. Supporting you while you get back into your trousers.

“Sweetheart, I didn’t mean -” He lightly pinches the corner of your ripped chemise, the buttons gone from your shirt. 

“It’s fine,” you say, about the shirt. About the rest, you don’t know what to think except you have this whirl of awestruck, nervous qualm in you, and you don’t know what to feel or do but need to kiss him then. 

He holds you tight to him. Damn you, you say into his lips, and he smiles and his forehead touches yours. 

“That okay?” 

“You better have meant all you said.” Your legs are a little weak, and he steadies you. 

“Only the good parts,” he says into your neck. 

“Me too.”

On the overlook far away from camp, he leans against the tree with you between his knees and breathes deep. The lavender air breezes cool on your sunburned arms and faces. Soon you’ll ride out to get Micah as ordered, and if the opportunity presents itself you might leave him dead there, too, for what he did last time, one of any number of ways you’ve imagined it occurring, but the point is that you’ll go together down the road like you meant to all along, no longer any stretch between you, wherever it leads.

 

 

 

Notes:

Thanks for reading! Comments/kudos/virtual shots of whiskey light up my whole fucking week x

Hope it's not awkward, after a somewhat salacious chapter, to thank bruisedambition for their amazing encouragement of this thing so far.🖤

In addition, this little sidesmut may have occurred before the next chapter.

And maybe this one too.

Chapter 5: The Fox

Summary:

How many weeks has it been?

How many weeks since an outlaw saved your life? Six? Eight?

Time passes so strangely up on that overlook in the fresh breeze of June, or is it July, only the weather changing day to day, the monotony of routine broken by the energy of a few heists. Among other things.

More importantly, how many weeks has it been since the train robbery? Since the stage? Three? Four? Calculations impossible to track, along with everything it all amounts to, a sum greater than what you are prepared to face.

A person will begin to let their guard down once they feel safe, and the gentle glide of monotonous, pretty days spills like unbroken water over river stones, rounding them, settling them

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

How many weeks has it been?

How many weeks since an outlaw saved your life? Six? Eight? 

Time passes so strangely up on that overlook in the fresh breeze of June, or is it July, only the weather changing day to day, the monotony of routine broken by the energy of a few heists. Among other things.

More importantly, how many weeks has it been since the train robbery? Since the stage? Three? Four? Calculations impossible to track, along with everything it all amounts to, a sum greater than what you are prepared to face.

A person will begin to let their guard down once they feel safe, and the gentle glide of monotonous, pretty days spills like unbroken water over river stones, rounding them, settling them. 

You wade up to your ankles in the river, down a ways from Arthur, where he is showing the little boy how to hold a fishing rod. There is a slight awkwardness in the way he demonstrates it, the boy standing hardly as tall as his gun belt, and he breaks down his instructions into the pieces such a little one can comprehend. Only the tones of his voice reach you. Teacherly, authoritative. He baits his hook for him, and crouches around him, holding the handle over the boy’s small hands to show him the motion and the force and the coordination to let the line out. He gets his line cast, and then lets the boy hold it alone while he steps back and baits his own, and as he does, he glances your way and shrugs, uncomfortable to feel observed doing this gentle thing.

While you wash your clothes and more than a few handkerchiefs and bandanas, soaping and scrubbing them against a rock, you wonder if this is how his father was, or if it’s how he thinks fathers are. Formal and instructive. Of the men in his life, Dutch and Hosea, was this how they regarded him when he was younger? What was he like, younger. Was he ever really a child. It’s hard to picture him in any other phase of himself, young, unsure, rambunctious. The suds flow away in curling trails downstream.

Across the road in the grass, a red fox kit is pouncing after a moth, springing up over the tops of the grass, a rusty lively exuberance and persistence that makes you smile. It bounds so high and haphazardly you think it must be playing, and count it significant that a wild thing would play so much, tantalized by something beyond its instinct to hunt. Not far away, two other kits tumble, and their mother watches, alert. 

Charmed, you rinse and wring out your laundry and start to hang it on the branches of a leaning tree on the banks when you are pricked by a sound or a kind of change in the air.

Two riders have stopped upriver, and Arthur’s whole being tenses up, immediate and fierce like you’ve never seen, not even when he’s about to shoot, and he’s scanning around, marking where you are, keeping Jack close behind him. 

You crouch and crawl back toward your revolver lying in the grass on the banks, but the men are out of reliable range, and there’s no clear shot you trust. You hold your exhale, trying to hear what is being said, watching Arthur keep himself in front of the boy, and how his hands claw up near his guns but loosen as he realizes there’s nothing he can do that would not endanger the boy.

The two men begin to close in slow, and your heart races. All the arrogance of appointed power in their postures, unable to recognize the real thing in front of them and everything he withholds.

He can’t keep his damn mouth shut, though, saying something that causes the two men to grip their guns tighter and stand ready. You mutter under your breath for him to shut up. And then you don’t know what the smaller of the two men says, but Arthur throws down the fishing rod and looks so ready that you prepare yourself to sprint into range. His fingers flex in the air, hovering inches from his grips, until the men mount up and ride away.

He’s as steady as his gun hand while he packs up their gear and hauls the boy up on the saddle, but you can see that he’s rattled when he rides past you, a cautious nod with a quick sweep of his eyes up and down the road to ask you to watch. To cover him, you search up the road with binoculars, and scan the edges of the bluffs around you. 

Thinking back, it was right about then you started to feel yourself watched, but you saw no one.

“You okay there?”

He lies beside you on the bedroll laid out on the smaller overlook, and he picks up your left hand and idly works the range of your fingers like a mechanism he’s figuring out as the distant rain clouds roll in from the west. For now, the air is hot and still, but the approaching turmoil is a sight to behold, dragging a dark shadow over the hills beneath.

You rock your head against his, your vague whirling thoughts interrupted but still there, building like fog.

“What is it?” He lightly cracks your knuckles one by one.

“Nothin.”

“Thought we was bein level with each other,” he says, a little sly but a little serious, cornering you with your own agreement.

He turns onto his side and props his head on his hand while he traces between the tiny flowers on your new shirt with his finger, especially over the knolls of your breasts, but losing himself in a thought, one that seems to be on his mind lately in shades of increasing preoccupation, as you watch the depths of his irises. An algae bloom of shapes and colors in them. The slowness of his blink, how the seriousness of his expression doesn’t break when he looks at you. 

You comb the hair back from his forehead with your fingers. His hand descends the path of buttons and rests below your navel, slipped halfway under the waist of your pants on the soft natural swell of your belly between your slightly jutting hips, and holds there, warm, as if to detect springwater underground or the vibration of an approaching danger. 

The problem is what would you tell him. If there was anything to tell. And not before he went off anywhere with his head distracted. And if you told him, what would his reaction be. If there was anything to tell him at all. 

“I mean it, nothing.”

“Got…nothin to do with -” he clears his throat, apparently realizing he’s not prepared to think about it either, “that stage a while back?”

Was it a while? What is a while? Lord, your mouth is dry all of a sudden.

“If I say I don’t know, I’m being honest.”

He sniffs, thinking out at the sky. He’s holding you perfectly still, stuck on a thought, or behind the wall of one.

“Do you…know when you’ll know?”

“Soon, I guess.”

He apparently notices he’s been pressing on you and lightens his hand. 

Beyond knowing that particular matter, neither of you can spare a thought for what it would mean. You stop yourself thinking of it, stuck on the idea that his reaction might be any different from your own, which you can’t predict, either. You had a scare once before, back when you knew the people who could help with such a thing. Came to naught, anyway, followed by a feeling of relief so extreme you had gotten yourself blind drunk in celebration and been sick for two days. That was years ago.

There is no way you can discern, in his hand on you or his expression, what he’s thinking. In fact the longer he stares at the pattern in your shirt, the more you worry. Just a kiss would reassure you of his mind. Just a sweep of his thumb on your stomach would put to rest the notions sweeping through yours. But over and over again. He doesn’t know the ways you can be reassured; you don’t know how to tell him, or what reassurance he needs too. How little you both know about each other. 

You wonder, though, how much he can guess your mind, as he pivots his head to glance at you, his brow lifted in asking, still. 

“You did good with the boy,” you say.

He seems relieved to have the subject changed. “He’s a good kid.”

“Were you a good kid?” As you ask it out loud, it’s a more intrusive question than you meant it to be. It sweeps up the traces of all his years, and pulls them back to the question on your minds, and you wish you hadn’t asked it. Of the outlaws you’ve known, the mere suggestion of their lives as children could get a few of them into a low mood for days. You’ve seen a man reduced to melancholy or violence just to pass by a place he remembered from decades ago, and you know well the kind of grief that rises up from behind to strike you senseless.

But he smiles, staring at nothing, and scratches his nose. “I was a rotten kid.”

“Couldn’t have been rotten.”

“Sure could. Ask Hosea.”

“Then what changed?”

He fidgets with a button on your shirt. “Not sure. Guess he and Dutch didn’t tell me to stop doin what I was doin. Just to be smart about it. So,” he says, with a smirk and a sideways glance to you, something self-effacing in it, or guilty. “Still rotten.”

"Well that's true.”

“What about little Nell Riordan, five-year-old terror?”  

You smile and push his hair out of his face, but lie there thinking up at the sky, still calm overhead despite the western clouds.

“Or was you all good till you fell in with some rotten kid?” He butts his head lightly into your shoulder and nips at your neck. That sweet pang through your stomach. You find yourself thumbing the scar on his chin when he looks up at you again.

“No, I was a terror all right. Mouthy. Thieving. Acting like a boy.”

“So you was always a troublemaker.”

“From the start.”

“Good.” 

That word stops you, how he says it, and what he means. Is it the same thing, to look at the scene in front of you and like it for what you see, or for what you see approaching? He seems to come out of the reverie of his mind, and picks up your right hand, feeling the callus where your trigger guard has rubbed your finger, and where the grip settles against the curve of your thumb, and possibly catches the strangeness of what he said or sees its effect on your face, the way he shifts, how he looks away.

“Anyway, you did good with Jack. Kept it calm,” you say.

“Weren’t much to do but get those thugs movin.” 

“You worried?”

“Dutch says he ain’t, but he is. Thinks he’s gonna stay put, call their bluff.”

“You disagree.”

He won’t directly say so, which is his answer for now.  

But then he turns your face to him with his finger. “If something ever happens, just get away safe. I’ll find you.” 

You aren’t about to argue, but you both know it’s more complicated than that.

He pulls you closer to him, his hand moving again to your stomach, which is reassurance enough for now, of what you don’t know, perhaps nothing more than his arms around you. Gradually, his hand moves lower to touch you where he wants to be, and his lips meet yours and you roll into his touch, and for a while before the rain moves in he can make you forget future things. 

That night, though, while the storm rages outside, as you both make a bed in the back of the wagon, neither of you can get certain thoughts out of your minds.

He pauses in the middle of kissing your neck. His head falls back.

“What’s the matter?” you whisper, though you’re just as distracted as he seems to be.

“Sorry, Red.” He pushes one hand up between you and lightly cups and kisses your breast. But it gets neither of you anywhere, and you turn over, pulling his hand with you. 

Dutifully, perhaps gratefully, he relaxes, his breath on your skin, his stomach warm against your back. “Want me to…”

“No. It’s okay. I think we’re just tired.” You’re not tired; you both fell asleep on the overlook and had to run back to camp when the storm started. But he agrees, and at length turns over, and both of you lie back to back, wide awake through the thunder in the rain-fresh air. He does reach back to you and take your hand at some point, though, and after that you fall asleep at last.

It’s rare, the times you venture into town, but Arthur is meeting John, and you tell him you have supplies to get, so you ride together in the heat of the afternoon. Apollo feels your restlessness, acting a damn fool and snorting. Arthur, too, is getting on your case about leaving your gun behind, but it’s hot enough without another several pounds on your hips and a leather belt sweating you. As you part at the entrance to town, you pull your hat down. He heads to the stock yards, and you into the street. A hot, breezeless, overcast day. Things catch you unawares on days like that.

And there’s a warm spitting rain when you emerge from the doctor’s office and stop cold on the boardwalk. Across the thoroughfare, John Marston is waiting outside the gunsmith, and he sees you at the same time you see him. He straightens in interest, or suspicion, his head tilting the other way while you swing your satchel on your shoulder, and you’re about to step off the boardwalk and ask him directly what is so keen on his damn mind when you’re stopped by a shout out in the street.

“Miss Scarlett!”

Sharp and piercing as an arrow.

And there are times when you have frozen from fear and had to will yourself to move, and there are times when your hands work of their own accord, and in this case your hand is where your gun would be as you grab a handful of air.

In your field of view, Marston’s blank confusion clouds your left, just as the door of the gunsmith opens and Arthur emerges with a long gun on his back and stops to see you too, as if he is the embodiment of your dead-stopped heart. 

In the middle of the thoroughfare, a tall, barrel-chested man in a plaid suit and a bowler is striding toward you, not minding the mud on his fine spats, and throws his arms around you as they both watch.

“What in hellfire are you doing in Valentine, Scar?” He holds you back at arm’s length. Black mustache as well-carved as ever. Deep eyes always seeing what’s plain in front of him but his broad mouth too quick to speak before he knows what’s clever. 

“Frank Livesey, imagine the odds.” You force a smile, feeling the collision of what must be twenty pairs of eyes on you.

“Thought I heard you’d gone west, far west.”

“That was the plan.” 

Arthur and John are walking slowly to their horses, both listening but Arthur especially, and you know he is because Georgia is not ten feet from you and he just stands at the saddle like he’s got some kind of a knot to undo.

“You know how it goes, little detours.” You shrug and try to make your voice as lighthearted as you can. In a way, you hate to be cold to Frank, because in his face you see how he senses it and is near to being crushed by it, but it can’t be helped. He should be used to it by now, the reactions he gets from people, being as indelicate as he is, standing six-five, outweighing most men, and in the way he dresses and in acts in general, discreet as a spotlight.

“Well are you at the hotel? Can I take you to dinner and catch up? Must be almost three years now.” 

Arthur is listening more intently, and slowly sliding the new rifle in his saddle holster as if he’ll be getting it out again soon.

You’ve always had to lay this man’s boisterous heart down tender; you tell him any other time, but if he’s in town a while, you’ll catch up soon. You scan the gunsmith, the law office, the spaces between the buildings, the alley by the saloon. Under your breath you tell him you’re keeping obscure, and ask him not to say anything in town, although the damage is done. If John and Arthur heard him call your name, then others surely heard. 

By the time Frank is nodding and understanding and doffing his hat to you as if he were a stranger, Arthur is gone. Then in the wide quiet street it feels like everyone is acting too casual, leaning, just watching from their posts, standing out of the rain, spitting. Eyes sliding side to side, meeting, low voices saying only what needs to be said, in that strange laconic way of the folk in the Plains. You walk the few paces to Apollo, figuring your best heading out of town is to ride out on the road along the back of the saloon. All the windows in the buildings are dark and dilated, the eyes beyond them surely watching where you go.

It goes like this through your head on the ride: You will collect your hidden effects. You could ride east a while. As Arthur said, he will find you. You needn’t do more than find a good place to hide out. You can explain everything later. You shake as if you are about to break apart.

You ride past Charles on watch, forcing yourself not to hurry, and let Apollo graze himself full on a persimmon bush while you walk quickly through the meadow toward the burned-out town when a sharp buzzing sound stirs in your path. The smell, as you approach, while not strong yet, is unmistakable.

The red fox mother. Fur matted with blood and already swarming with blowflies. Mouth open as she took her final pained breaths. There is a crescent-shaped wound on her abdomen, and you see the path she crawled away from the road to die here. 

Poor thing. You glance around for her kits.

And suddenly a chill runs up your spine. 

The indefinite but certain sense that you are being watched. 

With every shred of calm you can muster, you move on, acting as if that mere discovery on your casual walk did not affect you or provoke your sudden alarm, and you continue with unhurried purpose toward the river.

You spend a while picking burdock root. Enough for what a person might need, should they be needing burdock. Enough that you would have reason to be down there, picking it at all. Without your gun, idiot without your gun, there is nothing you can do, apart from looking incapable, to make yourself less of a target.

You smell rain in the early evening air and try not to appear to listen around you for any sign. You do not dare glance around more than a person might to appreciate a fine perfectly still evening. You do not dare go near that burned-out town.

You hold your hand near a butterfly, as if enchanted by its fleeting airborne fits when really it shows you the feeling in your chest. 

Then you start to walk back toward Apollo, your mind seemingly lost in thoughts of simple things, up the river road, and that’s when you hear the hooves.

One horse. 

Without checking behind you, you step to the side to let the stranger pass, your heart pounding, but the horse slows too. The rider silent. Hooves dragging on the rocky ground. Saddle creaking.

If Charles can see you, will he help? If you so much as walk up the path to the camp, will you have betrayed everyone?

The horse’s teeth clack as it mouths the bit. Its tail swishes. Stretch of leather. The unconcealed clearing of a throat.

If you can surprise him, you might be able to unseat him. There is yarrow growing at the side of the road, and you casually bend down to pick some.

And the rider passes.

Continues down the road. 

But you are shaking, and once he is out of sight you sit on the ground, hardly able to feel your legs. Beside you on the road lies a green bandana, knotted around a coin, dropped by the rider gone.

Shot up the whole damn town. He hadn’t planned on it going that way, but certainly felt like it once the gunfire started and Marston had to crow to him about having told his whole goddamn future so specific even her name wasn’t what he thought it was; the extent to which he knew her was that much a lie. Taking fire from Cornwall's guns pushed him far enough; he would have words with Dutch later on the subject of getting so sloppy they were standing in the middle of the thoroughfare paying for it. But taking it from John, too far.

“I shoulda let them shoot you, Marston.” With a cringe of regret, he picked off the gunman atop the saloon, aiming for his shoulder, and he fell onto the rear balcony; he’d recognized him, and generally liked him, and hoped he’d come out okay.

“Eh, you don’t mean it. You need me more than ever. Better start bein nicer to me once in awhile.” John tagged the ones by the bank, and when Arthur turned, the deputies coming around the corner of the sheriff’s office got themselves outgunned, and he got at least two before they edged back into cover behind the building.

When the barber came around from the back of the saloon with a shotgun rattling in his hands, Arthur just shook his head at him and motioned to get behind the building, before yelling back at John. “You got half the story and no idea what you’re talkin about, I ain’t bein shit to you.”

“Tell me that again nine months from now.”

“You two get your eyes on the street or you’ll get us all killed.” Dutch aimed steady and wasted no bullets, and strangely no longer looked him straight in the face.

By the time Strauss was moaning about his turned ankle or whatever his problem was, Arthur was about ready to throw him at John and let them rescue themselves, but Dutch practically hauled them all on their horses. The whole ride back, between the few bullets buzzing past, John kept it up. As if he never had such a draw on him and never would again.

“For all you know she could be law. Hosea said she’s run bounties.”

“Mind your own business, you asshole.”

“I’m doin you the favor you never did me.”

“The only favor I want is don’t talk to me, not another goddamn word.” He had turned and fired on the last one pursuing, who must have been half crazed to keep going after them; he felt half guilty shooting him; would have let him go if the bastard had just stopped firing and turned around. 

Back at camp, he drags John off Old Boy straight to the ground and hauls him across the dirt before he gives him one solid punch to the face, and stands there flexing his hand while John holds his cheek and acts the victim, sitting there on the ground.

“Well fuck you if you won’t hear it from me. Go ask her. See if she’ll tell you one true thing to your face, you idiot.”

But she isn’t there. Not in his tent, not the girls’. Just her gun belt on her cot, which stops him short, trying to recall her face as she'd stood outside the doctor's office talking to the suit, and was she guilty or in fact scared, and had he missed it by thinking of himself, and he's quietly losing control as he starts to head out of camp with his carbine in hand figuring he would be crazy to search for her back toward Valentine, and which he is on his way to do when Dutch steps in front of him and grasps Georgia's bridle.

“You’re heading out with Charles, Arthur.”

“Just gotta see about somethin first.” 

Dutch stares at him, eagle-eyed. “I’ve never needed you more than I need you now.”

The heat in his chest feels like he’s being wrenched apart, and he can’t think straight.

“Arthur, I am asking you to do what you are best at. No hard feelings, the past few weeks. I understand, I really do. But when it counts, that’s when I need you.” He steps closer, looking up at him with that dark weight behind his words. “Eighteen people, son.”

But when he rides out to the road and sees her horse standing alone, he pulls back. Charles slows up beside him.

“I saw her go down the hill,” he says, low. “Don’t know where.”

“When.”

“Not long before you got here. Go, my friend. I’ll scout ahead at the creek. You can meet me later.”

He takes off his hat and wipes the sweat from his face with his sleeve. No one around them, watching. “You sure?”

The first faint pops of gunfire snap their attention to the bottom of the hill, and Georgia dances, tight and skittish. 

“I'll meet you. Won’t be long.” Then he swings Georgia around, and she charges under him.

They’re shouting for you. “Scar-lett. Come on out sugar. Can’t hide forever.”

One asks if you might be dead.

“Well it’s your notion, why don’t you check.”

They laugh when he hesitates. 

You search around you for anything - a rock, a sturdy stick - to use, and there’s nothing suitable. You figure you could get your hands on his weapon, and the trees nearby can hide you if you’re fast enough.

He comes down, losing footing on scree, trying to appear intimidating in that proud green bandana they all wear, with his gun held out in a way that gives you a little more confidence. Waiting, holding your breath, you will yourself to hold out until he’s close, the others less apt to shoot directly toward him, and so when he is next to you, you jump up, snatch his revolver hand, and chop your fist down on the inside of his elbow. He’s nothing but a reflex as he shoots himself under the jaw. You grab his gun and race for the trees. Their gunfire follows you a second later. Bark bursts from the branch of one dead tree as you fly past, bruising your shoulders on their iron trunks. 

On the other edge you slide down the low bluff, slipping at the bottom and falling flat on your stomach. It knocks the wind out of you and you curl up on your side gasping for air. As soon as you can move, you stumble up to your feet and sprint. The meadow seems twice as long as it ever did before, and you go hard toward the river, slide down the embankment and crawl along it, trying to calm your heaving breath. The cylinder of the gun shows four rounds like a sinister broken smile.

They’re spreading out, shouting for you. You fucking bitch. You cunt. No use listening to all the things they call you, what they’ll do when they get you. You’ve heard it all before. 

The bitter smell of hash smoke catches you off guard, and you jump in panic to see Micah sitting against the same embankment not 15 feet away. He laughs quietly seeing you, realizing your predicament, which is now the same as his, being interrupted by this sudden conflict in the course of his leisure. He pinches his smoke and drags on it delicately, probably knowing full-well how it will draw them to you. 

“You got blood on your face, angel,” he says, barely a whisper, and you glare at him to keep quiet.

“O’Driscolls,” you mouth. 

He raises his eyebrows in mock surprise, and smiles lazily out at the river as if this whole thing will pass over his head and leave him untouched. 

“Lead?” You point at your chambers.

He eyes that rusty Cattleman and shakes his head, gesturing carelessly to his twin double-actions. “Don’t got your size, sweetheart.”

You point emphatically at his guns.

“Not a chance.” He seems mildly interested in what’s going on around him.

The day you robbed the coach with him and Arthur, he had watched you with similar bemusement, after he dragged you out of the water by your collar as you gasped for air and vomited a huge mouthful of water. When a bullet pecked the water near you, and then another, you were hauled sideways beside his legs sloshing through the river, and flung up against a boulder.

“Can you shoot, little girl, or you just like to watch?”

Still coughing, you shook the water off your revolver, wiped your wet hair out of your face, and started aiming.

On the downstream side of the ford, Arthur was checking over his shoulder at you between shots, and you yelled at him to get the hell down; you were fine. Beside you, Micah’s deep, smoky chuckle.

“You ain’t what I expected for that ol cowpoke -” and then he whooped when you tagged one O’Driscoll in the ear and he fell straight sideways dead. 

“You ain’t what I expected either.” Without a rifle, and still dragging air, you steadied the butt of your grip on the boulder and followed one of them with your sights down the hill before you picked him off.

“You had someone younger in mind, honey? Spend a lot of time thinkin about it?” He was a sharp but erratic shot, moving around the upriver side of the boulder, crouched and chambering rounds like a machine. Unencumbered by any need to conserve bullets or care about his targets. You have known a few men like him. Somehow they tend to enjoy you.

“Just always a surprise, to see any man pale as death still walkin.” You crouched back and patted around for your satchel and saw it underwater several feet away, exposed. “Fuck.”

“Aww, you spent already?”

“If you don’t have .45s, shut up and cover me.”

He didn’t then, and doesn’t now, and is disinclined to offer assistance. He would, however, be very happy for you to ask, and maybe beg a little first as he reclines against the embankment with his legs stretched out in front of him.

The O’Driscoll boys reach the road and the ground scrapes under their boots.

“I need your help.” You make your eyes as big and innocent as you can, and he sees right through you, of course, and you don’t give a shit. You’re both in this together.

“What’ll it cost you, honey?”

“Negotiate later.”

“I get less generous later.”

“I get less pleasant.”

His dirty smile takes you in. “I’m countin on it.” He holds up his left gun and looks you straight in the eye, more serious than you thought he was capable of being. “This is comin back to me pristine.” He makes you crawl to him for it and gives you a sweaty handful of .38s.

“Whatever you say.”

The grass dampens their bootsteps as they get closer. “You sure it were her?”

“Sure as shite.”

Micah points at you with a scandalized You? mouthed your way

Your first burst of gunfire gives you both enough of a lead to get to better cover behind a fallen tree near the ford. You throw away the spent Cattleman, and you’re reloading Micah’s gun when Arthur calls to you across the river.

“Give you to three, got it?”

“Aw, ain’t that sweet, just like old times. You come to rescue me, Morgan?” Micah croons, slouched low behind the log and slipping bullets in the cylinder like he’s lightly snapping his fingers.

“I’m leavin you for a decoy, Micah.”

You cross the river under his cover, just a few bursts of fire, and you crouch by him, wet, breathless, and desperately searching around you. They could be waiting anywhere. Any number of them. Your throat is so tight your breath is harmonic.

Arthur is reloading and swearing down at his hands. Flecks of rain appear on his shirt.

“Arthur, I have to tell you something.”

“Not now.”

“No I really do.”

“Later, I said,” he snaps at you.

You pick up his repeater and load it too, not knowing what else you can do. 

“On my mark, we’re gettin on Georgia back there and ridin. You in front.”

The sky opens up, sheeting rain so fast the road begins to flood.

Micah is across the ford, loading up, rainwater dripping off his brim. “You hightailin with my gun, honey?”

Arthur grips your forearm when you move to run across the landing. “She’ll get it to you later.”

“If you’re leavin me alone with these bastards, I’ll have it now.”

“No one’s askin you to stay.” Arthur snatches it from you and throws it sideways to him, and although it lands harmlessly in the grass near his thigh, Micah stares at him with real hate in his eyes, so fiery you think for a second he’s about to raise his gun while Arthur’s back is turned, but the gunfire starts up again. From your side of the river this time.

Micah is as unperturbed as if he were swatting flies on a porch, and allows Arthur to toss his carbine to him, though none of you is stupid enough to call that a peace offering for the sin of the other gun.

At a break in the fire, he signals to Micah, and shoves you up the road toward Georgia. She gets up under your added weight like it’s nothing to her. 

“Found a place to lie low, ain’t far,” he says over the noise of the downpour. You can’t tell his temper from the tone of his voice, but his body rocks into you with each stride and his arm holds you tight. 

He leads her down the shore a ways and then peels off to the right, and you come to a small stilted shack on the beach with a crooked dock extending into the lake. When you’re close, he vaults off Georgia and feels around in his satchel until he finds a key and unlocks the padlock on the door.

“You stole a cabin?”

“I bought it a new lock. The last one broke.” He holds the door open for you but stays outside. “Stay put, you hear? I’ll be back when I can.”

“Arthur -”

He’s already up on Georgia again and heading back to the road.

You close yourself inside, dark in the evening light, but dry, and you’re so exhausted from the last two hours of your life that you can only sink onto the bed in the corner and hold your knees to your chest and wait out the time, warding off all the fury in your mind.

 


 

You wake in the dark, damp and shivering. No sign of him there. Stepping carefully, you feel your way back to the door, and manage to light the kerosene lantern hanging beside it. 

It’s a strange little shack. At first glance, there’s not much to the place. A hearth, a bed, a table. On a closer look, you see things that make no sense for its plainness outside. A contraption rigged to open and close all the interior shutters at once with the turn of a crank, though broken now in most places. A spout over the sink and a pump handle. A small boiler system and pipes along the baseboards. And when you hang the kerosene lantern from the hook in the center of the room, its weight pulls down on a network of wires overhead of mirrors that turn toward it, amplifying that one flame into more than a dozen that spread a watery light throughout the room. A tufted chair faces the hearth, burrowed into in winter by rodents, no doubt. A few books line the wall by the door, dreary subjects like science, history, one book of poetry. A massive buffalo rug spreads out in front of the hearth. Near the foot of the bed, a small tarnished high-back tub with what looks like a large oil lamp underneath. 

After you get a fire going, you search around, starving, and the biscuits in your satchel are damp, but you eat them anyway as you explore the cupboards. There’s little but some rust-rimmed cans and a dusty bottle of wine, which you pull out like a blessing. A corkscrew is in the drawer, and you pour yourself a large cupful, thinking if he returns you would rather be half drunk for what you’ll have to say.

The box you got from the doctor is mostly dry, and you change your garments and stow away the discarded one.

After unknowable minutes or hours, you hear a rider approaching, you hold your breath until you recognize his low voice talking to Georgia, and then you pour another cupful and sit in bed against the wall, unsure of what to do with yourself while he tends to her.

He’s soaked through from the rain, and cold, and at first just grateful there’s a fire, getting shed of his gear as fast as he can. The way he regards you, sideways, you can’t figure out his state of mind at all. 

“Arthur, I -”

“I need a minute.” There’s irritation in his voice, or maybe a shiver. He peels off his coat and sets it out by the fire, and hangs his hat, streaming rainwater, on a peg by the door. You drink and sit with the cup in your lap, struggling to know how to begin, watching as he steps out of his boots, shrugs out of his suspenders, unbuttons his shirt, and in every movement you can see he’s tired; his hands are tired from reining, his back is sore from the ride, wherever he’s gone and back. He peels off his shirt, his jeans, his union suit, all drenched, and hangs them on the chair, turning it close to the heat, and sits in front of the fire to get warm, an inscrutable expression on his face.

“What a goddamn mess,” he rasps. 

You’re afraid to speak, and swallow another huge mouthful.

“We can’t go back to the overlook.”

“Because of the fight by the river?” 

“No.” He coughs, pulls a dusty wool blanket from the chair and wraps it around himself. “In Valentine. Can’t go back there, either.”

He stares miles away through the fire, and you reckon it’s better not to ask why.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine.” He sniffs, wipes his face still wet with rain. “Whole goddamned family of immigrants, had to get them on their way.”

“Come over here.” 

You move aside on the bed, and he reclines stiffly next to you. He sees your cup of wine, and you offer it to him, but he blanches with the taste and hands it back, clearing his throat.

“What happened,” you ask, venturing to touch his arm if he’ll allow your touch at all.

His words are halting, all retracing the broken path of his thoughts. “The father got picked up by some awful lot, almost got himself killed - they would’ve been eaten alive in that country without him. Might still be. Now we’re in the middle of it. No place for good men. Guess it suits us just fine then.”

You pull him over to lean on you and set your cup aside, and he settles into you, stretching his sore neck. The way his fingers ruminate over your hand, you figure what happened bothers him more than he’ll let on. 

“But a good man found them.”

He huffs. “Charles, not me.”

“You helped.”

He looks out at the room like he would rather hide right now than hear it.

The longer he’s silent, the worse it’s all going to get and you figure you’d better just be out with it, feeling lightheaded already. “I have to tell you, what you heard in town, that man -”

“Be straight with me on somethin right now.”

You blink at the interruption. It’s more nervous than harsh, and his thumb is busy on your arm.

“Fire away.” Your heart thumps like a sudden knock on the door. 

He seems to have trouble working out how to say what he means to say, as if he polished it in his mind over the miles he rode and then lost it. “I don’t…I don’t care about your name. I mean about it bein different. Or that feller in the street, long as he ain’t a problem. Is he a problem?” He glances back at you.

“Not exactly -” 

His hand on yours stops. “So right now…You gonna tell me what’s the matter or do I have to guess?”

“About what?” You take a long drink.

He glances down at his hands, then sits up against the bed frame and looks at you like he’s prepared. “You goin to the doctor yesterday.”

Oh jesus. You rub your forehead and would really rather not… “What we talked about, the other day, but Arthur -”

“Ain’t a time to be coy, Nell.”

“It wasn't..." You close your eyes, and sigh. "I’d tell you if it was.” And hate to even say that much, your face burning. “Doctor’s the only place to get supplies to manage.”

You don’t want to look at him, but you peek anyway.

He’s a shade pale, and runs his hands up his face and back through his hair, blinking wide, breathing in. When his right hand falls on your left, he grasps it, lets his head thunk back against the bed frame, and his mouth twitches in a brief smile.

“Be lyin to say my mind wasn’t eased.” His voice breaks a little higher, and he blinks with the wonder of near-misses.

“God me too.” Several ways. 

It takes him a moment, shaking his head, before he leans into you, and when he kisses you his breath shudders with relief, and christ alive you’re breathless with it too as his mouth opens with yours. His hand touches your cheek and brushes your hair back, cups your cheek again, and his fingers on your neck ask you for more. 

You set the cup aside and hold his face, and he pulls you up to sit on top of him, hands massaging your thighs, your hips, his thumbs pressing gently over the crest of your pelvis, the softness of your stomach there.

He undoes the first button of your pants.

“Hoa-there.” You sit up, clenching his fingers tight. With his head back on the pillow, his expression is a puzzling mix of relieved and newly bold, asking and not asking all at once.

You slowly shake your head.

“Why not?”

Is he stupid? You have to study him, checking for signs of idiocy or game-playing. “Do I really have to tell you?”

“No.” 

He reaches over to the side table for the bottle of wine and you can smell the rain in his hair and the faint musk of his sweat. You feel your own interior swell with all you want and can’t have. God shares no parts with you if he exists at all, because he would never have created this barbarous tease for himself. Arthur fills your cup and reaches over again to set the bottle back. 

“Why not.” He hands the cup to you.

His voice as he says it stirs your whole damn cunt. Not a question. Not a thought you’ve ever considered in your life. Well, until you met him. Then, you considered it once, last time, before you so much as knew him, and shut it out of your mind before you could go too far. 

You drink. “No."  

“Would it hurt you?”

You’re not sure. “Yes.” You drink. “I’m not sure.”

“Could find out.”

Goddammit. That mischievous tone of voice gets you every fucking time. You face the wall behind him. “No.”

“If you’re -” clears his throat - “embarrassed -” His hands run up your thighs, god just the right pressure on your thighs.

“No, no.” Yes. Fucking hell.

“You wanna know what I think?”

Not if it’s what you think he’s thinking. 

“Somethin Karen said one time.” His cheeks redden slightly, but he doesn’t waver. 

“Arthur -”

“It ain’t right to live a whole week like you mean to disappear.”

The rain drums harder on the roof.

“That’s how you looked yesterday. And now.” He’s still facing up at you, but not demanding that you look back. Like he does with your horse, you realize, when Apollo gets spooked and he’s showing him he’s not a threat.

It’s been a hell of a stretch of hours, and you are not going to cry about this, damn the gods of all creation for the pain in your throat. You take another drink. Some of it spills out the side and you quickly swipe it away.

“You just want to get off. If you want my mouth, I’ll do it.”

“I’ll make as if you didn’t say that.” 

You feel something in common with birds flying into windowpanes. 

“It’s disgusting,” you say. 

“Just a little blood, right?” 

“Well…”

“So what.” He takes the cup from you and sets it aside.

“I’m tired.”

“If you get out of this bed tomorrow I’ll tie you down.”

You don’t tell him how you’ve wanted something like that for a while now. 

“You worried I’ll -” He scratches his jaw in thought. “Think different of you?”

“Yes, goddammit.”

“Well, don’t be.”

By now you’re breathing a little faster, because his hand has started to move up your stomach, the roundness there, and up to your sensitive breasts, and when you wince, he touches you more gently. He’s unbuttoning your shirt, untying your chemise one-handed. He frees you of it and sits up into you as he lightly nudges you with his nose and licks your nipple so light your arms prickle with goosebumps. And again as it peaks. His tongue tempting you stronger this time. Blood and wine rush to your head. You wonder if this slow attention alone could bring you to your high as he laps you again and puts his lips on you, his hand cupping your other breast, his thumb stroking you so tenderly he could be handling silk. 

When he gets a sigh out of you, you feel him smile against your tingling skin. He runs his hand up your side and turns you onto your back so he can lean over you at a better angle. He trails kisses down your sternum and stomach, and you just won’t let him touch the waistband of your trousers, uncomfortably damp though they still are, so he moves back up, kissing the freckle near your bellybutton that he thinks resembles a star, and presses his lips in a trail up between your breasts to your neck. His hand is on your thigh moving higher by inches, and you close your legs, pinning his hand in place. He takes it away. For long minutes, he attends to your breasts with his mouth, soft lips on your soft skin, until you are so turned on with your fingers in his hair you are on the verge of tears. Then he appraises you for a moment, and seeing you tired and fighting yourself slows down, easing you back, until it’s just the rain outside raging anymore.

He kisses you casually on the cheek and climbs over you out of bed, wrapping the blanket around his waist. From his bag, he pulls out a clean shirt and hands it to you, then keeps himself busy, and makes a point of not facing you. He arranges his damp clothes better to dry. Puts more wood on the fire.  He is at the bookshelf across the room looking busy as a naked scholar as you get undressed and change your garments under his shirt, stowing the old ones well under the bed with the other to take care of in the morning, and you vault back into bed before he can turn around. You face the wall, huddling under the quilt to ward off the chill.

The rain on the roof makes a soft constant shirr. He turns down the lantern and gets into bed behind you, feels you shivering, and moves himself close to you, wrapping a heavy arm over you, forearm between your breasts, his hand finding yours, his forehead against the back of your head. You make a barrier of quilt between you, and he tucks you in even tighter. 

“Don’t go disappearin, Nell Scarlett Riordan Whoever. I like you too well.”

“Oh shut up before you get sweet.”

“Maybe you’ll let me say it if I tie you up.”

You can never win like this.

His thumb strokes your cheek a couple of times, runs across your trembling lower lip. You kiss his hand, and sleep soon after.

Some time in the night, he wakes and sees her sleeping, picks her arm up from his, laying it on her stomach. He gets up and feeds another log to the dying fire and sits on the buffalo rug in front of it watching the flames claw the bark and peel it back in scrolls. Cinderous thoughts on his mind, just the same, of where things come from and what happens to them where they go. Leaving traces and pieces and scattering themselves all to ash someday. And the business in the middle, what a man is supposed to do with his life, knowing nothin but what he’s got, and tryin to do better when he’s doin worse all the time. She stirs, awake, and catches him lost in old thoughts come to light. They never burn out no matter how long he tries to let them.

Some time in the night, the fox in your dream lies dead covered in flies, and you startle fully awake, your hand on the imprint of his body in the mattress. For that one heartbeat, you fear him gone. He’s sitting in front of the fire on the buffalo rug, watching it, and you don’t know if he saw that look on you, or if he heard you wake at all. You turn over without making a sound and sleep restlessly, full of the not-knowing you always get into, as if you wouldn’t know where to land on the earth if you had all of it to choose from. 

 

 

 

Notes:

(Don't worry, Apollo is within whistling distance.)

 

Okay, friends, please bear with me… a little scene might have written itself in that cabin (I take no responsibility). And I gather, from Reddit, which is the definitive source of well-considered opinions on things, along with the generally low incidence of related tags in this fandom as far as I’ve seen, that the content may be somewhat objectionable to some people, which I can dig. Or it might *definitely* not be a context in which you want to see Arthur. I totally get it. So I took it out.

That being said, I have feelings about it, and it’s hard to read the room here. So…I've posted it here as a little under-the-radar DLC one-shot*. I personally think there’s nothing in it that’s beyond the pale, and that there's something sweet and tender about these two dorks in that scene, but I’m not easily bothered in general. Just, you know, if you’re not into that, definitely don’t go there and read it.

But, also, I feel pretty strongly that no one should be made to feel unsexy one week out of every month (even if they do, because ugh). So here’s something for your kinky sweet tooth, if you want it, cuz I feel like Arthur would be pretty cool, and even into it and goddamn dote on your regal ass. And maybe I spent too much time on r/askmen looking into it and this is my overblown reaction. Not a speech I ever intended to make for one second, but here we are, THANKS, characters I apparently have no control over…I’m going to go get some ice cream, peace!

*Meanwhile, to one side, everyone’s like, “It’s actually no big deal, stop acting like you’re the first,” and geez I know; this is how I make every decision. ;)

Finally, for the sake of managing expectations, that entirely avoidable scene will be the extent of bodily functions involved in this fic. Sorry/not to worry. Glad we had this talk! X

Chapter 6: The Locket

Summary:

Summary: The gang is safe at Clemens Point, for the time-being. Hosea sends you and Arthur to a party in St. Denis, where you are definitely on your best behavior. Arthur gets a little drunk. So do you. And you didn’t bring your walkin boots. Been a rough and heavy couple of weeks for you two - here, have a rum drink.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

He's watching you struggle with your gloves in the carriage, and then you drop the locket and lose it in your skirts somewhere. Your hands are clumsy from the champagne and the heat.

“You are beautiful,” he says, drawling his words.

“Charmer. You can let up the act now.” You give up searching for the locket and drop your hands into the tempest of navy taffeta.

“I have.”

You give him a little glare. 

“Alright fine.” He leans back with his hands up and lets them fall loosely in his lap. His collar is undone - he ripped the tie off as soon as he got in the carriage - and his waistcoat hangs open, and he’s slouching there, legs spread wide, with his head rocking on the back of the velvet seat, watching you like he's lost in his private thoughts. His shoe slides on the floor until it meets yours, and he gets that gleam in his eyes, the one that usually leads to things. You shake your head. 

“You’re drunk." 

“So are you.” 

You sigh at him and start hunting for the locket again, trying to stand up to feel around beneath you while the carriage rattles on the city streets.

“You have to admit the coach rockin has a certain effect,” he says, grinning.

“A certain one,” you mutter. The bodice on this dress is indestructible and unyielding. In some positions you can’t even breathe. Another bump in the road sits you back down.

“You mean to tell me you don’t have the slightest -” He slides down to the floor of the coach and between your knees amid the full volume of your skirts.

“Not when you call me ‘beautiful,’ talkin all sweet like that, what the hell, Arthur?”

“Fine, I take it back then. You are ugly as sin, Mrs. Kilgore.”

You swat his shoulder.

“Ugly as a bull’s ballsack. I watch flowers wilt when you pass by.”

“Shut up.”

“A face like…I can't even look at your face.” He holds his hand up to obscure you, thinking he's real funny right now. 

You sneer and then stare out the window to avoid him, because he’s hard to deny when he’s facing up at you, eyes on you like he knows something he won't tell, talking all sly. 

“I mean it, would you please put this thing back on before I get sick.” He holds up the party mask and you snatch it from him and throw it out the window.

You cross your arms, and he is undeterred.

“And them clothes?” He lifts the taffeta up with a disgusted pinch. “Whose grave did you have to dig up to get tatters like that? Or did you rise from your own grave for the occasion, havin died of ugliness?”

“Aw fuck you.” 

“You first.” He stares you down, the devil, and you break.

“What’s gotten into you?” 

“About a bottle of rum and a pretty night out with an ugly girl.” His hands are sliding up and down your calves under your skirts like he isn't even thinking about it, he just can't keep his hands away from your skin. 

“Well you’re no picture of beauty yourself.” Which is a lie if you ever told one. The moment he had entered the room suited up like that, hair cut, hands in his pockets, you would have taken it right off him had Hosea and Trelawney not been there chiding him to put the party mask on.

“What're you talkin about, I’m a regular Adonis, sweetheart. Wouldn’t be caught dead with you under normal circumstances. This is really charity, this here. They’re gonna put my name on a plaque.”

His hand is on your foot, your shoe now lost somewhere in all the fabric, his thumb carving up your sore arch, the bones of your ankle.

“It’s a good thing you got all them skirts on to hide your feet.”

He smirks and you slump against the seat forcing yourself not to smile.

“I been meanin to ask, was your mother a gator? Judging by your feet I mean.”

You shake your head at him not to push you any further, and then he lifts your (quite nice) foot and sticks your big toe in his mouth and you shriek. He smiles with his teeth still lightly biting it, and lets it go. 

“Is everything alright there, miss?” the driver calls down, and the carriage slows.

“Yes, yes sir - everything’s fine.” You glare when Arthur goes for it again.

“Jesus, Arthur.” You mash your foot into his face and he laughs, writhing out of the way, holding you by the calf now, kissing your arch, and up to the hollow behind your ankle.

“And your legs. I plain hate em,” he says, voice smothered as he lightly bites your calf. “Sure would hate to spend my wakin days and nights between em.” 

“You be careful, old man.”

“Hey now, doting on an ogre like yourself is hard work, sweetheart. Ages a man sooner than natural.”

He ducks under your skirts now, fighting crinoline and tulle and cream silk, and when the carriage goes over a pothole in the street he loses his balance and shouts when he hits something.

You sigh, searching for him under all those layers. “You okay there, Adonis?”

He’s shaking out his hand, rubbing his elbow as he rises up to your lap, hair in his face. He braces himself with hands on either side of your hips and gazes at the brimming ledge of your breasts.

“You should really cover those up. Downright offensive.” 

You scowl to keep from laughing. 

“Not at all the prettiest things I ever seen,” he says, before the carriage bumps and shoves him straight into you. He kisses you with a deep hum, and you taste the rum and the cigars, and dear god he has such fine lips. 

He breaks away. “Hold on a minute, I lost my dignity somewhere in here,” he says, his voice muffling as he gets back under your skirts.

And you would tease him about whether he ever had any, except he is spreading your legs then, opening the split of your undergarments, and his fingers are slowly crawling as they part you, and his breath is hot on your cunt right before his lips and tongue touch you and take a lingering soft taste of you. The vibration of his satisfied hum stirs you. The city streets blur past outside, people oblivious to the affair so thinly concealed in the carriage rattling past. Though they could guess, from the moan he gets out of you next.

You hold his shoulder, and he drags your hips toward him, sucking your clit and tasting you so well, his craving mouth, the deep caress of his tongue that arches you, and you brace your bare feet against the opposite seat. You wish you could watch him. When he pleasures you this way, with his eyes closed, brow slightly creased in concentration or gratification, the bright rising muscle of his tongue, he makes you feel like the only thing on earth to him worth knowing. To see him wince in pleasure with his mouth on you as he kneads your hips, you could purely fall for him, if you were honest about it. But he’s concealed under the full taffeta veil of your skirts, so you’re not expecting it when he slides his finger inside, pressing just right along the top of you while he tongues your clit, and, deprived of one sense, you feel his touch stream through you, and his voice floods you with its resonant drawl, and then you’re bracing yourself on both sides of the carriage, gasping when he adds a second finger, fucking you harder, harder, and a wail claws from your chest before you can stop yourself. 

In Saint Denis, you had met Hosea and Trelawney in the saloon of the hotel, dusty from the day’s ride there, and walking through the crowd of wealthy southern patrons who turned half their faces to you with expressions as if a breeze had passed over a stockyard to reach them. You paid them no mind and put yourself between the two men at the bar.

“Well, is one of you gentlemen gonna order a lady a whiskey or is she gonna have to do it herself?”

“Later, my dear,” said Trelawney, his hand delicately acknowledging your shoulder. “First, Susanne here is going to get you cleaned up.” He turned you around and guided you toward a woman lithe in lavender, with a nice arrangement of hair piled on her pretty head. She took your hand in her impossibly soft hand, so soft you had to see if she was wearing gloves. 

“I can bathe myself,” you told her, as she stood in the corner with her arms crossed.

“It was suggested you cannot.” She ordered you in her melodic voice to undress and get into the steaming tub, and proceeded to scrub your feet and hands with a pumice stone until you sank underwater in pain, and she scrubbed the rest of you practically raw. Dressed in a silk robe, and feeling flayed, you followed her to a suite where Hosea and Trelawney sat discussing the plan as they saw it.

“What’s all this for?” you asked, as Susanne sat you down and commenced a punishment of brushing and pinning.

“We can’t have you entering Saint Denis society appearing as if you’ve just trudged through the swamp to get here.” Trelawney poured a coupe of champagne and handed it to you as if it were a tonic, and which you drank as quickly.

“I thought I was robbing that Gallier man you told me about.”

“Armand. And yes you are. But it happens that he’s a recent widower.” He shared a side-glance with Hosea. “Reportedly over his grief. His sister is throwing him a debut of sorts.” He preemptively refilled your champagne.

Hosea listened tolerantly, sitting at the small table with his boot up on his other knee, but his angled expression softened when he looked at you. “Only a party. Arthur said you could be relied upon to play a part. I assume you’re game for it.”

You blushed slightly. “What’s the part?”

As Susanne led you behind the screen to dress you in so many layers you felt like a French pastry, he explained the idea, and the absurdity of the upper class celebrating Bastille Day, and so it felt poetic to take something from them of value. When he told you Arthur would accompany you, he had your full attention. Gone three days far to the north, it felt like he’d been weeks at sea.

“If he decides to appear,” Trelawney scoffed, stepping onto the balcony and peering down at the street, letting in the perpetual post-rain smell of the city and all the grind of carriage wheels and the clamor of street hawkers and church bells in the air. “I sent him off two hours ago. Beginning to think I should have gone with him to ensure he doesn’t abscond.”

“Red’s here; he’ll show.” That plainness made you blush again. A foregone conclusion. Hosea stood behind you to tie on your ornate mask, fingers careful and light, and patted your shoulder, and even if you were there merely as bait, you were included. Trusted for once.

When he stood in the doorway, you almost told him he must be lost.

The fine black tuxedo, well-fitted, if a little tight in the shoulders. Hair cut short and swept back. Skin tanned from being up in the mountains, eyes a bit more creased from squinting sunblind at the snow. Beard trimmed to a shadow the way you like it, despite Trelawney’s insistence about going clean-shaven. 

“I ain’t wearin that damn thing.” He tossed the party mask on the table when Trelawney handed it to him. A flourish of ornately engraved gold fitted over the nose and eyes.

Hosea turned away from the window. “You are, if you know what’s good for you.” 

“Send Josiah if you want someone right for the job.” 

“I want you there if it goes wrong. Anyway, it’s Red's job; she’ll do the dirty work.”

He was about to put up more of a fight when he saw you, wearing your gold-dusted mask like some discovered secret by the other window, in a gown of navy silk taffeta and black lace. Trelawney forbade you sitting down so you wouldn’t wrinkle the taffeta, and refused to let you smoke. Susanne fussed over your hair, a few auburn tendrils left down, and you could already feel the headache you would have the next day. Though you forgot about it when you saw him. 

Arthur cleared his throat. Then Hosea said something about you being siblings for the occasion. The widow Kilgore and her brother Arthur Callahan.

Both of you found it nearly impossible to retain the instructions given by Trelawney and Hosea. Something about the ball, something about land, but in any case, get upstairs somehow and find the person whose name you promptly forgot, Hosea’s contact, get into the study that way, and find the little book in the desk. He handed you a key.

You were too struck by the sight of Arthur in the room after so many days away, so cleaned up fine, to hear much of what was said.

He has to come up for air, apologizing and red-faced, saying darlin your damn skirts could kill a man. He shoves the entire jumbled pile of them over your legs and looks up for one intoxicated blueeyed moment, his expression partly dazed by you, partly up to no good, and he gets up higher on his knees.  

He starts again at your thigh, bringing you back with his lips grazing your skin, now seeing you better in the low lamplight of the carriage, which begins to slow to a stop, and to your horror pulls next to another carriage. You throw your skirts back down over him, sitting up a bit more, doing your best to stare out the opposite window as the passengers of the other coach certainly see you, disheveled, slouching, flushed from nearly coming not half a minute ago, and the man not well-hidden beneath you now clamped between your legs and seeing this as no opportunity to waste. He’s sucking a mark on your inner thigh, and you hold your hand over your eyes, enduring the gradual screeching approach of the streetcar and the interminable stop it makes, and burning under the scandalized glances from the next carriage. You can't reach the blind to pull it down. 

At the party, he had touched your hand at your side, and you had to stop yourself from elbowing him. 

You want Saint Denis society to talk, you give them grown siblings to talk about. You will be legendary in a week halfway up the Lannahechee, you hissed to him, with a pleasant smile. 

You turned back to the fatuous Mister Gallier giving you, the recent widow, such persistent attention and handing you a flute of champagne as he told you about this awful thing you had in common. Nothing more alluring than a widow, you found out. It was probably the combination of needing to be consoled, being in no position to discriminate, and having certain experience, you guessed, from the attention you got all night. 

I ain’t seen you in days. 

Then you forgot everything Hosea just told you, dear brother.

As the party wore on, after a period of surly resistance and two strong drinks, Arthur found himself disconcertingly welcomed by the other men. They likely perceived the qualities that stood him apart from them, and so were that much more easily won over by his withheld charm, his way with a well-aimed nod, his laissez-faire attitude about losing a few rounds at roulette, and what they sensed but could not define underneath it all, that he would be terrifying to them under different circumstances. They got a single flash of that other side, though, when one of them apparently asked a vulgar question about his sister and soon after had to leave in a drunken hurry. 

“Look at you, slipped and fell,” he snarled into the man’s ear.

“S-slipped and fell,” The man clutched his trembling hand, one finger undoubtedly broken.

“Darndest thing.”

“Darndest thing.”

“Better head home.”

“Yes, yes, I had better.”

It was as if he hadn’t even lost his temper when they were all laughing again in a minute.

So he was downstairs feeling cocky about himself while you were busy, oh goodness, feeling faint upstairs and needing to be fanned off. It was July, after all, and the silk did not ventilate well. How any of the women survived a single summer dressed like that, you had no idea.

And he might have been upstairs for a few minutes, lost certainly, gone exploring and having found the conservatory and spent that time admiring the night sky beneath all the tropicals with his sister as she recovered, and come down the stairway to the gardens as you were coming down the one in the hall.

Once you had found the study and the compartment that opened to your key, and found the book in question among a number of scandalous-looking items in the desk drawer, and the strange gold figurine, it was, regrettably, time for you to go, quite rushed, oh yes, very sorry, and thanks for the delicious hospitality; you will tell everyone back east what splendid hosts you had. 

Your confectionary smile dropped the minute you turned tandem to the carriage. Arthur on the other hand seemed to have just started enjoying himself.

The carriage leaves the diffused electric light of the city, and in the amber glow of the cab he’s got you in almost tearful ecstasy, arm bracing you around your waist, two masterful fingers fucking your cunt, adoring the sight and strong spasm of you coming as you try with waning success to hold back the sound of your pleasure. He pulls himself up to sit beside you and kisses you, watches you come down, and wipes his fingers on the finespun wool of his trousers.

He brings you over to lean on the stiff fabric of his shirt clean and white, and you touch the buttons, smelling a hint of cologne on him, fingers tangling with his. 

You’re hardly over the bridge before you start to undo the buttons of his trousers. You pry his cock out, full in your hand, and run your thumb along the vein. He is so ready for your mouth that he breathes sweet fuck with the first brush of your lips. When you glance up at him he’s watching intently until you sink your mouth on his solid length, making him fall back with the feel of your tongue slicking around him and your lips pushing down. You come off him with a sloppy suck and give him a couple of wet flicks against your lips you might have thought about doing for a while. And you love the sight of his bewildered face whenever you give him what he doesn’t expect, and the low sigh he can’t contain. 

The next thing you know, he’s dragging you up to his lap and ripping the fabric of your skirt out of the way, never breaking his gaze on you. 

“Whatever you do, keep a low profile,” Hosea had warned, as if you needed to be reminded.

And which you recalled only long after the hostess of the party had started flirting with Arthur. From across the ballroom, while old Gallier with his truffle breath was giving you his fullest attention, you watched Arthur rear back from her sudden brush of his upper thigh, his drink splashing over his hand. 

Rich people, thinking they can own everything they touch. 

He saw the leonine rage on your face and shook his head, and then, with a look so wicked and inspired your head burned at the sight, he kept his eyes on you while he let her mop him off and touch him again, and in doing so discovered that night, more than he wanted to, perhaps, just how thoroughly jealous you can be. Not your finest quality. Not the worst of your faults, either, but among them. 

The hostess, an aging dark-haired socialite in a gaudy goddamn getup, ran her hand up his chest, and Arthur saw your neck lengthen, your shoulders settle, your nostrils flare, and with his placid expression let you watch it happen. He did jump again when her hand traveled lower. 

Your fainting spell upstairs might have had something to do with that. He’d had to intercept you halfway across the dancefloor before you did some damage, and handed you off to a butler saying you were feeling unwell.

“Goddammit, Arthur, you’re not supposed to fuck the hostess.”

He was sitting in front of your implacable form in the dark corner of the conservatory, among the palms curving overhead in poses of protection. “She touched my chest, Red, that’s it,” he said, taking your hands, which you started to withhold, but his quick hands gripped tighter. “Thought it would only tease you.”

“She sure damn touched more than that.” Couldn’t even swear right, you were so mad.

“Hey,” he said, turning your face to him, brushing your cheek, leaning to get your attention, his other hand on your waist, sliding up and down in some pattern of reassurance, for him or you, you couldn't say. 

You blew out your cheeks, but were losing steam with the sincerity in his eyes now. 

“I’m sorry, Nell.”

Glancing up at you contrite, he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a gold locket, an oval set with sapphires around a ruby, swinging there on its chain. 

“What’s that about?” You lifted it by the pendant and the gems glinted.

“Stole it off her.”

You dropped it and it clinked on the marble floor. 

He bent down and snatched it back up with a slight glare at you. “Well don’t keep it; thought you could sell it and get a thing you like, christ.” He got it open with his thumb nail and peeled out the tiny paper inside, nothing more than the jeweler’s label, and clasped it shut again. “It’s worth somethin at least.”

You eyed it in his hand, and let him drizzle the chain into your palm.

He sat in the corner in that shielding cove of plants with you standing between his legs, patient. When you grudgingly gave in to his pull on your waist, he kissed you then so sweetly he might as well have been a peach, and when he dragged you closer and pushed his tongue into your mouth, that glorious rush hooked you both. He broke away with a nudge of his nose under yours and got you to look at him.

“What was you sayin about makin society talk?” 

In that dark corner you were straddling him, your back to him, your skirts shoved up out of the way. His hand clamped over your mouth as he pulled you down, easing his cock inside you. You went weak with that long aching glide and stifled your moan in his hand, and had to sit there for a moment, trembling to feel him inside you so deep. He took you by the waist, that stiff-bound waist, and you let him work you up and down as voices came and went down the hall. When he grasped the rim of the bodice between your breasts, the resistance suddenly increased the pace beyond what either of you expected, shooting pangs of lust through you until your whole body tightened, and you bent helplessly into him with the strong throb of your orgasm and gasped into that dark, echoing room. He held off as long as he could, but then you knelt in front of him and finished him in your mouth, and there was no way in hell someone didn’t hear him come.

Now you’re standing on the side of the road holding your shoes, wanting to disappear while Arthur is across the road laughing just about fit to die and the driver slams the door. 

“Never in my whole life -” the driver huffs, climbing back into his seat.

Arthur is holding his eyes and standing weak, recovering, sniffing, clearing his throat. Laughing more.

As the carriage starts to pull away and leave you both stranded in the middle of Lemoyne, you pat down your dress and remember the locket.

“Arthur!” 

Immediately he understands and sprints after the coach down the road. “Hey, hold up, partner.”

“Absolutely not -”

“I said stop -” and he cocks the revolver he draws out of his waistband as he jogs to a halt alongside the coach.

“Now I just left somethin behind, don’t get all uppity. Stuck-up goddamned city…” he’s muttering as he leans into the carriage rummaging around and finds it, backs out again, and smacks the back of the coach like a horse’s rump as he swings back up the road. Returning to you, he holds the locket up high like a hard-won prize.

You glance down the long red dirt ribbon of road winding away. “Now what? Must be five miles from Rhodes yet.”

He considers it as if he knows. “Six.”

“You just couldn’t help yourself, could you.”

“Had a pretty willing accomplice.” He knocks your arm with his elbow.

“That's true.” 

The moon is a sliver, and the night is quiet so late, apart from the chitter of insects and frogs in the hot night air. The dirt is soft under your feet, the locket a small heavy token dangling from your fingers. You stumble on the hem of that ridiculous dress and he holds out a hand for you. 

“Tell me somethin,” he says, after a stretch of peace, and it takes him another minute to come around to asking. “Why can't I call you beautiful.”

You step on the hem again and he catches your arm, and when you don’t answer right away he lets the moment draw out and watches a squirrel scampering parallel to the road for a few steps. 

“I abhor a liar,” you say with conviction.

“Lucky for me then.”

“Is it?”

“Been wantin to tell you the truth all night.”

“You better not.”

“Why.”

“You know why.” You stumble again and grab an angry handful of the skirt, wrenching it out of the way. “Can't go getting sweet on each other.” 

“Ah,” he says, taking off his jacket and draping it on his arm, rolling up his sleeves.

And after a breath, says, “Because of what, we might get killed or somethin.”

“And twenty other reasons.”

He strolls another few paces in thought. “And what we get up to is…”

“What we get up to.” The locket swings erratically from your fingers like a pestering fly. “Anyway I thought you’d sworn off things like that.” 

“Things like what?”

“Like…being sweet on someone.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“I won’t say who.” You feel a little relieved to have that keepsake of information at your disposal right now. A comment tossed off by Mary Beth while washing dishes, and Karen pursing her lips, saying there was more to it than that. And later, when she alluded sadly to a dead girl, and one who’d never been truly kind. 

You peer over to see how he reacts, but his jaw doesn’t set in that way it does when he has to think about something he doesn’t want to. He walks quiet beside you, hands in his pockets, watching the ground ahead of him.

“And there's Dutch,” you add. 

He sniffs, mulling over each step he takes or perhaps has ever taken.  

“Different than sweet-on.” He glances up at the stars as if they might disapprove.

The silt between your toes is cool, but the air hangs stagnant. Your embarrassment from the coach has mostly worn off. The champagne, however, hasn’t, and you say without thinking, “Different.” 

“Gonna make me say somethin you don't want me to when I'm drunk.”

You drop the locket. Somehow it sails away from your fingers and lands behind you. When you bend down to get it, you stand up too fast and feel the ground tipping. 

He grabs you by the shoulders and eases you upright, asking what the matter is while he’s smoothing your hair off your sweating forehead and for one second looks as if he almost lost you.

“Damn heat, damn dress,” you mutter. “Like breathing bathwater down here.”

“Sit down a minute?”

“We’ll never make it back at that rate.”

So you keep on, and he holds out his arm, which you take, and walks easy with you along that long empty road. 

The fourth time you stumble, he stops you before you can start to get mad about it, kneels down in front of you, and begins to rip a six-inch strip of the taffeta off, and you jerk with each pull, and the sight of him destroying a nuisance to you, this minor chivalry, brings up that knotted mess of feelings you can’t untangle and panic to swipe them out of mind, though they remain in your core and leave you breathless. He goes after the other layers, complaining out loud on your behalf why anyone would want so much goddamn fabric gettin in the way. 

“If you took them underthings off you might feel twenty degrees cooler.”

You hold his shoulder as you wiggle out of the dainty silk things and they drop at your feet. He balls them up and throws them away like he’s banishing them forever, and you start to laugh when a rider appears on the road. Arthur swears under his breath.

“What is it?”

“Nothin. Let’s get on.”

He pulls you to him as the rider passes with the faintest nod and grunt in greeting, and Arthur is putting his arm around your shoulders to turn you when you hear the horse stop and come back toward you, until the rider is paced alongside you. Arthur’s grip on your shoulder digs into your flesh.

“Evenin,” the rider says. “What’s this now?” He touches his brim at you. 

“Just what you see,” Arthur says. Something changes in his voice, a deadly seriousness rising, kept under the surface where things can still turn out all right.

“I’ll hear it from the lady.”

You feel his sinking understanding of events unfolding in the way he takes his hand from your shoulder, rubs his jaw, and you know without looking he’s within seconds of going for the gun in his waistband.

“I’m taking the air with my husband. Thank you for your concern.”

He’s staring back at the scraps of your dress on the road.

“Ma’am, just say the word, if he’s laid a hand on you.”

“I know how this must appear,” you say, with a small laugh. “I was tripping on my -”

Arthur’s hand is on yours, in the concealment of your skirts between you, and all three of you have stopped walking.

“Where you all from?” the man says, his voice falsely bright. “Ain’t seen you around here.”

“We’re traveling. Seeing family. Lovely country you have here -”

A whistle up ahead pierces your words. Another rider turns onto the road. “Hell’s bells, Virg, you fuckin slowpoke.”

“These two is travelin.”

The other rider trots up and slows. “Is they?”

“Seein family.”

“That so?”

“Only ones with outside family is the uh Bennets and…” Virg scratches the edge of his graying mustache.

“Fairchilds.”

“That’s right. Is you Bennets or Fairchilds?”

The second rider doesn’t wait for an answer. “And in your Sunday best. You’s eight hours early for church though.”

You count two revolvers, a repeater, and a shotgun. Farther away than your last heartbeat would take to reach them, and you feel Arthur getting overconfident. You grip his hand.

“There is one just nearby though. Get you a good seat.”

Virg spits through the hole in his front teeth and laughs, a gritty, sinister sound. “Be mighty Christian to show em the way.”

A third rider turns into view, a dark shape ahead.

“Why don’t you company us.”

“Why don’t you get on your way.” There is murder in Arthur’s voice.

“You tellin me my business on my own turf, boy? Yankee?”

You let go of his hand and get ready to go for Virg’s revolver, heart sinking in that heavy air, knowing you’ll be slow.

Before Arthur can give you any flicker of a sign, the other rider swings his horse between you, sly as a chess move, and barks at Arthur to get his hands up before driving his boot heel into his face.

–-

He sits against the crumbling wall of the old stone church with his wrists tied behind him, his head propped back on the wall as he watches, a bruise spreading under his eye, swelling. When you glance at him, he gives you a pained half-smile, or what you can make of one in the darkness and the few licks of light from the fire.

They’ve emptied your outer pockets and laid those few things out by the fire: A handkerchief, a strange gold figurine, a key, a locket. The revolver from Arthur, one you haven’t seen before, with an ivory handle and skulls engraved on the frame. The book for Hosea is more discreetly stowed on your person. You stand with your wrists bound in front of you in an alcove with a young guard while the other men admire the revolver and marvel at the gold figurine, some kinda Arabian treasure, one of them speculates knowledgeably. 

Out the window, the remains of a battle half a lifetime ago lie strewn, desecrated by the climate and bitter remembrance, a fight echoing in some men’s ears still, fought daily in burnished memories, those bullets now unfatal, those mortars mere ornament to a story told so many times it is as worn out and patched back together as their flag. A massive magnolia tree sprouts at one corner perfuming the air like funerary herbs, sweet and waxy and pungent.

Your poor guard is outfitted in the uniform of that bygone time, in yellow trim like the others who have all claimed the colors of the craven. His belt sits high on his skinny waist, and holds a knife better suited to cleaning fish than combat. His rifle appears heavy for him, his pistol rattles in a stiff new holster, and he stands at rigid attention, somehow proud to be given a job in this lost militia. He refuses to look at you, as if you have the power of Medusa to turn him stone. 

“Hey,” you whisper, trying to sound sultry but coming across vaguely sick.

He starts to glance at you but quickly snaps back to attention.

“Please, sir,” you say. 

“We don’t talk to the prisoners.”

Prisoners? Lord, the make-believe of it all. It’s embarrassing even with live ammunition, if not more so.

“Nature’s call.”

You might as well have just explained the birds and the bees, the way he shrinks from you.

“You’ll have to hold it.”

“Can’t, I’m afraid. I’m liable to burst.”

He seems to panic for a moment, figuring out what to do, when Virg wanders over.

“What’s goin on, Private?”

Private. You almost snort and have to face your feet.

“The prisoner says she’s gotta…you know.”

“Does she?” He tips his head at you, glances off over the battlefield through the window as if considering his dim prospects, and swings his lazy stare back to you. “Well let’s go then.” Dammit.

He takes your arm, leading you past Arthur, who sits upright and watches in alarm even after you shake your head at him, and outside through the arch of the door, explaining to the private about how to handle prisoners, and how two-on-one is smarter, they’re always trying to escape, thinking they can give you the slip. Oldest trick in the book. 

Leering at you, he tells the private to keep a lookout; he’ll take it from there, and guides you farther away into the grove. And behind the beech tree, where he’s fumbling with his belt, it’s painfully easy to grab his rifle and butt him in the teeth, where you figure he’s always been in pain, and when he’s doubled over drooling and choking, you set the safety and club the stock hard at the back of his head, and he crashes to the ground ass-up. You hold his knife between your bare feet and cut your ropes, grab his revolver, sneak up on the private, who is pissing against the church wall, and throw your arm around his neck, the knife pointed at his eyeball. 

“Honey, I can gut you here or let you go, but if you make a sound I’ll shoot you running. Will you be a good boy and get the fuck out of here quietly?”

He’s leaked on himself and nods like he’s been scolded. 

“Off with your gunbelt, first. Don’t get piss on that too.”

The belt is small, even for you. You fasten it as he runs through the trees, gather your meager arsenal and sneak back in. 

In the shadows, you start sawing into the ropes around his wrists. 

“I didn’t think you could get any prettier,” he whispers. 

“You only got one eye open, that’s why.” 

“Give me that gun.” He pulls you to him by the back of your neck for a fast, hard kiss, then grabs the revolver and goes for the upper level, watching you below and counting men. 

On his signal you both open up on the seven angry soldiers guarding their brethren ghosts and lost causes. A few of them are good shots, country boys who can pick squirrels out of the trees, and you watch one near-miss gouge the stone over Arthur’s head as if it’s moving slower than nature can allow. A couple of the men are old and cloudy-eyed and die in undignified crouches and you can’t find pity in your heart for them. Two are hard to pick from cover, and it’s a game of snatching the moment, all four of you ducking, peeking up, firing, trying not to lose track of them. Your man falters and takes your bullet in his eye, and the other man hasn’t come out from his cover. 

You head around the outside to track him down, and as you see him duck back inside, you follow him through the blinding stone dust spray of your last shot. Inside, you stop dead. 

Arthur reloads coolly as ever as the last man aims straight at him and without any thought for your own self and your spent guns, the whole fucking world goes white as you shout at him to turn. You feel light and terrible as a demon when he spins around to you and the click of the hammer stops your heart. You flinch with every pull of his trigger. It falls on empty chambers again and again, a rattle that seems to number the rest of your days. It empties you click by click. 

You grab a rock and throw it just as he whips his revolver at you and it cracks you in the face, and Arthur sends four bullets into him before the blood has even started to stream from your nose. It pools in your hand, an unbelievable wellspring spilling out of you with the ringing of your ears. He reaches you in three strides and gets his arms under yours to prop you up.

“Jesus, Nell, sweetheart.” He rips the yellow kerchief off the nearest dead man and holds it under your nose, scolding you between checking your eyes and the blood still drizzling. “Goddamn unarmed, throwin rocks? The hell were you thinkin?”

“I wasn’t, clearly.” Rainbows flare inside your eyelids and you feel like you’ve leaked a gallon of yourself into that kerchief before it slows. 

He rests his chin on your head, his heart pounding as he holds you. 

“Arthur, I’m okay.”

“You goddamned almost weren’t.”

“He was empty anyway.” 

“You didn’t know that, what a stupid thing to do!”

You shove him back. “I said I’m fine. Let a girl have her dignity, fuck’s sake.”

He holds his hands up, wipes his forehead, walks out toward that dead battlefield alive with the scurry of rats and the eerie fog gathering heavy in the washed-out trenches.

“You woulda saved my life, Red.”

“Well I didn’t.”

“You woulda taken that for me.”

The click click click click of empty chambers in your ears makes you stretch your neck. “Well it was lucky is all.”

“Don’t ever do it again.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

Some crows up in the dead trees call out in their clever intonations. 

He turns back to you, and from what you can see in the moonlight he must be confounded, the number of times he opens his mouth to speak.

“What.”

“Still beautiful, even with blood runnin all down your face,” he says, and when you swing at him he doesn’t dodge fast enough.

“Oh lay off it.”

“Why.” 

“Quit fooling around, I’m telling you, it isn't nice.”

“You think I’m just teasin you?” From the tone in his voice, he might be scolding you again, and you square up. “Christ’s sake, Red, I don’t know what kind of proof you need -”

“You can start by knocking off all this ‘you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful -’” 

“Would you shut up and let me tell you for once, goddammit I want you.” His voice breaks like he’s given you everything he has just now. He starts to take a step toward you, but halts, as if he thinks he might repel you, getting closer, worse torment than this small distance now. “I care for you, Nell. I’m no good at sayin it. Nothin has to change.” He clears his throat. “If you don’t want it to. But that’s my mind. Now you know it.”

Those words whirl into you like a thousand furious wings, blinding, paralyzing, breathtaking in flight. And in the midst of it, he stands there waiting for you.

You fly into him so hard he stumbles backward and takes you with him, landing with a grunt and grasping you tighter. Hot, panting breaths fill your desperate seeking mouths, and he curls over you and lays you on your back, his lips pressed to yours until that moment, when he braces himself over you, eyes on you like he can’t look away, all the magnitude of his heart within them. The trees let through enough moonlight to glint crownlike off the gold dust left by your mask and the shine of sweat on his brow as he fingers your jaw. That round wavering surface of water meeting air, the way the feeling swells before skin touches skin; that’s where you meet.

You fit flush to each other when you lie together and his hands on your body pull you to the edges of yourself, where every sensation is heightened and you feel not only his touch but his need. His mouth at your pulse point, his heart within his chest against yours. He presses you into the ground and sweeps the enormous quantity of your skirts out of the way as you kiss his neck, comb your fingers through his hair, and love the heavy rounding of his body into yours. 

Behind you the old machinery of long-lost battles and futilities, the many sacrifices of lost causes, defending what should have been relinquished long before. Well it’s a backward kind of place, and you can realize the truth of certain things when faced with a farce. 

In the conservatory that night, when you stood sullen in front of him, he had looked at you the same as he does now. His thumb smoothed back along your cheek.  “Hey. Look at me.”

You rolled your eyes and faced him, but just couldn’t meet his gaze. 

“It’s only you, Red. Only ever you.” 

He fucks you meaning every bit of that and you believe him.

Afterward, he’s fiddling with the clasp on the locket and holding it over your head and fastening it at your neck. You stiffen thinking he will try to rein you back with it, but he doesn’t, and it lays on your skin with a nice weight, like a thought on your mind.

Then he sweeps one hand under your knees to carry you back to the road, and you don’t put up much of a fight. On the road, he switches you to his back, and you hold onto him, with every step telling yourself you should confess all the things you hide. You should say something sweet to him in return, you wounded fool, and the thing that stops you, well, you won’t face it, either. All you can do is kiss the back of his neck and bury your dirty face in his shirt. He presses your legs into his sides in reply, and walks down the road as if he doesn’t mind your burden on him at all.

The next day, Hosea returns from Saint Denis, and it takes him a full three hours to so much as look at either of you. In the evening, Arthur nicks his head to you and you slip off to a place up the shore and out of sight. You’re black under both eyes and your nose is still clogged but not broken. The deep purple bruise over his eye has gone down but darkened. You had made it back by sunup, your fine clothes wrecked, covered in blood and bruises, and Lenny on the watch hadn't even known what to say to you.

“What is it?” you ask.

“Well, like you said, some talk.” 

“So he knows.”

He looks down. “Yeah, he knows.” He skips a few stones into the lake one by one and you watch them hop cheerfully away. 

“He mad?”

“Well I won’t have to wear a suit any time again soon, I’m glad of that. But he said you did a fine job. And, uh,” he says, skipping another. “I wanted to apologize.”

“For what?”

“I think I said some things while I was drunk I regret.”

“Like what, Adonis?”

He cringes, his ears suddenly bright red, and picks up another flat stone. 

“‘Uglier than a bull’s ballsack.’ Don’t think I’ll ever forget it.”

“That too.” It skips five times and disappears in an arc of spreading rings in the reflected sunset bronze.

“Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, carin for you and carryin on.” You watch the rings dilate and fade to nothing but glass again, and realize you're holding your breath.

“No, that I meant.”

Then he notices the locket peeking out from the open collar of your shirt, and doesn’t mention it, but on the walk back he takes your hand, and you stretch your fingers tightly between his, and he doesn’t say anything to put a point on it, but smiles down at the sand.

Notes:

As always, it's great to hear from ya in comments or on tumblr🖤

And here is what essentially became chapter 6.5, recommended before the next chapter.

Chapter 7: The Cell

Summary:

An old tree rises massive out of the sandy banks of the river. A live oak draped in tatters of Spanish moss. Centuries old. Assured of its rooting, it sprawls in all directions, arms extending in poses of indifference, having lived well beyond the need for earthly concerns, shading the river that winds past, glassy and calm.

In the stagnant swamp on the other side of the road, water lilies open up curiously clean and white from the scum. Closer to the tree, the oleander growing around you is fragrant as eden. Pink and sweet, offered up on stalks like nosegays, and deadly as hell.

In recent days when you can both steal time, you’ll spread a blanket there on the sand. You’ll share from a bottle of whiskey or rum or lemonade. It has an air of shelter without walls, open and yet guarded. So when he wants to fuck there, in the air perfumed by oleander by the glass water roamed beneath by reptiles, you can hardly get enough of him because it confounds all your senses until you feel drugged in that misty evening light and around you haunt the reflections of herons flying upside down until they converge with themselves on the water.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

An old tree rises massive out of the sandy banks of the river. A live oak draped in tatters of Spanish moss. Centuries old. Assured of its rooting, it sprawls in all directions, arms extending in poses of indifference, having lived well beyond the need for earthly concerns, shading the river that winds past, glassy and calm.

In the stagnant swamp on the other side of the road, water lilies open up curiously clean and white from the scum. Closer to the tree, the oleander growing around you is fragrant as eden. Pink and sweet, offered up on stalks like nosegays, and deadly as hell. 

In recent days when you can both steal time, you’ll spread a blanket there on the sand. You’ll share from a bottle of whiskey or rum or lemonade. It has an air of shelter without walls, open and yet guarded. So when he wants to fuck there, in the air perfumed by oleander by the glass water roamed beneath by reptiles, you can hardly get enough of him because it confounds all your senses until you feel drugged in that misty evening light and around you haunt the reflections of herons flying upside down until they converge with themselves on the water. 

Bark scraping your back. Fireflies pulsing in the air, on the water. The words that outlaw gasps to you then. 

Look so beautiful takin my cock.

Words he’s embarrassed of later. Words you love from his mouth. When you tell him how wet he makes you, how you think about him filling you, he still glances down with that crooked smile, a flush of pink on his face, but he’s transformed by the time you can’t say anything but his name and strands of shameless wayward prayers. 

With Apollo tethered by the vines that are going to make him fat, you roll out the blanket and retrieve the treasures from your saddlebag. A bottle of gin so rich with juniper you want to open it just for the aroma to freshen the air. A new holster you had made from good leather, tooled with the figure of a buck. He will stammer when you give it to him and probably say something awkward, and apologize as if you wouldn’t know what he really meant.

Down the road, a rider; it will never get old, seeing him in a saddle, coming to you, and the sight of him riding quickens something in you. Even more now that he’s saying certain things, certain thoughts preoccupying him that get to preoccupying you. He’ll sit against the tree with you leaning back on his chest, between his knees, letting you watch him draw in his journal opened to a blank page on your thighs, and a thought will cross his mind, some notion far ahead in time, and he’ll mention it. A room. A house, maybe. You let it pass merely observed, like big game you don’t want to scare away, but it makes your skin feel like to shine when you hear it. Once, without comment, he started to sketch a perfect slow circle and you thought your heart would stop, but it became a sun over a landscape of western bluffs, and you weren’t entirely convinced he wasn’t teasing. He won’t let you see other pages. Another time a pressed flower slipped out from them, and he hurriedly cut it back in between.

A slice across his forearm is still bleeding. You see it when he comes around the veil of vines and slides off Georgia, and you head back for your saddlebag to get your kit.

“What ran into you?” you call over.

“You won’t believe me.”

“Probably not.” You point to the hunched root of the tree for him to sit while you lay out bandages and moonshine on the blanket. He recoils at the sight of moonshine, but lets you pour it on, and he grunts with the burn in the middle of telling you about chasing down a train, and Trelawney in a cage. 

“How’d Trelawney get himself caught?” You wrap a bandage around his arm as he rests his hand on your knee.

“Who the hell knows. For a slippery feller he’s awful trusting sometimes.”

“I think I like that about him.”

“You’re a nicer person than I am.”

“Not even close.” 

He watches as you tie off the bandage as if he’s memorizing something about your hands. 

“That wasn’t even the strangest part. Got us all wearin a brooch now.” He plucks a metal badge out of the pocket of his vest and you hold it up. 

“Deputy Sheriff State of Lemoyne,” you read, looking up from the badge to his face, and he’s shaking his head, eyes wide with just as much puzzlement. 

“They must be stupid or desperate,” he says. “Both, from what I saw.”

You straddle his lap and pinch the fabric of his vest to pin it on him, and give it a pat. “Well, there are certain advantages to this kind of thing.”

“So far it’s just more rules, far as I can see.”

“And what if I break em?” You dig your pelvis into him.

He grabs your wrists and gets them behind your back, and his chest rises against yours. “I’ll have to consult the law on the subject, but I think I may have to jail you.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

“Bet you would.” He presses closer. “Probably have to chain you to the wall for all the trouble you’ll give me,” he says, voice rumbling into you with his kiss. 

When you give him the holster, he runs his thumb over the tooling and changes it out with the old one that you noticed had started to catch on the rear sights, having grown soft there. He’s shy to receive a gift, but in the way he admires it and relishes the cupped sound of his Schofield sliding in and out of good leather, and tries it several times, you know he's pleased. 

“I got you somethin too. Not as nice,” he says, sheepish.

He reaches sideways, still holding you on his lap, and lifts his coffee mug from the top of his saddle bag, covered with a handkerchief. You pull the covering off to find a large chunk of honeycomb nestled in a pool of honey. Little perfect cells holding drops of gold, a heady sweet scent. You greedily break off a big piece for yourself.

“Hey now.” He fakes putting up a fuss and smiles to watch you.

You shake your head with it already at your lips.

In the heat, it spills in strands of condensed sunlight into your palm as soon as you bite it, and you take a second bite, trying to stem the flow. It glazes your lips like an anointment. Before you can lick it away, he leans forward and kisses it from your lips. He takes your hand and presses his mouth to the base of your palm where it collects, like he’s sipping from the cup of you, and then steals the rest of the bite for himself with a grin, his teeth barely scraping your fingers. The laced wax of the comb crackles as you chew. 

He wipes his mouth and covers the rest in his mug with the handkerchief, flies already buzzing nearby, and for a breathtaking flash as he looks away you recall the fox fur crawling with them, and it occurs to you to wonder what this stolen gold has bought. You try to push it out of your thoughts. 

“Sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted.” You suck it off your fingers and catch him watching, ears red as he looks down at his hands, and wonder what got on his mind. “But sticky as tar.” You pinch your fingers together and they come apart tacky.

He tosses a glance out at the water. “Jump in.”

“Hell no. Have you seen the gators here?”

“They're all…” he swipes his hand toward the interior of the swamp.

“Close enough.”

“Well I’m goin in, all this heat.” He claps your thighs to get up so he can stand, and you realize only after he’s taken off his shirt and trousers and is peeling off his union suit that you’ve been staring the whole time. It’s not often you see him unclothed, and it’s a sight as lovely as you remembered, only this time there’s something bittersweet about it. Like you could have this any time you wanted in a different kind of life, and the taste, the fleeting sweetness, fades all too soon.

“You’ve lost your mind.” You turn away as he gets in and plunges under. When he comes up and wipes the water streaming off his face, he waves for you to join him. 

“Ain’t nothin in here but a few lazy catfish.”

“You just make it sound better and better.” You’re sweeping the banks and the water for the signs you know. Ripples, bubbles, currents in the shallows. Slips of the heads of water snakes darting under. So far it’s only him moving the water, but as long as he means to push his luck, you can’t help but watch.

“You’re clean enough. Come back up here.”

“No ma’am. This is the coolest I’ve felt in days. Come in, you’ll feel better.”

You wash your hands in the water, and he starts to move toward you like he’s about to pull you in, and you back up quickly. For a split second he capitulates, hands up and about to leave you be, and then to your horror he’s dragged underwater.

You’re already up to your waist in the river when he surfaces, whipping the water out of his hair with a grin, and you heave a huge splash at him. 

“Real funny, scaring me like that.”

“When'd you get so gullible?” He stays low in the water, pulling himself over to you.

Something snakes past your leg before you can dunk his head under, and you shout and stagger back to shore, and he laughs.

“Dammit - was that you?” You shove him back into the water when he follows. “You deserve to get eaten, fooling like that. I’ll miss you a little when you’re dead.”

“Get them clothes off and come back. No gators in sight.”

“You can’t see down two inches into that water.”

“You scared em all off goin on about it.” He reaches out.

He can get you to forget about them, taking your hand, your waist, blue eyes on you, his foregone conclusion, and pulling you slowly down to him, long enough to get your clothes off, long enough to just drift with you a while suspended in the cloudy quiet water in the shade of that tree. Holding each other, your chin on his shoulder, the view around you is all branches lifted up in the luminous mist. You idly rest your lips on his neck and shoulder, tasting the minerals of the water and the salt on his skin, and he holds you tighter. After a while, he follows you out of the water and lies with you on the bedroll, and you fuck there and sprawl together, cooled off for the first time in days.

You lie drowsily on your stomach on the bedroll parallel to him while your clothes hang to dry near a small fire, your boots upturned on sticks, and you wrap a fresh bandage around his arm. He’s trying to get you to move closer to him, as if he needs to feel you while he sketches. And you nearly fall asleep, except you notice he’s sketching the oleander clustered not far away, in beams of that hazy, smoky sunset, and somehow he lays bare both their beauty and their poison in the way he shades them. You find yourself kissing a scar on his upper arm.

And you try to lift up the page to see the writing there. He pulls the whole book from you so fast his pencil skitters a yard away on the sand.

“You got some big secrets in there, do you?” you say, as he clusters your fingers in his hand and rolls you over onto your back, and when you try to reach for it again he pins you down.

“There’s a fine for stealin a look.”

“That’s on you for trusting a thief.”

“Ain’t a very good one, gettin caught.”

“Suppose you don’t know what I might’ve seen already.”

For a moment, his eyes dart sideways, as if he’s thinking back on everything in that book, before he notices you’re teasing, and pins you tighter, face down close to yours. 

“Gonna arrest me for it, Deputy Sheriff Callahan?”

“You won’t even see it comin.” 

The camp at Clemens Point comes to life in its new configuration as you all feel the threat of being found receding. Despite the heat, moods lift, and an almost leisurely life begins to seem possible there by the lake, one of fishing, playing games, organizing a small homestead on that misty shore. Even Dutch is in a better mood, and acknowledges you sometimes in passing. 

The girls and you find new rhythms in the chores you do, and under the shade of the tarps as you mend laundry and talk, or learn some of their songs, there’s a lightness to this domesticity you might almost call friendship as you get to know them. A night of drinking left you all newly revealed, although you gave away little of yourself. Enough to share an embarrassed clink of your coffee mug with Karen in the morning for the ridiculousness of the night before. 

When Abigail asks you to keep an eye on Jack as he naps so she can go into town, you take it for a good sign she would entrust her most precious thing to you for any amount of time. The boy is sweet, quiet, lonely, and you take to finding treasures together; pretty stones, flowers, animal bones, and he likes to bring you little gifts of them.

But despite that pure sweetness, it isn’t making money, and it isn’t with Arthur. It’s working for someone else’s life, and no one seems to know what that is. Helping each other, but helping each other stay comfortable in this filmy limbo, and vaguely aware of the poisonous futility in every action. All of them playing a part but to no discoverable end, and too stuck to see a way out. 

You’re alone fetching water for the washing, mulling over that thought when Sean finds you.

“Nellie girl, come here,” he calls, waving his hand to you downshore.

“What, you out of tobacco again already?”

“No, but I’d take a smoke if you’re offerin. Mine’re in me tent.” 

You dole two out for yourselves as you walk, and you’re probably right in thinking he doesn’t have any and feels no guilt asking. He leads you up the beach near the fishing hole, to the old overturned boat where Micah sits and Bill stands, talking. 

“Mornin, Miss Riordan. Time to collect.” He slouches on the sunbleached hull of the boat and spreads out his arms.

“Collect what?”

“Collect on loanin you my gun. Savin your life.” He pushes a pinch of chewing tobacco into his cheek.

“Boy you don’t forget a thing.”

“Try not to.” He smiles cheerlessly as he chews and spits a long brown rope sideways into the sand. 

“What’s the price?”

“There’s a stage, skirtin through the swamp out of Saint Denis to Rhodes tomorrow afternoon. Like to have you join us.” 

“Unless the crown jewels are in there, I already hit my last stage with you.”

“Might be. That’s plantation payroll, honey. There’s money in this soil.”

“They send insurance with that kind of thing.”

“Well that’s why I want to bring our own,” he spells out in a condescending tone, slicing his open hand toward you. “They’re good but they can’t overshoot their range like you.”

“Not a habit I make.”

“Just a measure of what you’re capable of. Windless day in the swamp, you could pick them off from the roof of the bridge a quarter mile away.”

“If I’m your main gun, I get thirty percent.” 

He rolls his eyes exaggeratedly at you. “Gettin high and mighty on us now. You’ll take twenty-five. Expectin two-thousand, better payday than you’re going to get anywhere outside of a vault.”

There’s a figure you’re always doing in your head, and the things it comes out to that you don’t think too hard about. Not until the road is really under you. Together. Only heartbreak comes from hoping until then. Nothing but work until then.

She comes into his tent in the night, as she has most nights since they arrived, slipping through the canvas flaps completely soundless. He clears a path to his cot for her when he turns in so there is nothing to trip on, and he usually can’t fall asleep until he sees the shadow of her entering. He’ll quell the lantern and shift to his side to make room, and the cot creaks lightly as she eases down with him. It’s no place to do anything; he always fears that old cot will fail him someday, but that doesn’t stop her sleepily pressing herself back into him in the dark of early morning when he wakes hard against her, and he just wishes he could push into her and relieve that bittersweet ache. The glow of Kieran’s campfire spills under the canvas, the low waves lap the shore behind them, the horses nicker and neigh at any damn thing.

When she jolts awake, he holds her, arm firm around her waist, and she lies back again, slowly easing.

What was it? 

Just a dream.

Fallin again?

She nods.

What from?

Nothing. The whole ground caved under me.

He kisses the back of her neck. She turns to face him, a shift of such slow care the friction of her makes a quiet shirr, rolling into him so close he can’t do anything but feel her breasts and stomach against him and the light slow grind of her pelvis on his cock with a creak of the cot. He whispers shhh against her lips. 

I know, she whispers back. Just a bit.

He holds her tight to him by the small of her back, and then he reaches up her night dress to take a handful of her firm ass, but it brings a sigh out of her, so he lightens his grip and runs his hand up and down the back of her thigh, bringing it over his with another creak. Their faces touch, noses and chins and foreheads, nudging, pressing. The smell of her body consumes him, and he buries his face into her neck. 

She sighs I want you and he can’t die a happy man right there because he can’t do a goddamn thing about it. He’d take her standing but for ten people in earshot. He’s of half a mind to catch their horses that minute and go anywhere, anywhere, when she slips her hand down between them and undoes the lower buttons of his union suit, one by one breaking them free, enough to pull him out, and he shudders needing more. Holding him and pressing him against her, she gives his shaft a squeeze, and then a deep slow grind that makes him hold back a moan. He pulls her night dress out of the way and feels the coarse hair of her mons, her soft belly, and she carefully clasps him to her, puts her arm around his back, and rolls against him, slow as waves. Not enough to let him come. Enough to make him painfully need to. As her body curves into him she stares into his eyes with the same pain. As if this is her way of telling him there is a better way to wake up every day of his life and she would have it with him this instant if they could. And jesus, he would give her everything. He will give her everything as soon as he can. But in the agonizing time before then, they lie unfinished and tangled together as close as they can get without making a sound, and drift asleep and awake, until they hear the change of the lookout, John or Bill or Grimshaw returning from the woods and another heading out, and the time comes for her to go back.

Meet me at the tree this evening. He takes her hand before she sits up. 

I have a job today.

Doin what?

She shrugs, and he pulls her closer.

Robbin, she says.

Nell. 

She gives him the look that says she wins.

Meet me after.

She gingerly sits up, stands, her night dress falling again to her knees like a curtain. She pretends she’ll think about it. He scowls at her. She kisses his furrowed brow. She looks down at his full erection before he can put himself away and gives him the cruelest, saddest frown. Then she leans over him, faint mischief in her smile, lays a single, almost chaste lick up the underside of his cock, and leaves him clenched and speechless, fuckinggoddammit, the canvas flap waving as it closes behind her. He stares in minor misery up at the dingy tent ceiling for a long minute fighting his need before he finally gives in and finishes himself with a few dejected, efficient pumps into his fist rather than endure that goddamn torture any longer. It’s a hell of a way to wake up and he’s irritable as he washes, drags on his clothes and the suspenders over his shoulders. 

In the back of his journal, he goes over the list he keeps, pencil smudged by now to a light haze. Forty-two hundred dollars. And nothing added to it in the days since they had gotten themselves deputized and would have to be living straight for no good reason he can figure. Wasting time. He reckons ten thousand could be enough. Maybe twelve. Give a sizeable cut to Dutch to ease the loss of him, help the others. Take the rest, and her, buy into a new life. He keeps the rolls of bills and a small ingot in the bottom of his trunk but can’t look at them. They don’t grow like they used to.

What a fine mess we have made of this. Camped by a lake and stalled like we got all the time in the world to wait. I do not know what will be the force that drives us next, but right now the world is slow and stuck, and us stuck to it getting dragged below. 

The back of that page is covered with his half-finished sketch of her. The view of her from her hip. The faint shading of the slope under her ribs. The soft peak of her breast. Sleepy face gazing back at him, hair mussed from lovemaking. The light in her eyes seeing past the worst of him. The starred scar on her shoulder.

“Arthur! Get out here!”

Dutch stands at the mouth of his tent as Molly walks away in a huff, and Arthur ducks out from under the canvas flap stumbling as he pulls on his boot. 

“Mornin,’ deputy.” Dutch’s morning cigar smoke hangs thick around him, mixed with the mist bleeding in off the lake. The air in that place diffuses the light and feels vaguely dreamlike and unreal at all times. The flat water of the lake pulls their voices away in echoes around them. Heat seems to radiate up as much from underground as from the baking sun.

“You’re in a bright mood,” Arthur says, getting his other boot on.

“The best, son. I feel our fortunes changing, and all it takes is our own restraint, to harvest when the crop is ripe.”

“And in the meantime don’t get bit by everything here that means to poison you,” he says, striking a match on his heel and lighting a cigarette. Micah sits up from his lean-to across the yard yawning loudly, and says something to Abigail as she walks past that gets a cutting reply over her shoulder, good woman. 

“Just takes some awareness and staying one step ahead. Not too hard, given the intelligence around here.”

The old war-players had been the dull edge of the blade, no doubt, but there were times, standing in town hearing the sheriff wheedle on about families and conflicts, he got the sense that there was some more playing going on, the half-witted guile of good old boys drawing you out. He’d known a few passing through out west, dumb as foxes and taking advantage of everyone’s underestimation of them. Dutch dismissed his notion as giving them too much credit.

“Better look upstanding,” Dutch says, shrugging on his jacket and giving the badge a polish. Arthur goes to find his in the gully where he’d pitched it, before they take off, and the day is spent in the dull business of keeping a lazy town in line. He breaks up a fight by the saloon between one of the Raiders and a man just minding his business, and gets an evil stare from the Raider that marks him. So he walks up to him chest to chest, and looming over him he tells the bastard to find him any time he wants to revisit the subject, and the Raider walks backward from him with a dumb and irksome smile like he was only minding his business too, but alright, Yankee, if you gotta get a stick up your ass about it, I’ll leave you to it. Lord, how his finger had twitched near his trigger.

He’s never had a straight job with hours to keep, and in the midday heat he’s nodding off in the chair on the porch from a kind of submerged exhaustion unmatched by the aftermath of most fights he’s ever been in. By the time they’re ready to head back to camp, he has insights into the law confirming suspicions he’s held for years.

“You won’t believe what I read about today,” Dutch says as they ride out.

“Get some fine reading done did you?” Arthur yawns and cracks his neck side to side. 

“The Rider-Hall gang.” 

“Jack Hall’s boy, in Santa Fe?” It’s a stupid place for a marked gang to be running, in his opinion. Population, sure, but too much law and too many eyes watching. Then again, they’d been at it ten years or so, which said something.

“Tom, yes. All of em gone.”

“Gone?”

“Dead, jailed. Every single one.”

He stares over at him. It’s the kind of news that hushes campfires, to hear such a gang as them getting obliterated. 

“All but Juney Rider.”

“That feller? A rat?”

“More than a rat. I’m disturbed about it. He ain’t turned rat. Turns out he was Pinkerton the entire time he ran with them. Eight years, son.” 

“I’ll be damned.”

“Rat from the start. The lowest of the low, to go in and gain trust, make himself Tom’s right goddamn hand. His only aim to destroy them from the inside. A success by every measure, then, if you see it his way. I heard Tom Hall was so shocked he could do him like that, he didn’t even try to resist when they took him. That story’s been keepin me up three straight nights. And just today, news of his hanging.”

“Better if it was Colm O’Driscoll.”

“I had the same sentiment.”

“How’d it go down?”

“Went out, scouting out the next score, same thing you do time and time again. Most ordinary thing. But found themselves in a box canyon out by Twin Rocks, and Juney just turned to him, says, ‘Tom, it breaks my heart to do this, as many years as we gone together. But it’s time, my friend.’ And there were thirty Pinkertons just waiting, just waiting, son. Ready to pick them off like turkeys. And Juney with them, if it came to it, make no mistake. They will eat their own for the greater good as they see it. It’s a sickness. And it killed the beast from within. Tom swung in Blackwater. Two weeks back.”

“I feel a little sick.”

“Me too, son. Juney and Tom was like brothers.”

“Always thought of them like you and Hosea.”

“Or you and me.”

He’s too stunned by the grim way he says that to get a word out in defense.

“Or me and John. Any of us.”

“Jesus, Dutch, never.”

“Juney said never. You bet your last dollar he was the most devoted of all Hall’s men. That’s how it goes. I heard he attended the hanging. I can’t imagine a more demented act than that. Or the deadness of a soul to pretend his affections all that time, get to know a man, betray him, and coldly watch him swing.”

“I don’t wanna think about it.”

“Me neither. But it’s a fool who doesn’t wonder. That’s the lesson, to my mind.”

It’s the kind of story that won’t let go, no matter how he might try to avoid it. Like a disease, murdering the beast from within. He’d rather take a killshot than go down that way. They all would.

“And they didn’t even get the gold.”

He sits up fast enough that Georgia slows under him and he has to urge her. “What do you mean?”

“Thousands’ worth, part of his daddy’s cache, apparently. They was so certain they would find it in Hall’s vault. Nothin.”

They ride for a while in mind of such things, and when they reach the crossroads he’s about to part for the tree when he sees Lenny waiting ahead on horseback, his eyes so serious with news that they stop together.

“What’s goin on, kid?”

“Wonderin if you seen Nell. She ain’t come back with the others.”

“What others?”

Your wrists are tied in front of you, a little too tight, as you kneel on the road in the dying light within view of the tree, and you can’t quite see straight. All around you swirl the squawks and shadows of large birds and the deep rumble of gators in the shallows.

“You’re in serious trouble now, miss.”

The older deputy walks around you, sifting through your satchel, pulling out your wallet, the few things you’ve saved for yourself, a sketch Arthur drew you, and strewing them on the ground. You thank the heavens you put your cut in Apollo’s saddlebag and had him tethered.

“Where are the rest?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” You’re still staring at the sketch, and start to reach for it when he scatters gravel at you with his boot.

“Your associates. Survivor described a woman with firearms and three others. Who took the payroll?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Well let me help you.” He squats in front of you to get you to look at him, and his cold stare sees what they all see. “In this county, when you steal from another, when you steal a lot of money, it don’t come out so good for you. We got a hangin judge, and a lot of fellers who work for the Greys you just stole from who would see you hang sooner, outside government business. To tell you the truth, we meet some of them on our way, I might not be inclined to resist them.”

As the evening fades and he takes his sweet time there on the road, you wonder what he’s waiting for, and you test the rope around your wrists. Tight enough to make your fingers numb. He’s already taken your gun belt away, having judged it to be incriminating.

“Could you loosen the rope, sir? I can’t feel my hands.”

He only pulls you to your feet and then hoists you up into the saddle and gets up behind you. 

You had waited with the three of them, all of you in a good mood, sharing Micah’s hash and feeling fairly confident in general, although you ordinarily wouldn’t go into a fight without your head clear. But when Micah held out the quirly to you, seeing if you were up for all that he was expecting, you took it, and smoked it, spent half a minute coughing, smoked again, and handed it back to him, the low-firing sound of his chuckle in your ears.

“You come with me,” he said to you, and he pointed for Bill and Sean to take up by the bend in the road, to come up from the flank. In a light daze, you smiled and followed him, and stood among some cypress listening for the signal from Sean.

After a while gazing around, leaning against the tree opposite you, Micah lit a cigarette. “He’d never know,” he said to the flame cupped in his hands, almost as if you could decide whether you wanted to have heard him or not. Truth be told, it took you a while to realize what he meant.

You glared. “Try anything, and I’m drowning you in that mud over there.” It give the impression of a threat, but in the haze of the hash, you found yourself joking, the way you had so many times. Deflecting without threatening. You have known men who turned violent at a hint of being judged unfit.

“You talk all tough, but you got needs. I’d treat you right. Unlike that old cowpoke. Probably only knows one way of fuckin, facing you away like a sheep.”

“You talk like that to everyone with a gun?”

He smiled, dirty as ever. “I’ll be here whenever you’re bored with him.”

“You’d have a better chance with Sarah Bernhardt than me.”

“Oh, don’t say that now; she’d love to fuck you.”

You had made a face at him just as Sean’s whistle came through from the clearing, and now, sitting front on the deputy’s horse, a pang of remorse strikes you to recall arguing to let the survivors go. How you’d had to jokingly, desperately, break your silence and make eyes at Micah to get him to think twice about simply executing them on the road. The thoughts you’d put in his head for that. He’d still shot one for looking at him askance.

“What are you going to do with me?” you ask, your voice weak in the grip of that memory.

“Keep you till Monday when the judge is back; he’ll see you to your trial,” he says, sighing as if this whole business is a great weight on him. “Find a lawyer that will take you.”

When you turn onto the main street, you see Arthur sitting on a chair on one side of the door of the sheriff’s office, and you see, with sinking heart, Dutch on the other.

They pretend not to know you.

Arthur looks like he will make you pay your debts to society and then some. In the light of the porch, he’s imposing, glowing a little with the shine of sweat on him, and he waves away a moth gyring in his face. He stands up and doesn’t look at you. The badge on his chest is newly polished after he tossed it away two days ago behind camp. He’s wearing a clean shirt, his nicer vest, looking upstanding. Downright law-abiding. 

“Archibald,” says Dutch, standing as the deputy reins to a halt. “Heard there was some commotion outside of town.”

“Stage robbery, Mister Macintosh, though the others are still at large. I’ll need to head to the Parlour House to round up a posse.”

“In this peaceful hamlet, a stage robbery?” Dutch’s face is full of shock and he props a hand on the porch column to brace himself against the illogicality of it. Arthur leans on the siding, and you can’t read his expression.

“You might be surprised, the miscreants who try to take advantage of good people here.” Archibald groans, dismounting, and dragging you off the horse. You fall to your knees and stagger back upright with no help. He shoves you toward the steps. No move from Arthur to show you so much as a hint of recognition, much less care.

“I’d be glad to go with you, help round up this posse,” Dutch says, as Archibald leads you past him inside. You don’t try to catch Arthur’s eye. 

“Much obliged, Macintosh, if you’ll give me a minute to get this one booked in.” He glances at you as if you are an obstruction to his very way of life at this moment. “Your name.”

“Frances Black.”

The deputy is as dim as the lamplight and naive to the point where you almost pity him a little, surrounded by three outlaws in his office as he leans over the ledger to write that name and the charge. 

He guides you toward the cell, unties the rope, and locks you in, and Dutch watches, leaning in the doorway. “Let deputy Callahan take over, Archie. Come tell me what you know over a drink or two, and we’ll get to the bottom of this.” 

Willingly, the deputy gives up the keys and leaves ahead of him, and before following, Dutch withers you with a glare and points a ringed finger at you. 

“You are not going to blow our cover, you understand? I will cut you loose if there’s any threat of this going wrong.”

“Yes, Dutch.”

“Far as I’m concerned, you can rot there if that’s what it takes. Stupid as it gets.”

You face away, still feeling the rope around your wrists, faintly spellbound by the slowness of your fingers as you move them, and the heavy floating feeling of your receding high.

“You’ll handle this, I presume?” he asks Arthur, who is leaning against the desk with his arms crossed, not looking at you. 

“Do what I can.”

“Remember where you are.”

“I got it, Dutch.”

Arthur closes the door, turning the knob to shut it soundlessly, just standing there for a while before he turns, and that’s when he finally looks at you. 

You start to step toward him, up to the bars but you’re stopped by the flare in his eyes. It hits you deep as a mine blast.

“What in the hell were you thinkin?” 

You hold the flat bars of the cell and can’t look at him.

“Okay. Don’t explain yourself. Don’t tell me why in god’s name you went robbing a stage with that bastard in the state of Lemoyne. They hang people for fun here, in case you forgot where you were. Probably hang you for wearin pants.”

“It was just a job, Arthur.” 

“With Micah.”

“And Bill and Sean.”

“Bill ain’t aware of his own dick and Sean’s Sean. It was Lenny who had to tell me he thought somethin was wrong.”

“You think I can’t take care of myself?”

He gestures to you in the cell like you must have your head on backward.

“I meant with Micah.”

“That ain’t what I mean, you know it.”

“Well go on, you seem to have a few things on your mind!”

“You don’t get what I’m sayin to you, sweetheart. I can’t just get you out of this. Right now, I ain’t even sure I want to.” He pushes off the desk and paces a little ways, and turns back like he can’t think straight sitting or standing. “I suppose he took you out into the swamp somewhere. Somewhere nice and remote. Jesus, he get you messed up, too?”

He steps up to get a better look at you and you turn away.

“Did he do anything?”

“Dammit, no.”

His eyes search you until he’s satisfied of that truth.

“You knew it was a bad job.”

“Well I wanted it. We need the goddamn money and I wanted to do it.”

There’s fury and there’s defeat behind his eyes as he backs away from you. He goes to the window, leaning on his forearm on the sash, checking up and down the street. 

“Thought I’d find you hangin. From that tree.”

“This place just gets in your head -”

“This place ain’t just in my head. I swear I thought you’d be…”

You will learn he rode Georgia to a lather to get to the tree. As soon as Lenny told him, and he beat the story out of Micah, he was shouldering his repeater and gone. Over those red dirt miles, he had not let up. And when he didn’t find you there, but found Apollo tethered, and down the road the empty stage in the ditch and the bystanders getting worked up over it, he went back for Dutch and raced into town, and he paced on the porch of the sheriff’s office like he was almost out of his mind, not knowing if you would be brought in, or, if not, where in the whole dark world you would be. Were you dragged away. Were you hanging from a branch somewhere, were you far worse off than that. He took a chance trusting Dutch’s intuition, suffering some of the longest minutes of his life on that porch.

“This could’ve gone wrong ten different ways. Did you figure why he came to you? Not Javier or John? Or me?” You’re stunned to hear emotion in the rasp of his voice. 

“You seem to think I just waltzed into the job without thinking it through.”

“I don’t know what’s worse, you thinkin it through or not."

You scrape some rust from one of the bars with your nail.

“Would you have said no?”

He leans his forehead on the glass. “I don’t know. Probably not.” 

Your throat suddenly aches with the first edge of tears. “It was the best score in a long time.” 

In the swamp, where you had ditched the coach and shot open the lock box and freed the horses, you came around the other side and halted in horror. Just below the level of the road, a buck carcass lay mostly submerged, its rotting upper half and antlers sticking out of the muck, head bowed, and it had not been mauled by gators; it had starved. You knew it beyond a doubt, faced with its buckled form, and swallowed a wave of bile.

Micah had chuckled grimly to see it, and paid no mind to it after that. 

Arthur walks to you and puts his hands over yours holding the bars. “It ain’t worth riskin your life with that bastard for a score.” 

“It’ll take forever if all we are is careful.”

“Yeah I know.” He nods, fingers tracing the ridges of your knuckles. “We’ll find a way.”

You reach up and thumb the tight serious corner of his mouth into a smile and he gives you a tired smirk.

“What now?”

“Wait for word from Dutch I guess.” 

“Could leave.”

He shakes his head. “Got to be ‘upstanding.’” 

Those bars. He hangs his hands on them, tightens his grip around them, rattles them. Iron, rusting where they intersect, rivets at every point, an overengineered grille in the shape of someone’s fantasy of security and punishment, for as much work as it must have taken. 

“When’ve you ever been upstanding?” You tease, reaching through and hooking your finger between the buttons of his vest and tugging lightly.

He leans closer, and then seems to think better of it and backs away from you. “When?” He walks over to the desk and sits in the chair, testing out the swivel, and spins slowly to face you, resting his boot on his knee, taking his hat off and placing it thoughtfully on the desk. “Feel pretty upstandin right now.”

“Let me out and show me how upstanding you can be.” You press yourself up a little against the bars. 

He wipes his sweating face, concealing a passing smile, and leans back. Glances at the star on his chest, and then back at you in the way of half-patient authority. “Now why would I do that?”

Oh you bastard. 

“You’re in real trouble, Miss Black.” He stands up and goes to the window, spends a long moment looking out, and pulls the blind shut. He walks to the other window and does the same. Checks the door lock. When he sits down again, he clasps his hands over his stomach, and his voice, when he speaks again, turns sinister and flat. “Or is it Missus?”

He’s known to take his time getting information from the ones he intercepts, this Sheriff Arthur Callahan. A ruthless hand who serves criminals up to the judge like it’s a mission bestowed on him from the highest power. Unsparing. In truth, he cares little for the law. It’s retribution he seeks, for long-buried violations, and he will not stop until he has seen every one of your gang swing. He’s sought you through three states. You’re the last, as if he saved you for it, relishing every moment of the hunt until now. He’s waited so long for this, and he intends to make you feel all the harm you’ve inflicted on others. He intends to make it last. 

“Miss.” You straighten up defiantly.

He’s one of those men who faced a crossroads in his life, and for a man of his talents, he could have been successful on either side of the law. He handles his weapons with the skill of an outlaw, unhindered by any moral inhibitions about killing. He enjoys it, just as he enjoys seeing you now, rightly fearing for your life. There is no escape for you.

And you: Are you scared and contrite? Cowering and trembling at the thought of what he will do to you? A good girl who just got caught up by the wrong men - no power of her own to choose - and now suffers for her lot in life? But in her softness, could she awaken him to his own sense of compassion? When he fucks her, could he be transformed just as she realizes her own power to transform through love? 

Or are you brassy and reckless? She knows she’s at the end of the line, and she’ll fight until the end. She might as well get off one last time, and this sheriff packs more than just guns. 

“I haven’t done a thing.” Facing the end that has chased you all your life, all the desperate time you’ve run and fought and fucked and lived on the blurred edges of life, defiance is all you have now. There is no one left to save you.

His posture gets severe. You feel a little heat between your legs.

You raise your voice.  “What are you going to do.”

“Come to the bars,” he says, his voice husky now. 

You press yourself against them. 

He lifts his chin at you. “Take off your clothes.” 

Your fingers automatically start to unbutton your blouse, and you shed your clothes quickly, until you’re standing naked in front of him, but he's not paying attention now.

He unlocks the cell, all authority and brass balls, and swings his hand upward as he saunters inside.

“On the wall, Miss Black.”

“I'm afraid you'll have to make me.” You stand tall. 

And notice the dark smile on his face.

"That's what I thought."

Before you can react, he gently shoves you, in a way only he could get away with, by the arm across the cell, a stunning taste of his full strength. It makes your head spin and you catch yourself on the wall as he stalks away from you. 

He leans opposite, with his arms crossed, and stares for a long, slow breath. If you tried to detect the hint of mischief in his eyes it would disappear. 

But it smolders in his voice. “Turn around.” 

You turn slow.

Across from you he stands scratching his whiskers, eyes riding your curves in thought, until his focus finally rests at your feet.

“Get your foot up on that bar.”

Despite the hard flit in your belly, you stare back. “Make me.”

Eyes widening, threatening, he tips his head in mock acknowledgement. “I take it that’s your way of askin for what comes next.”

When you tip your head the same in answer as if you were his partner dancing, he steps up to you, a prowl, and when he reaches you, his gaze drifts down between you. With the toe of his right boot he knocks your left ankle. 

“Up.”

You dare him back. "What are you going to do."

Before you can react, he spins you around, his arm barred across your chest, and answers you with a hard spank. Your whole body jolts from the sting.

He holds his hand there, grips you. Smacks you again, hard, and kneads that handful of flesh and pulls you close, your ear to his hot mouth. “This what you want? Me rough with you?”

More than you can say, but when he wrenches you back around, for one brief moment you have to see in his eyes how serious he really is. He is severe, unmoved, stares down the two inches’ difference between you, teeth on edge, breathing restrained through his nose. One eyebrow curves up; you nod.

And his voice grows rough and quiet. “Foot up on that bar, I said.”

You press your left hand on the wall behind you for balance, and set your right toes on one of the bars about eight inches off the floor. Gaze up at him, defiant, prepared for him to be brutal, and aching at the thought of him fucking you senseless in four raw, uncontrollable thrusts, but as he stands there close, his eyes flash at yours with a wicked fondness, and he speaks so low you lean toward him.

"Touch yourself."

You blink, suddenly nervous.

“You heard me,” he says.

He never breaks his gaze with you as you lower your hand to yourself, already sensitive and flushed, slip your middle finger into the mouth of your slit and start to slowly stroke yourself in the full heat of his attention. Each small, beckoning graze seems to draw his breath. 

“More.” 

He doesn’t watch your hand; he watches you. His gaze holds you. When the angle of your wrist sharpens, the rush of his sudden exhale streams cool over the perspiration beading on your chest.

You’re just as unsettled as you are excited, and close your eyes with the next firmer stroke, aching slightly with a trickle of arousal as if you’re not in control of your own hand.

“You know the meaning, woman? Ain’t you ever been taught?”

He rounds his hand under your jaw, then around the back of your neck. He tips your face back with his strong fingers, his mouth so close to yours you smell tobacco on his breath when he says, “Keep goin.” His thumb runs hard down the curve of your throat and up again, and presses under your chin.

With that threat, in the constant stroke of your fingers, your body begins to beg, hips tipping, shoulders spreading back against the wall.

“Harder.” He blinks slow, and raises his chin when you begin to pant.

You slide your middle finger inside yourself, drawing up to your clit again, slick and warm, and rub less gently now. When he reaches down and adjusts the fullness along his inner thigh, his hold lingers, and a pang spears through your sides. You reach for him. He shakes his head in warning. He gazes at your hand, and you feel the heat of your high starting to bloom within your belly. He hears it in your breath, sees the pull of your stomach, the tightening of your legs. 

“Stop.” An appetite burns in him. 

You tremble as he stands in front of you, touches your flank, fingers skimming up to your breast, cupping you with the lightness of his distracted hand. 

“Were you about to come?” His face near yours. His voice low. Quiet. 

“Yes.”

“You were close.” He nods slightly, knowing.

“Yes,” you whisper, nodding unconsciously with him.

He waits a long several moments, watching your body, your held breath, your pleading hips, as you come down. Then he presses you against the wall with his arm across your collarbone, and, without looking at you, sucks his middle finger, and kisses your neck as he slides it into you.

Your body spreads back, as if you can feel every contour of his fingerprint as he fucks you, and you grab the bars with your right hand. You can feel the summer heat through the floor. Your gasps cascade into a moan when he slides in his ring finger and hooks both fingers up into you, hard, steady, deep, lifting you slightly with each relished reach. His cheek scrapes yours, his lips and breath on your ear as he tells you how much it turns him on to feel you wet for him, how goddamned hard you make him to hear your sighs, and you reach one hand forward, feeling the thick ridge of his cock before he takes your hand and presses it back against the wall. As you start to keen, growing heavy and weak, held up only by his strong, wet hand, he draws his fingers out of you with a long impassioned kiss, and then cruelly breaks away. Wipes his fingers on your thigh and leaves you sagging against the wall.

You are so irretrievably close right at this moment, you’re quivering.  

He starts to walk away, and it’s that, right there, his back to you in this momentary abandonment, that strikes you hardest. Like a match. When he turns around again, he finds you lit and reckless. You reach him, and he watches you in surprise, his hands lifting, letting you rip off his gun belt, strip the holsters off, set them on the cot, and you slap the belt into his hand before backing up. Daring him. He runs his hand along it, hesitating.

“Face the bars.”

You turn.

“Keep goin.” His voice is rougher now, frayed on the edge of control. He grips the belt strap in a loose fold.

You hold the bars with your left hand, driving your own self mad to be seen, like this, wanting this, your spine already arching with need.

“Why did you go.”

He snaps your breath away with a stinging lick on your backside from the belt. Not hard. Testing.

You swallow. “He asked.”

“And you did what he asked.”

Snap. Harder. You jump, panting now.

“Yes.”

“Why.”

Snap.

“Why.” 

“I want us to get out!” 

He drops the belt. You cry out as he grabs you from behind. His left hand braces him on the bars, his thumb hooking over your little finger. His other hand reaches for your stomach and jerks you back to him. For a moment, his fingers dig into you like he wants to make it hurt, and starts to work at his fly, and you feel his furious need, too, his urgent hand.

But after a seething breath he rests his forehead on your shoulder, and his sigh spreads cool down your back. Another. Pained.

“Jesus christ I can’t.” His voice is hoarse as he holds you, tightly now.

“Should I -?” 

He peels away and leans beside you against the bars, and he exhales at the floor like he’s going to be sick, then unpins the badge from his vest and tosses it next to his gun belt. “I hate hittin you like that.”

“I wanted you to; it’s just foolin, Arthur.”

“It ain’t just foolin.” He fingers the bruise on your skin. His tenderness, your redness there. You touch his face and see in the twitch of the side of his mouth how much he truly feared today. The look of near-loss, and the relief that is spoiled by what could have been.   

“I’m sorry for going on that job,” you whisper.

“Ain’t to be sorry about.” He pulls you to him and drapes his arms around you, holds you tightly to his chest. Kisses your forehead. Rests his chin in the curve of your neck.

“Not sure I can take much more of this damn place.”

You nuzzle your head against his, in the safety of his arms and his radiating chest. And you laugh a little, at a fleeting thought.

 “Who stays in an open jail?”

Whistling low, he huffs. “You got me there. Two fools like us." He speaks into your neck, presses his lips there. "Feels like nothin makes sense anymore.” 

“No such thing as sense in this world.”

She lies with him on his cot. Their legs are twined, arms wrapped. Her face to his, despite the heat in the air. In the lantern light, her eyes are flecked in gold and green, and the thin sheen of sweat on her skin gives her the glow of washed fruit.

What will you make it out of? She nudges his nose with hers and speaks beneath a whisper, barely a sound.

Maple. Carved on the posts.  

What with?

When he kisses under her ear, she gives such a pretty sigh.

Ain’t sure yet. Thought maybe wildflowers or somethin.

Didn’t take you for a woodworker.  

I know a thing or two.

She combs her fingers in his hair; his eyes close with her touch.  How big will it be?

Big as we can find a mattress for. Biggest one we can. There’s a hint of honeysuckle on her neck. She smudges the petals there, and he just wants to breathe her in and in.

A bed, she muses, and he glances up. It’s the first time she’s smiled about anything to look ahead to. He has to touch the light dimple in her cheek he’s never seen before, wondering what else the slightest joys would unveil to him.  How she would look in a soft, clean bed next to a daylit window, a dry breeze coming in.

That notion contents him beyond reason, and he stretches out his legs, braided with hers, but the cot creaks loudly, and both of them stiffen. The dark heat of the tent seeps over them like oil.

She sees him cringe, feels him pull away slightly. He wishes she didn’t. With a kiss, she whispers it will be worth waiting for, and blows on his chest to cool him off.

But a man can wait too long. He’s seen that more often than he’s ever seen a man make up his mind. 

Dutch had paid off a very drunk Archibald, convincing him the payroll had miraculously been recovered. Two thousand to keep the matter quiet and replace the loss, keep away bounty hunters looking to flush out the others, keep them all beneath notice. 

Deep in the woods away from camp, Arthur and Dutch had argued. He ought to get the cash from Micah and the others to pay for it. Dutch felt no need to punish them, not being the ones who got themselves caught. Even though it was Micah’s job. Even though there was a code. You shared the loss and the gain.

"The girl," though, was Dutch’s concern, and there was a price to pay.  “From the beginning, son, the very beginning, it was a bad idea to let her in. And I’ll take your lack of gratitude for bailing her out as a sign of things to come.”

“Course I’m grateful, Dutch. But she ain’t the goddamn problem.” He struggled to keep calm; Dutch would wait for any sign of weakness and win the battle there.

“Nothin but trouble since she got here.”

“Since Blackwater, you mean,” he seethed.

“Since you abandoned us there.” Dutch stepped forward, his face severe in the light of the ember of his cigar. He placed his cigar hand heavily on Arthur’s shoulder, and he felt the heat by his ear and smelled singed hair. “Son, it can’t be done over, but we atone for mistakes. I’ll help you do right,” he said, jostling him, “but you’ve got to make some choices.”

He smacked the brick of cash into Dutch’s hand and stalked back to camp. 

“I’m sorry it hurts, son,” he’d called after him. “It’s for the best.”

As she blows another cool stream on his neck and his eyes close again with that brief, fading relief, he makes up his mind for certain, and holds her close.

I was gonna tell you earlier. Some gold I heard about.



 

 

Notes:

Pfft, you thought that was all they got up to in that jail? Au contraire, mes amis.

Chapter 8: The Toll

Summary:

Arthur holds his coat open to display his Schofield and Volcanic, and gets a nod from the barkeep. “Yonder.”

He walks toward the man in the back, minding the beams overhead, until he stands behind the opposite chair.

“Heard you’d be here.”

“Heard correctly.”

“I’m Arthur Morgan.”

“I’ll be damned.”

Chapter Text

The flaxen grasslands sweep toward thunderheads that loom for hours before the rain falls. Mountain ranges cut ragged and snow-capped across the sky. Rolling hills sink to lowlands dipping into the water that borders it all along the southern edge, a colossal expanse of earth filled with possibilities, dangers, and secrets. Heartsinkingly vast. Men have been driven mad by the solitude, the interminable flatness of its plains, the impossible sheerness of its cliffs, untethered from the horizons they know. 

His map lies spread out on the grass, many times folded and unfolded, rocks weighting the corners. Tiny sketches mark the paper of landmarks and things he’s seen: dreamcatchers in the trees, rock formations, and abandoned shacks. Places with little more than a river yet unexplored. Burdock here. Bison spotted there. The place he will soon head for, alone, to avoid Dutch’s suspicion, is far to the north, where lines form rings upon rings of elevation and little else. Beyond the edges of the map, places still unconceived by your minds, as if to leave room for your worst fears. 

The island across from the camp hooks around an inlet protected from spying eyes, and on the rise you can see across to Blackwater, and feel invisible to everyone, the ferries, the specks on shore. That’s where he spreads out the map on his last day with you and shows you the route. The half-sunken ship lists in the inlet not far away, a broken relic of an era so far gone those terrible captains have become glorified in memory, though the ship’s remains tell a different story, rotted sailcloth and rotted wood and failed plans, lost treasure and villains hung. 

When it gets too hot, you swim. You dare to talk more and more about what you hope for, but afterward comes this uncertain disquiet, as if you have stolen from your future just to bring it to mind, and so those conversations die out and you just hold onto him as the two of you stand up to your shoulders in the sandy-bottomed lake or tread water and float and let the insects dart around you at the water’s surface and the bluegills cut beneath and sometimes rise to eat them. 

You dry off and lie together dozing in the shade. You think of your lives beginning. When you come awake you turn to him with your leg over his waist and his head under your chin. He listens to your heart and you can almost hear his working mind building the unsaid future as you run your fingers through his hair starting to get longer and curl up at his ears. 

“I hate not knowing.”

“It ain’t forever.”

“Could be. Alone out there in some pretty unforgiving country. Wish Charles could go with you.”

“Dutch can't know nothin of it, you know that. I bring Charles along, he'll have more cause to wonder.”

“Doesn’t mean I like it.”

He coaxes a ladybug from your thigh onto his finger and rotates his hand as it crawls over his knuckles until it flies away. “I feel like you’ll have it rougher here.”

You snort.

He glances up at you gravely. “Look at me.” 

“Yeah I know.”

“No, look at me.”

His blue eyes are sharp on you. He gets up on his elbow. “That bastard so much as makes your skin crawl,” he says, as earnest as you’ve ever seen him, “you kill him, and get out. I’ll find you somehow.” 

“Well he does that already.”

“I mean it, don’t make me leave thinkin you won’t.”

“I’ll kill Micah, don’t worry your pretty head.” You kiss him roughly and hug his neck and roll him on top of you. “Just get back to me. I have to spend every waking minute till then wondering if you broke your leg in a crevasse somewhere.”

“Don’t go thinkin like that.”

“How can I not?”

Both of you are silent for a minute, sobered by possibilities as the breeze rustles the leaves and birdsong chirps sweetly careless of the burdens on your minds. 

He rubs his thumb over the furrows of your forehead with a pitying smile up at you, the lines at his eyes creasing slightly. “What you still thinkin about?” 

You sigh long. A tanager flits overhead; they always take a sip of breath away from you, their brightness. “Thinking what I’ll give you to remember me by.” 

“That’s funny.”

You glance down at him.

He grazes his nose between your breasts and presses his lips to you there as his arms tighten around you. “I had it in mind the other way around.” The clouds pass overhead, and you close your eyes, the sun flaring crimson through your lids as he runs his hand down the curve of your spine.

After, you lie there as long as you can, though your chest hurts to see the sun and the ships pass, not letting you forget the fading hours of that last day together and the approaching expanse of time. And in the calm of evening you lie spanned between seats of the boat watching him pull the oars through the glassy lake and cut them back dripping over top, rocking with the hitch and glide of each stroke, and above him the sunset flooding the clouds in streaks of fading fire. The lake is so tranquil it’s as if you can hear it breathing, water brushing the shore with each slow rise of a massive chest. 

You walk with him out of camp in the fog of early morning. He leads his Hungarian, Trula, who is more surefooted on slopes than Georgia and fatter, and Apollo, who loves hills, and he leaves Georgia in your care. You help him load the horses, and look him long in the eye when he wraps his arms around you, those silent words of protection, warning, promise.

“Stay out of trouble, troublemaker.” 

He steals one last kiss, gets up on Trula and looks down. 

You check his tack and glance up. “You come back to me.”

“Nothin’ll keep me away.”

This feeling in your stomach as you watch him ride, the verge of fear, a swale of strange seclusion, you bury with every other sorrow.

He hasn’t been gone long, three days only, but you can’t help wondering if he’s sent any word. A letter. A telegram. 

Georgia, brushed to a bronze shine by Kieran, the mousy lackey who seems so afraid of everyone you have never paid him much attention, stands calmly grazing on fresh hay. Ears placid. When you approach her, she pays you no mind, and you’ll realize afterward you should have suspected something when she didn’t so much as aim an ear your way. She even let you run your hand down her foreleg and check her hoof so you would move to the rear. 

She starts to lift her hind leg for you, and before you can react, she flicks it at you, punching you squarely in the hip and sending you tumbling. Not a full kick; it’s a deliberate, restrained warning shot, and Kieran sees it happen and appears to smile to himself where he sits at the scout fire, but he doesn’t say anything.

You pick yourself up and see her now with a sly cold look in her eye, ears back. 

“That was clever of you, girl. Pretty proud of that?”

Damned if she doesn’t look smug. Kieran has to get her bridle and saddle on; she won’t let you so much as come near, not even for offerings of an apple sliced and juicy, not the finest carrots, berries, and treats you can scare up, and will hardly tolerate you mounting her with Kieran standing there holding her steady. Then she deigns to keep you on her back long enough to get you down the road out of camp before she tosses you off, and you curse Arthur as you lose hold for leaving you with his misbehaving horse. 

You roll when you hit the ground and lie there slowly moving your wrists and knees and back and neck before you stagger up and see her skipping away like she’s pleased with herself, even though her reins are hanging, and it takes you half an hour or more to catch her, this game of getting close, and her letting you get close, only for her to dart away or flutter her hindleg at you again, ready to kick in earnest.

“You nasty girl. I see that look. He’ll hear all about it, mark my words.”

When you do catch her once, you try to mount up quickly, but she’s too fast, and swings her rear toward you to knock you off balance. You manage to flinch almost out of the way when that hind leg clips you in the arm, and you dart out of range, watching her shore up to give you a better kick. 

Bitch of a fool-broke nag. You leave her, stalking back toward camp, holding your forearm, which is already blooming purple, and notice that she does follow eventually, although it’s only Kieran she’ll let near to get her tack off. She seems to make a point of acting sweet around everyone else, especially when you can see her.

You missed Sadie leaving with the wagon for town. Charles might allow you to ride Taima, but he’s away. You would row yourself to the island just to have space for yourself for a while, but Pearson’s taken the boat. The fog that morning closes in from the lake, the heat makes it hard to breathe, and even the collar of your shirt feels too tight. You try to drive out this quivering restlessness by staying busy in camp, but the one time you started to chop wood, Dutch stood nearby watching, commented on your shoulder seeming much improved, and then out of nowhere wondered aloud what Arthur was up to. And did you know, did he let you know. 

The simple answer you had agreed to give - he’d only said a job - seemed such an obvious lie now.

“Interesting that he didn’t tell you.”

The stump caught the blade of the ax and gripped it. You yanked up on it, and it wouldn’t give, and you brushed the hair out of your eyes to face Dutch.

He turned the book in his hand to see the back cover of it. “I’d have thought he’d share where he goes off to and who he sees.”

And even though you know the truth, once doubt is sown, it is hard to dispel more haunting thoughts. The hours stretch unbroken in the enclosure of camp, and in the night heat you startle awake having fallen in your dreams, and once having seen him dead in a canyon, once returning only to walk past you as if he didn’t know you, once casting you out of camp with Dutch by his side talking low-voiced in his ear, the eyes of everyone on you, betrayed, and the click click click click of empty chambers aimed at your heart.

In mid-afternoon on the sixth day the familiar terrain disappears and he finds himself faced with a different kind of horizon and the dispiriting unknown distance ahead, and his attention gets sharper, and he no longer hums to keep himself company. The landmarks he sees and occasionally sketches are strange, carvings in the rocks of odd figures, dreamcatchers in trees, and in a window rock the graffiti of madmen, figures in a circle like a clock and handprints in desperate clawing contortions. As he sketches it, he feels half mad himself, to consider the hand that made them, and he is hours down the road before that unsettlement begins to fade from his mind.

All sounds mean something different now. The sun sets later here in the summer, and yet the shadows are deeper. This is the home of predators. Wolves. Bears. Mountain lions. He keeps his shotgun loaded and extra shells on his chest. 

Not many travelers, though. More likely bandits and highway robbers. Weary wanderers and their heavy loads, alone in that harsh part of the world, ought to know better. When he sees a man standing at the side of the road up ahead, he is on his guard. 

“I hear two horses approaching,” the man hails, still a long distance away.

He takes Trula down to a walk, Apollo slowing behind, and he watches the trees for movement but doesn’t answer.

“Would you spare a dollar for a blind man?”

There’s no sign of danger yet on either side of the road or overhead. The blind man has nothing more than a walking stick and his tin cup, his coat dripping with trinkets on yarn and twine and leather lashes, tinkling when he moves. His eyelids sink in his sockets and he aims a vague smile out at the road, but cocks his ear toward him as he approaches.

“Out here this far, old timer? Dollar ain't gonna do you much.”

“Tolls are paid one way or another.”

“Can you…” Arthur reaches out with the dollar from his saddle and the man doesn't hold out the cup. He hesitates to dismount and sighs, jumping down with his Schofield uncovered by his coat. The old man passes his aloof smile toward him.

When the dollar drops in with a clink, the man grabs his wrist, and Arthur whips around scanning the trees for trouble.

“What you seek cannot be found. It was always a figment in the minds of the lost.” His tremorous grip is surprisingly strong, and shadows fill the cups of his unseeing eyes.

“Buddy, just let go,” he warns, his other hand on his Schofield. The man's trinkets jangle like shards of ice when he tries to pull away. 

“All you have,” he says, “lies in ashes, but it was not to be.”

“I don't wanna hurt you dammit.” He rips his arm from the man's grasp and reels back, spotting the trees for others and swinging up on Trula, giving her a touch of spur and clicking for Apollo. He glances over his shoulder twice down the road. The man hasn't moved and merely waits. 

Your whole life, you have never kept friends. Made acquaintances easily, sure, but there comes a time where revelations emerge, and it draws you back, that prospect, to be known any further. And so, now, in camp, there’s not much you can think to say to anyone. Arthur is all you really have in common. When Mary-Beth asks you about him, you give a reflexive answer that comes out as more of a snap - you’ve no better way of knowing than she does - which has the expected effect and now you’re more alone than ever.

Anyway, it is a different kind of trap, to be content, to stay with the ones who care about you, and you don’t mind feeling that much less attached, despite the guilt, because it means you're leaving. You take your dinner bowl to the log on the beach, you drink your coffee there too, and when Micah once sat on the other end, you might have abided him staying there except the first thing he said was that you looked especially tense, and it was clear what he meant and you left.

Hosea invites you to play dominoes and it becomes more of a daily appointment. With him there’s no expectation of friendship; when you initially turned down the invitation, he seemed to see through your act and said he was too old for new beginnings of any kind, so you feel drawn to this distraction, and to him, although you lose far more often than you win. 

“You worried?” he asks one day out of the blue, laying down a spinner. When he looks across at you, you don’t have to ask what he means.

You check around. Dutch is over by the dock, Micah snoring by the dead campfire.

“You seem worried.” He lifts a finger toward your tiles and you quickly choose one.

“I’d just like to hear word.” 

“My Bessie used to worry.” He reaches for a tile. “It made me more careful, being away. I always joked,” he says, his voice lower, “she’d find another after me so easily I’d be erased, but the fact was she would have stood at a fencepost long after hearing I was dead, and tended my grave like a garden, and I vowed I wouldn't leave her like that, at least not for having done something reckless.”

He plays, and you take time finding a tile, your mind caught up on women and waiting. When Arthur comes back, you intend to tell him you’ll never wait again, and hear no argument on the subject.

“She’d fret over Arthur too, now that I’m recalling it. But he was never a careless boy. Impulsive, but not the kind to tumble out of trees and break bones; more the kind to fight his way out of a problem.” He lays a tile. “It was rare that he’d ever get into real trouble, not for lack of trying. Got himself jailed a few times, certainly. Got better about that as he grew up, thank god.”

You win, without meaning to. “Are you worried?”

“After Arthur?” He stands slowly, groaning, and puts on his hat. “If anyone is capable of coming back in one piece, it's that boy.” He pats his pockets, and stops a moment, staring at the ground. “And I worry every day.” He rests a hand on your shoulder, putting enough weight on you to share his meaning, and then with a couple of pats goes off in search of whatever it is he can’t find.

When you walk past Georgia on your way to go on watch, she turns her rump to you. She still won’t mind you, though you give her hay twice a day and sidle toward her calmly, and the most you’ve been able to do is get her girth strap on, although she holds her breath and so you can’t get it tight enough to ride her. As if she knows you’re stuck and is amused to torment you.

So when she does the same, shunning you as you come back in the middle of the night, you take it harshly to be so rebuffed, and it makes his tent, as you pass it, seem that much more vacant, as if his time away has made it less his own. The camp is quiet. Not even Kieran is awake at this hour.  You steal inside in the dark and sit on his cot just as silently, inhaling as you lie down as if the faint smell of him in his pillow or the canvas will rekindle him to you for a while and summon a few vibrant thoughts in the darkness.

That last day on the island. Something to remember him by. When his hand stroked down your cheek, your neck, your shoulder, and lightened, adoring his favorite contour, cradling your breast as he kissed your flesh and pulled your body toward him. Your nipple was like a bright currant in his mouth, savored by the slow swirl of his tongue. And how could you ever lose the sensation of his cheek rasping your chest, his wanting mouth, his powerful arms around you, his hand following the course of your spine he knew so well, and his lips sowing gentle affection down the light trench of your center line, chin scratching over your mons, one final look up, and how it took your breath away, the way he turned and kissed your inner thigh? As if he had waited as long as he could. 

You reached down, wanting to touch him, to be fair, to be equal, and he had lifted his head, interrupted, as if you had undone some of his handiwork. His eyes said wait, but even more lovingly forbade you, and he started again kissing the soft skin on the inside of your knee, when you tried to move his hair out of his eyes.

“Scuse me, miss, I’m workin here.”

“Oh? Does it pay well?”

“Its own reward. Now hush, I'm tryin to concentrate.”

And he glanced up in his slow progress until he got your eyes to close, your head to roll, until he heard your sigh, and knit his right fingers with yours. 

He yoked your leg over his shoulder, pressing into your hip just to urge you, to feel your muscles grip him and your heel dig into his back as he opened you and took you with his mouth. His deliberate tongue coaxed your clit, lapping up from your entrance and plying the bud before each reveled, carnal kiss. Again. More willful now as your hips began to drive into him and he gripped you tighter.  Mouth now sucking, now begging at your cunt. When he’s about to make you come like this, your high feels round and almost too much to endure without him inside you, and hearing you moan like that, he had to stop and hold himself, hard and ready. 

Arthur - Your fingers swept behind his ear, pleading for him to come up to you.

Shh, sweetheart, dammit sorry, he bowed his head, half-smiling and wincing, knelt upright and looked away, give me a second.

Can you bear it? you panted, and slid your hand between your legs, more to tempt him back. 

Not when you - His face blanked when you touched yourself.

I can’t bear it. All that time you’ll be gone -

He dropped his head like this was some kind of torture. You let him rest two eternal seconds. 

“And I’ll think of this moment.”

He snorted in spite of himself and then grimaced. “You are evil.”

“Couldn’t help it.” You pursed your grin away and he grabbed your foot tight about to drag you by it, but ran his thumb up and down your arch like he got distracted by the feel of you.

“It’s your fault anyway, bein…”

“Me being…?”

He swallowed. Shook his head sifting through too many words, eyes on you. 

“Turned on by you?” you said. Lord, he blushed, even then.

“And by the way you touch me? The way you treat me?” You sat up and eased him backward to make him sit, propped back on his hands, and you straddled his lap and took his cock in your hand.

He’d looked like he would gladly be buried right there if he could, to hear you talk like that, his jaw skewed. 

“And what a good man you are.”

“Nell -” he shook his head, and you watched that thought start to take him down the wrong path.

“You’re trying.” You kissed his neck. “We’re trying. This thing you’re going off to do, it’s trying to do better, and not just for you.”

He wiped his hand over his face and had to look away, to watch one of the ferry boats calmly glide toward Blackwater, faint on that distant shore, and suddenly he realized what he was seeing and glared down, reminded of a different scene many weeks ago blazing against that same western sky that made him close his eyes and stop your hand. 

You touched his cheek. After a moment lost, far away, he turned his head and kissed your wrist, and the private shadow that crossed his face when he thought you weren’t watching vanished with the vein in his temple. 

You rested your hand on the back of his neck, and leaned in until your forehead touched his, until he looked at you. “Anyway, I don’t think I’d like you if you were all good.”

“Well good, you ain’t gettin that.” He still sounded sullen.

“Good.” You rose up on your knees, maybe on purpose bringing him close as you draped your arms on his shoulders, and he was somewhat defenseless in that proximity to your breasts and unable to give you his full attention while you said something or other about the goodness of men, and you didn’t get his notice again until you said something on another subject.

“What was that?” Those blue eyes, captive, willing, brought back from worlds away to focus up on you. 

You told him what you wanted.

He smiled into your chest, but for a last serious spell held your hips, those pondering rough hands sculpting over your shape, and you let him mull the curve of your ass, the shape of your thigh, the skin of your flank as he settled the concerns on his mind, and watched him until your neck weakened and his hand smoothed up between your legs and he couldn’t stop himself kissing your breast, and the hollow sound of his breath in his mouth stirred you. 

He pulled you closer by the back of your neck and kissed you deeply, his tongue riving into your mouth, and you pressed yourself to him. With that vicious gleam of his teeth like he would give you everything you asked for, he hauled you tight to him with one arm, grinding you against his cock until you were both worked up again past wanting, and you knelt up higher when he took himself in hand to align himself at your entrance and you watched his closing eyes as you lowered onto him, stretching yourself with a gasp and clinging to him shaking before he began to work your hips, his mouth on your neck, his hands on your ass and your back and your neck, wrenching you tighter to him. When it wasn’t enough, he lifted you off him, crawled over you as you lay back, and he fucked you the way he needed to, your bodies tight together, until that delirious unstoppable surrender bridged you up into him, and he groaned against your cheek as he jerked and you felt him come, warm and pulsing with your own release, and he swore and started to pull back but you kissed him silent, his words dissolving, and held him tighter. For a few breaths you lay together with him still inside you, and you never wanted his weight on you to lighten. The sensation of him pulling out of you was just the same as longing. 

While you lay there together, he traced a pensive finger from the scar on your shoulder across your clavicle and ran the backs of his fingers down your breastbone. A strange consternation tightened his brow. You asked him what, and he smiled down at his hand.

“Think I’ll spend the rest of my life tryin to square with hatin the man who shot you and thankin him for bringin you to me.”

You wipe tears on the shoulder of your shirt and turn over on his cot.

“Guess you ain’t lucky enough to die today, son.”

He’d heard it the first time at fourteen years old, but didn’t understand it. He’d stood on the hitching post to get on the magnificent beast, that great white stallion, The Count’s predecessor, and turned him down the thoroughfare and given him a kick. The horse charged under him, and for a few glorious seconds he believed he’d actually managed to steal a horse as fine as that. He was hardly out of town when it bucked him off so hard he was still knocked out cold when the two men reached him.

The older one crouched down and swatted his face with the back of his hand.

“Hey kid, you still know your name?” 

The other stood over him with his arms crossed. The gold and garnet ring on his finger when he reached down to pull him up caught the sun and shone like a promise. To a starving kid like him, he was the richest and wisest man he’d ever met. 

“Guess you ain’t lucky enough to die today, son.” 

The second time. Eleven years on. He’d squinted in agony, blinded by sunlight, blinded by pain. Still breathing. Then Dutch’s shadow passed over him and he could open his eyes. “You ain’t never doin anything that stupid and reckless again, you hear me?” His voice was furious. "Only man does that has a death wish. Is that what that was?"

Couldn’t look at him. Rolled to his side, pushed himself up to sit, all he could do. His voice just a croak. “Don’t tell Hosea.”

And they’d never speak of it again. Nor the two crosses around the side of the little house outside of town. Dutch sat there a long time with him in the dirt being silent. Maybe this wasn't what it looked like. Maybe it was. The best cure, Dutch said, the only cure he knew, was work. That very night, they robbed a goddamn company stage. His heart wasn’t in it, but it got him out of his thoughts. Long enough that he could stand to sleep, and face another day. And another. 

It was painful to think of the man who had saved him, and now to appear to forget all he’d done for him. He’d taught him decency, even if they weren’t always decent. They tried. Hard to reckon now with what he was doing, whether it was decent or selfish, and what did he owe and what was he within his rights to want for.

But you could walk away from a good man and it didn’t make you wrong. He’d thought through how he’d put it to him. While he still had it in him, he wanted to have his own life. One he’d almost had a couple of times and lost. A man don’t get many chances. And this one, well, Dutch, if you love me like a son, you’ll understand. This gold, if it’s what it’s said to be, will make the rest easier. Get out from the Pinkertons’ reach. You’ll come around on it eventually. But I gotta try. She…I can’t have that life here. 

You’ll betray me one day, son. It is how things go.   

He forces Dutch out of his mind for a while and distracts himself on those long miles with thoughts of where they’ll get land, building a structure in his mind of posts and beams and staircases. Mountain lakes or desert vistas out the windows; she would have to decide because he cannot. And those nights when he is not too tired from the day, lying there on his bedroll, he thinks of her lying with him, not on hard ground but on a proper bed, and the warmth of her body with his, but has not indulged his own need, even though sometimes he could damn near ache to satisfy himself. 

That day, the heat of the brilliant mountain sun had fallen heavy on him over too few hard miles spent cheering Trula up craggy paths with sheer drops down the side, and sweet-talking her down switchback trails blazed by someone intent on torturing those who would follow. He lies there now in the radiant heat of his skin, quickly chilled in the night air, feeling no midway point of comfort and weak against the solitude and silence. When he thinks of Nell, it’s in that house he sees her, dreamlike moonlight all around.

The door opens quietly creaking, and he walks with care to the foot of their bed where she sleeps.

The sleek new curve of her belly. 

Jesus christ, he can’t believe that’s what comes to mind or that it turns him on so purely, and he almost stops himself with an uneasy sense of propriety, or that old pain, but it hurts him more to let go of that image, the shape of her under the sheet.  

The fullness of her breasts. She sleeps deep now. She’d asked him to wake her, or he wouldn’t.

He removes his duster, his belts, his guns, laying his clothes over the arm of a chair, and before putting his full weight on the bed he leans on one hand and touches her hip. She sleeps nude under the sheet now in hot weather, and it skims like sealskin over every curve and line and bone of the range of her body in the moonlight. His hand rasps up her lovely contour, dipping to her flank, not too lightly up her ribs, over the glowing cap of her shoulder, and falling down to her neck, the light tendrils of her hair. Down her spine, under the sheet, rising over her hip to her belly as he gets into bed behind her, and he lies skin to skin with her. His hand feels that small roundness and cradles her as he kisses her neck and she stirs, hips forcing back into him. She sighs to feel his stiffening cock. She reaches behind her for him and grasps his shaft, stroking him sleepily, and he tunnels his right arm under her neck and finds her hand on the other side. 

He runs his left hand up underneath her thigh. Before he can ask, she’s reaching between her legs and guiding him to work her open while she fingers her clit - jesus, he gets rock hard thinking about that lovely slip of her hand when she touches herself - and when he slides his finger into her, her entire body awakens against him.  The cup of her mouth spills the slightest sounds of breath and pleasure, and her sighs come light and faster on his neck as he pushes his cock along her ready slit. 

She pulls his head down with a needy kiss, and he enters her, aching to feel her so slick and ready for him. His fingers caress her clit as he withdraws and pushes in again, and they move together, wash into each other, and leave his soul beguiled. She grabs his waist behind her as if she needs to hold on through each wave of deep mounting pleasure, opening her legs for him - that wide willing spread when he presses back on the inside of her knee - her spine arching, her moans gutting him as he fucks his wet cock into her deeper, his fingers grinding, her gasps rising to that beautiful wasted groan of his name as she comes. 

He comes harder than he expected to, panting as he spills into his hand and on his bare stomach, and lies there a minute, running his other hand down his face and already losing the image of her. What used to feel lonesome and shameful is more of a short-lived solace now. Every thought of her a promise.

But a promise unfulfilled. He sleeps badly and wakes early, sore and depleted, everything taking more effort. Feeding the horses. Getting water from the stream. Forcing down food when he just feels nauseated and out of breath in the thin air. He’d picked a nice spot for his camp, and would ordinarily spend some time sketching the view from the comfort of the shade, but he can’t settle this morning. Even coffee takes too long, and he drinks it standing, looking out over the valley already feeling the fatigue of those many miles heading north, the land going cold and colorless. 

It could be the bad sleep, or the altitude, or just the weary miles, but that day he leads Trula around a rock in the trail without seeing the ledge on the other side crumbling, and before she loses her balance he vaults off her, his boots barely catching the ledge before he slides with a heartstopping drop, scraping his chest on the rocks and scree, and he thinks in that slow split second about what she would do if he died right now, they hadn't spoken of it, would she wait too long, until he can grab a root to stop himself. He clings there, pulse racing in his ears, and after a moment he’s able to get his feet under himself and make his shaky way back up to the path, where he sits for a time to get his wind back. Shirt torn up, neck scratched. Hit his jaw on something, bleeding a little. Feels his teeth with his tongue, tasting blood, and finds where he bit the inside of his cheek. Careless. Stupid. 

“That was a close one, girl, I’m sorry” he groans, standing with a swoop of vertigo and easing away from the ledge. He cinches Trula’s saddle tighter and leads her and Apollo to a wider part of the trail before mounting up again. Every step more dangerous now.

“Let’s get on. Bein a good girl for me.”

It is the quietness of some tragedy that is the worst part. As if it has lived among you for an unknown time before it betrays itself. You walk into camp with a stringer of fish, and there is not much sound to accompany the evening activity. The near-silent slap of cards on the table. The slip of a needle and thread through cloth soundless as a wisp of smoke. Conversations low, unheated, dreamy. The dog barks far away, but he barks all the time, to the extent that you all have come to ignore him. 

So quiet, it could steal from you unnoticed. 

It might be a new note in the dog’s bark, or you notice the direction it comes from, and then Abigail’s shout, and John’s, and all at once eyes turn toward the sound. Abigail is splashing up to her thighs in the lake, fighting the resistance of the water and the weight of it dragging her skirts. John follows, though he seems choked to a halt by an invisible chain, and stands in water to his waist, powerless. That small cap of brown hair sticking out of the water is too far out, almost invisible, motionless in that sickening way that you know in your gut isn’t playing. Your boots are already off, stringer dropped, as you sprint in a long line past Abigail, splashing, and swim furiously toward that spot, the dog still barking, paddling near it, and somehow you pull him up as he sinks, somehow you tow him back in that dark water, and you stand up to your knees at the shore holding him face-down, beating against his back, heaving up on his belly, shaking his heavy limp little body and hearing nothing else around you in the muffled daze of this moment, not the wail of his mother, not the shouts of his father, not your own voice demanding that he breathe, not until that life-sparking spasm in your arms that breaks the soundless bubble, water retched again and again from his lungs, the coughing, the awful terrified wheezing sobs in your ear as he clings to you, and Abigail reaches you and peels him off you, and you sink down to sit in the knee-deep water with the dog. You can’t stop petting his head.  

Charles arrives in the confusion of the aftermath, having heard it all. He helps you up from the water, but you would have stayed there for hours with the dog. A few of the girls and Uncle gather in a hesitant scatter around the tent, hearing muffled whimpers and Abigail’s hum, as if they need to be reassured for a while before they’re satisfied. Even Dutch stands at the opening of his tent, smoking his cigar and wisely offering no commentary on the matter. John has walked away, and Charles goes after him. 

When Abigail calls out your name, you go right in. Jack huddles in one of his daddy’s shirts, covered up in bed, and Abigail says he kept asking for you. She lies down behind him, and you sit, still wet, on the rug as his small hand clasps yours. His whole body jerks with the hucking remnants of sobs. It’s dark by the time you’re able to pry your hand away, put a blanket over Abigail, and duck out of the tent, shivering despite the heat in the air. 

“That was quite the selfless act, Miss Riordan.” 

Dutch sits with Micah at the table, and you’re too exhausted to come up with anything to say but “Only lucky he’s okay.” 

“Humble too.” Micah smirks and lights a cigarette. “Downright noble.”

“We are all thankful for Miss Riordan’s humble heroism, saving our little Jack.” Dutch salutes you with his cigar as you pass.

You would turn and ask them what their game was if you had any energy to, and weariness is all that will save you from coming unhinged in front of them. 

Two weeks and a day he’s been gone.

 


 

The mining town of Fallkirk lies eight miles behind Tempest Ridge. It takes him an extra day to get there in the snow, and at the entrance to this ice-whipped village already past sundown he longs for any shelter and dreads it all the same. There is, thankfully, a farrier in town with stables for Trula and Apollo, with cracks in the walls letting out a little amber light onto the dusk-blue snow blowing across the thoroughfare. 

He gets pointed to the tavern he’s heard about by the farrier, but even then it takes him a pass to notice the place, a sunken old structure with three steps leading down to its solid oak door, and he has been shivering the last two miles, since the sun dipped beyond the peaks, so even the relative warmth of that cold room is some relief. 

He has to duck under the door frame and stand between the beams. A pair of bearded men sit at a table to his left not saying much, watching him enter. The barkeep in a bearskin coat feels the gust of him coming in and stands up from his stool, and although Arthur doesn’t know the local customs, whether to state his business or order a drink first and make himself unthreatening, he feels decent about glancing around to get the situation in mind - the two bearded men, the barkeep, and the one man far back by the potbelly stove - before making himself plain.

“I’m lookin for Juney Rider.” 

“It’s manners to show your tools.” The barkeep stands at his counter, gloved hands on the top. His shotgun hangs under the shelf behind him, with another no doubt just under his hands. 

Arthur holds his coat open to display his Schofield and Volcanic, and gets a nod from the barkeep. “Yonder.”

He walks toward the man in the back, minding the beams overhead, until he stands behind the opposite chair.

“Heard you’d be here.”

“Heard correctly.”

“I’m Arthur Morgan.”

“I’ll be damned.” 

You had spent the morning rigging up a round pen in the grove, tying ropes from tree to tree until you had a more or less circular enclosure, and kicked away rocks and any weird plant that would possibly spook. After three tries just to get a saddle on Georgia, and another seven trying to mount her, when she would swing her rear end into you and jolt you off balance, you’d had enough. You decided a couple of things about Arthur Morgan in the process, not breaking this misbehaving horse anywhere near right. She bit, she pushed, she hopped like a skittish colt at the slightest brush of your spurs, acting sensitive when she just didn’t want you riding. She took a bite at your hair and could have scalped you if you hadn’t pulled away fast enough, and now you have it braided and pinned up under your hat, and you carry a willow stick for lunging, and face her. You’ve broken more than a few horses. You can get one ornery buckskin to mind you for a while. 

Within minutes you are on your ass in the leaves swearing and she’s over by the trees looking pleased with herself.

“Sugar cubes.” A rasping voice calls from behind you.

You get up and dust yourself off. John stands by the ropes, watching. 

"After everything I’ve tried?"

“Fuckin plain old sugar cubes is what he gives her, and lots of em. Only thing that’ll make her hew to. That is the most spoiled horse I ever met. She ain’t felt so much as a spur from him.” 

You leave Georgia to act proud for a while and limp over to him. He runs his hand along the rope and looks down when you approach.

“Damn does she ever work for him though. Never saw a horse so in love with her person.” He rubs his chin and smiles, this man who hasn’t said two words to you together, if that, the entire time you’ve been there. 

“Fuckin plain old sugar, huh.”

He waves his hand up toward her. “Yeah, so just lead her a while, let her have her treats, and she’ll let you ride her. Probably. You’re a woman. I don’t know. Could be jealous.” 

“Lead her around, fatten her up on sugar, John’s idea.” You wink.

“Hell no, get me in trouble with the big guy. Keep her workin. I didn’t tell you a thing.” 

You smile at that scarred-up outlaw who can’t be teased. “What was I doing, thinking I could get her to mind me?”

“I don’t know what he’s thinkin, leavin you here.”

“Long story.”

“Usually is, with him.”

You suffer a little silence between you, and then you both look up ready to say something, and he beats you to it.

“You saved my boy,” he blurts, somehow unable to face you for too long; he’ll always be that way, though he’ll feel more comfortable with time. “I’ll never find a way to thank you.”

“It’s just what you do.” 

He swallows, clears his throat, shakes his fist in thought a few times as he gets control of himself, and still can hardly speak, and the brim of his hat conceals his face. “You say that until you can’t. Then you know.” 

That evening, they invite you to have dinner with them on a blanket spread on the beach, John and Abigail, and Jack is animated, telling you about catching frogs, and you share the last few sips of a bottle of whiskey and the view of the peach sunset over the lake, and while you chat about fine nothings, funny stories Abigail tells, you somehow feel closer to Arthur than you’ve felt all that time. Jack sits heavy in your lap as he gets tired, and plays with your locket, opening and closing it, and asks what goes inside. You tell him to find something special, the right size, and you’ll keep it there.

Later, you lead Georgia up the shore on the south side of camp in the dark of the new moon, only starlight and its reflection on the lake to see by, and you keep holding out cube after cube of sugar on the flat of your hand to coddle this horse, ridiculous as it is. She lips them delicately from you.

When you reach the roped-off pen, you unhook her lead and back away, and then you take his old blue shirt from your satchel and put it on. It’s been washed, but still smells like him, deep into the fibers, and you hold the inside of his collar to your nose and breathe in. Her ears perk with interest, nostrils flaring and huffing the air, and you stand there, ten feet from her, with your arms at your sides. She steps forward until she’s glowering over you, black mane like brushstrokes of ink down her face and neck, and you let her bump her nose into you, inhaling deeply from the shirt, nose nudging your chest just hard enough to rock you on your feet, testing you. Can you take it, see through it, work for her heart like he did? He gives her rein enough not to break her spirit, and she reads his every twitch and knows when he needs her.  

You back away a few steps and she advances. You stop, she stops. Moving slowly, you bend down and unbuckle your spurs, and you unhook one of the rope barriers you’d tied. The spurs clang when you toss them aside for her to see. 

She nudges you more softly this time, and blows into your shoulder. When you reach up to stroke her blaze, she lets you, and presses into your hand. She permits your touch on her neck, on her withers, and then your grasp of them. And although you feel the strain where you were shot, you manage to pull yourself up on her bare back. 

“You are something different, girl. No wonder he’s yours.” You pat her neck. “Will you take me too?”

You grasp her mane and press gently with your knees. She responds, and lets you guide her to the opening between the trees, then trots when you ask her, out to the road, and when you’ve got her where you want her, when you are sure of your balance and feel her muscles quivering, you ask if she will get up for you.

Under that wide and brilliant sky she surges forward, but you felt her getting ready, and you realize as you hurtle with all her power under you that you have been ready for this for some time. The starlit road stretches far away, open, leading into the dark beyond. You hold on and let her fly you.

That night, he had sat across from the traitor of all traitors, not knowing what he expected. A man who had been successful in some perverse way. Any ideas he had of what he’d look like were erased from memory now. This man was pale, thin, mustache wiry and long, hair long and drawn like weeds dredged up from a swamp. 

“What is Van der Linde’s ace doing up north of Tempest Ridge.”

“We playin polite?”

Juney smirked. “Best you ask for the whiskey. He makes me get up for it.”

Arthur called for two, and the bartender set down a stingy tumbler in front of each of them. 

“Where’s the gold, Juney.”

Juney drank his glass immediately, and sucked it off his upper lip. “I suppose a shot like you has no need for beatin around bushes.” 

Every breath was like a long sigh, letting off the exhaust of his soul. He had never seen a more ruined man. Juney squinted at him.

“What’s the look for?” Arthur left his whiskey sitting in front of him, catching a gold glow from the coal stove.

“If you’re here, I figure something has already started. Dutch Van der Linde is old-guard. He ain’t a scavenger. He’s a hunter. You want a bead on Tom Hall’s gold, tells me you ain’t bein fully truthful or you ain’t fully loyal anymore.” 

“Bet on it not bein truthful then.”

“Sure, shooter. Where you boys been? Whole world’s been lookin for you.”

Arthur sat back in the hard chair and lit a smoke. The stove gave off little heat, just enough to warm the side of his leg. “A nice patch of paradise out of reach.”

“Then I have to wonder,” Juney said with an odd smirk.

“Wonder what.” He had a lawman’s way of sidling over to the point, and Arthur had no patience for it.

“What the men of the goddamned Blackwater Massacre want with a few gold bars.” 

“I ain’t here to chat.”

“I don’t have the gold.”

“Bullshit.”

The man across the table was nothing like the man he’d heard of. Silver-spurred. Silver-tongued. Well-liked. A mustache finely trimmed on his lip in a wry curve that lent certain cleverness to all his quips.

“Order me a capon, will you? Won’t serve me here.”

“Get the man a -”

“I heard him,” the barkeep muttered, and trudged into the back.

Juney shook his head bitterly, propped over his elbows on the tabletop, his neck crooked like a vulture’s, watching the barkeep ignore him. “So here you see me, the big rat, is that it?” He rolled his own smoke with fingertips blackened by the coal he fed into the stove and the perpetual frost. “They’re bringing all the old gangs down, don’t think me the last or worst.”

“I ain’t heard of another.”

“You will.”

Arthur drank, wiped his mouth on his wrist.

“Frontier’s closed. Civilization movin in. All the railroad men want passage without you all scarin off the rich folk, the ones they want funding miles of track and buildin up their cities.”

“Yeah I heard it all. You lawmen all think you know how folk oughta act. Fearin consequences instead of actin out of a sense of rightness.” Dutch's philosophies suddenly felt dry in his mouth. 

“You are the last one to talk to me about that.”

“No doubt. But at least I ain’t pretendin I done right all along while hangin men for your same crimes.”

“Oh you just come up here to pass judgment?”

“I come up here to relieve you of a burden.”

Juney let out a simpering string of huffs from his nose, and in the sweep of his head to one side gave the passing impression of the outlaw he had been known for. Like an old photograph eaten in flames.

When the kitchen boy brought the chicken out it was a gristly dark-fried mound on a tin plate, no longer steaming, and Juney pulled it apart hastily and sucked the greasy bones clean. His lips shone in the lamplight.

“I always liked you, what I heard about. Righteous right hand of Dutch’s Boys. This fool’s errand you’re on won’t help nobody. Gold. Pfft. Have it; it won’t save you.” He talked while he chewed and swiped his greasy fingers dismissively in the air. “Mark my words, the door is almost closed. You owe what you can’t pay. They’ll take everything that’s precious, son, everything, they’ll make it hurt before you die.”

Whether they were the slow-wasting words of a coward or the last wise words he would ever hear from the only man who knew the future, he hears them again and again going over the mountain pass. And then at the base, where the road forks, when it comes time to pick a path, it feels like there was never any choice at all. 

He thinks, as he heads that way, what a fool Rider was, livin in all his justified cowardice. But it sits with him, what he’d said. Like some old crone reading fortunes in the bones all strewn around him.

“You got no idea what’s comin.”

Hosea had caught you that morning as you were brushing Georgia, and handed the letter to you. The look on his face shared this secret, having been entrusted with it, taking it seriously. He clasped your hand as he gave it to you. You mouthed thank you and tucked it away. 

Now Jack waits patiently at the opening of the girls’ tent with a present. The tip of an arrowhead. Sharp on its point, sharp where it broke away, small enough to fit crosswise in the locket, and you let Jack snap the clasp shut and you tousle his hair. He hands you the bottle of tonic Abigail sent him over with, which you tuck into your satchel.

“This looks like leavin.”

Micah passes the opening of the tent and backs up.  You reflexively keep Jack behind you.

“For a little while.”

He grips the support above his head and hangs there, watching. “I always get nervous, folk leavin with all their things, if it’s just a ‘little while.’ Makes a fella wonder where they’re goin and what secrets they like to tell.”

What meager belongings you’ve accumulated in the past weeks, they fit in a saddle pack. Just a few articles of clothing. Your tin mug. That ripped-up dress you can’t throw away. “You think I’ve got some secrets, do you?”

“It’s our secrets I’m protectin.” He pretended a peek at your clothes, and sucked in a relishing breath, as if there were something titillating there. “But since you mentioned it, there are things you ain't told anyone.”

You usher Jack out of the tent and back away again. The acrid smell from the darkened armpits of Micah’s coat is enough to turn your stomach.

“What could those be.” Your gun is just two feet away. He’s wearing his.

“Thought I’d give you a chance to tell me.”

Your breath held in, your heart a trapped and fluttering bird. 

“Before Dutch starts to hear things.”

“You don’t know shit.”

“Don’t I?”

“There's nothing to know.”

He releases the tent support and stands up straight with his thumbs on his gun belt and rakes his teeth over his bottom lip. “Only one thing gets you killed in this camp, did you know that? Honey? Now,” he says, stepping inside, “if I was runnin things, might be different. You got a generous man right out there giving you shelter, giving you food and drink and a place here among folk who might feel threatened if they knew what you was. I wouldn’t be so generous. And truth be told - something that ain’t been done much around here lately - nothin would really stop me from taking you in the woods right now and squeezing that pretty neck of yours. Old Arthur ain’t even here to get in the way. If you was hidin somethin, I mean.” He leans forward and sniffs your neck, and straightens back up, hardly a smile on his face, just his staring eyes taking you in like he owns you. 

Your hand aches to grab your revolver. You just stare him down. “I don’t have any secret every other outlaw in this camp doesn’t have.”

“Where you off to.”

“None of your goddamn business.”

“What’s he out there doin?”

“Bein a better man than you.”

“Oh I'm sure he is, honey. Good old Arthur.” He steps closer. Still watching your face, he wraps his hand around your hand that is pointing your knife into his gut, just piercing the fabric of his shirt. His hand loosens and he backs away one step, but he didn’t fear you the instant your knife pricked him, and he doesn’t now.

You can hardly keep from seething. “The next time you touch me, you’ll be dead before you realize what happened to you.”

“I doubt that.”

“If you think you know something, say it, you snake.”

He chuckles, a crackling sound from his chest. “Tell old Arthur when you see him there’s a job when he gets back. Out by Twin Stacks. In a week.”

“He doesn’t take orders from you.”

“It’s from Dutch.”

He slinks out from the tent and nearly runs into Mary-Beth as she is coming in. From the sympathy in her eyes, you could burst into tears. She clasps your hand as you pick up your bag, and you squeeze, feeling undeserving of her kindness, and it’s hard to say more than a mumbled thanks to her as you leave the tent, perhaps for the last time.

Dutch stands at the mouth of his tent, watching as you go past. He smokes clouds over his head and says nothing, but his expectant glare follows you long after you can’t see him.

When you get to Georgia, your eyes are fierce enough that Kieran backs away from you.

The letter is folded in the pocket of your shirt and you put your hand over it for reassurance. When you get on Georgia, she’s as goddamned ready as you are.

Found something. Meet in Valentine. Ready for a long ride. 

 

Chapter 9: The Hanging Dog Part I

Summary:

You've been apart for weeks. Then, a letter.

 

Found something. Meet in Valentine. Ready for a long ride.

Chapter Text

He’s waiting for you at the crossroads outside town in the dry heat, his hat pushed back, arms crossed leaning on his pommel as if he saw you coming miles away. Freshly barbered just for you, and finer than your memories could hold. 

The last few miles, you read and reread his note, and almost lost it on the breeze when it flitted out of your hand and caught stiffly against your shirt. You slapped your hand over it as if it was the only evidence you had that you were going in the right direction, and without it the possibility existed that you might have merely dreamt it all.

And now he's sitting there easy, waiting, talking soft to his mare, and you watch him over the last quarter mile, as he pinches his brim at a passing cart, and his look on you coming toward him like you are the rising sun. You have to rein Georgia back, and she heeds you, barely. 

“‘Meet you in Valentine,’” you call as you get closer. “‘Ready for a long ride’?” 

"You up for it, pretty girl?" he calls back, his half-cocked smile keen on you after all those weeks gone, and you can hardly contain the pure elation it fires in you. 

"Might be." 

He’s jostled in the saddle as Trula shivers flies away, and his hat brim cuts down while he adjusts it, and then up, unshadowing his face and the slight flush he can’t conceal. He clears his throat. “Long trip here.”

“I’m about ready to fall off.” You wipe your grimy forehead with your wrist. “You sure it's safe for you here?”

“Sure as I ever am.” And somehow the ease of his seat in the saddle, the tilt of his head, has you believing him. “C’mon. I got us a place.” He steers Trula around and gets up to a trot heading up toward the station on that gentle rise into town.

You walk Georgia in a line behind him past the stockyards and along the edge of the crowd gathered for a hanging. He doesn’t turn his head to watch, though you know it's on his mind, and you search the crowd for lawmen. His broad back sways with Trula’s walk, as if he is enjoying an ambling pace under the late afternoon sun, his right hand resting on his thigh, his left doing nothing much to guide her.

To your right, five o’clock is signaled by the clap of the trapdoor and the dull smack of a rope going taut with dead weight, and you jump and Georgia stops short.

All that registers ahead of you of the death of a man is the barely perceptible tightening of Arthur’s shoulders and the brief twitch of Trula’s ears.  

While you buy a few more provisions, he gets the horses stabled for the night, where he’s boarded Apollo already, and he gets your things up to the hotel room. You gather coffee, salted beef, a few cans of beans, tobacco. A pair of deerskin chaps for yourself. As you come out with a flour sack full of supplies, he’s standing across the road, leaning against the hitching post, waiting for you, smoking. You cross to him, avoiding the deeper puddles, and he takes the sack from you with a playful swipe of his brim, and he holds out his hand to let you pass in front of him up to the boardwalk. His face might as well have Roman numerals on it for the time he’s keeping in his head until you’re up in that hotel. After all those weeks, even a few minutes is over the line. 

“Deputy was just in the store,” you whisper.

“I’m watchin.”

But you can feel his gaze on your ass as he follows you, as close as an almost complete lack of decorum will allow. Still, there are errands to finish. Ammunition. You buy a paper. He starts talking technicalities with the gunsmith, and you stroll along the wall of weapons listening to their rural back-and-forth. 

There’s a strange ease in the way he talks to people he’s not robbing. He passes for one of them, but only by resemblance. Often they are struck plain by the presence of a man who would never fear them, and whom they would absolutely fear were they to cross less favorable paths. They all sense it, not knowing it is the sense of potential peril, withheld at his whim. 

You, for one, are impatient, and he knows you’re impatient, and without looking at you, knowing exactly how well you can hear him, he proceeds to ask the gunsmith another question about the rifling on his Schofield, rifling you know he had improved last time he was in this damn shop, and so you have to go outside with a cigarette to keep you from throwing dirty looks. When he comes out, you stride across the muddy thoroughfare in front of a coach, leaving him to wait for it to pass. Through the coach windows, you catch him watching with a smile, and you look away, not really piqued, but playing it. 

At the saloon, neither of you is very hungry for the food in front of you, but you both sip down a tumbler of whiskey while sitting in the shadows near the barber, Arthur’s back to the wall as the evening sunlight stretches across the planks of the floor. 

The conversations around you are casual, bored, and the clack of poker chips on the table far to your right and the frill of the card shuffle beat a tranquil percussion. You swallow a warm sip of your whiskey not quite knowing what to say first, and he seems at ease, except for the fingers of his right hand as he works them sometimes against the numbness that comes on from a lifetime of gripping guns and reins. 

You start to speak at the same time, and he shuts his mouth with a patient tip of his head.

“Really no one with eyes on you?” 

“Really no one, Red.” He drinks, leaning back, and he’s watchful but has this cockiness you hate when there’s real danger. You know for a fact his face is on a poster in the sheriff’s office and the train station for shooting up half the town. He just had the damn barber trim his hair and beard, though they seem to have a certain understanding, the way Arthur lifts the edge of his glass to him, the way the barber nods and swipes his nose. 

“If it makes you feel better, got you a souvenir.” He digs a folded paper out of his pocket and flicks it across the table to you like a playing card. You start to open it and he gestures to keep it low, while the top half of his face stares up at you from his wanted poster, torn off a pin from a board somewhere.

“Not sure ‘feeling better’ is how I’d put it.” But you stick it in your satchel with the other note. You have no other likeness of him.

His knee presses the inside of your knee under the table. You feel his boot ride up against yours. Which is rich, considering the dawdling he did at the gunsmith. You get up. When he starts to rise with you, instead you order two more drinks and he slumps again, recognizing payback. 

But you can’t keep up the act, after all this time. When you sit down with your drinks, he slides his knee next to yours again, and it’s hard to suppress the flit in your stomach. The whiskey only stokes it, as does his knee, unmoving.

“I got it Nell.” His eyes glint like you haven’t seen them since, lord, maybe since he looked up at a bluebird sky one perfect day and then at you.

“He give you any trouble?”

“Not really.” The twitch of the side of his nose betrays the lie you all tell. “You ready for a ride tomorrow?” 

“Do I get my horse back?”

“You can have your horse back.” His heavy-lidded smile, magnetic.

“Good.” 

“Miss me?” 

You give a playful shrug that makes him smirk, and then you sit back and plant your boot between his legs, firmly nudging your toe up to his crotch and pressing on the contour there you can feel through your sole. His legs clamp on your boot and he grabs your foot, shooting a look at you, provoked.

“Troublemaker.” 

“That was a long time you left me.”

“Too long.”

“That's the last time that I stay back waiting.” Whatever speech you’d made up over all those miles, that’s the most you can manage now, and your heart isn’t in it for scolding, seeing what the journey took out of him, the deeper shadows under his cheekbones, the fatigue in his posture.

“Oh yes, ma’am.” He nods seriously at you but can’t hide that expression, the one you missed all that time. And he won’t let your boot go, clamping his knees tighter when you try to pull away, raising his eyebrows innocently at your effort. 

Sliding his chair back, he finishes his whiskey in one shot, gets up, and stands casually by your side gesturing for you to do the same, already pinching the fabric of your shirt between the backs of his fingers and next he’s taking your hand and pulling you out of the saloon through the tide of tipsy cowboys and cattletown whores, across the thoroughfare and its muddy cups of sunset light, into the hotel, past the man at the front desk and his unanswered greeting, up the stairs, and you’re barely through the door before you’re at each others' necks.

He lifts you and your legs are hooked around his waist as he locks the door one-handed while holding your ass and devouring you starting at your throat. When he steps out of his boots, he stumbles but reaches for the fireplace mantle for balance. While he gropes under you to unfasten his gun belt, you do nothing to help aside from hitching yourself up against him higher, and with your breasts up by his face he is momentarily lost. He lets his guns down with a deep thud, and his hat falls to the rug and rolls on the brim. 

The bed creaks when he lets you fall onto it, and he’s trying to yank off your boots and get his mouth to your cunt at the same time. Like he’s been thinking about it all day, even while pretending to care about rifling, and his steady fingers are already making quick work of the buttons of your fly, but you squeeze him between your thighs and instead pull him up and shove him onto his back and proceed to show him what he’s wasted all that time missing.

You climb up to straddle him, sitting tall, and give him a strong knead of your hips and press your legs to him like you’re urging him into a canter, which makes him smirk, lying there propped on his elbows watching you.  His mineral eyes, sundazed and whiskey-bright, are fixed on your face. When he reaches up to draw a wave of hair out of your eyes and graze your cheek with his thumb, you kiss his palm but then shake your head and he relents, hands surrendering at his sides.

The trail of buttons of his shirt and union suit starts below the notch of his collar bone, and you kiss him where each one comes open in your fingers, crawling backward as you go, your leg, your pelvis, your belly feeling the gorgeous growing stiffness of his cock. His head falls back on the pillow and he mutters something grateful to someone’s god as you get to the end of his shirt and extract him from his suspenders, leaving a cooling path of your wet lips and tongue down his sternum and stomach and you blow on the tracks of your saliva and bite the edge of his trousers. Your jaw runs along the bulge of his cock and he can’t hold back a soft sigh. 

With each button, you nip the seam of his fly between your teeth and tease it open further, and he’s watching with a look so heatedly impatient that your own pleasure starts with a sharp rush. The smell of his body and the trace of recent soap thrills you as you finally get his fly undone and free his imprisoned, bobbing cock. Even more handsome than you had recalled to yourself more than a few nights over the last endless weeks. God, but he is a sight. 

With your left hand cradling his balls, you begin to lick the base of his shaft, slithering your tongue slowly around and up, guided by low groans and murmurs of oh fuck keep goin from the head of the bed, giving him moments of respite, sometimes licking with the tip of your tongue, sometimes running your mouth up from the base, but you take your sweet damn time approaching the head, red and dribbling precum down the side where it arrives at your tongue and you taste his salt with a savoring hum and hear a low sound from him too. You lap it slowly up his ridge in soft wide kisses to the edge of the head and when you finally lick the tip his breath catches, his throat straining as tight and ridged as his cock now sliding into your mouth. He wants to shove into you but you press on his hips, letting him slip out of your mouth, a filament of spit trailing, and you wipe your chin and get a look at him. 

In your control, right now, he would give you anything you ask for, and you rest a moment to appreciate his staggered breath, the muscles that contract his whole chest when you take him more firmly in hand, the fiery urge in his eyes, like it costs every ounce of his resolve not to flip you over and fuck you right now, and there you are, holding him captive with the merest pressure of your right hand.

You lean down and linger to part your lips on him, letting him in, inch by sucking, slavering inch, stretching your jaw, slicking him with saliva, preparing to take him in your throat. You work up and down, straddling his right leg and grinding yourself below his knee in the same rhythm, bracing yourself with a hand on his stomach as the bed frame begins to creak. His right hand finds your head and his fingers comb into your hair and you sense how much he is trying not to grab too hard.

His fingers nudge upward at the base of your skull, showing you how he wants it this time, which is the same as the last time, which gratifies you to no end because the last time you worked him up like this you had him on the outcropping parallel to camp. If a person with binoculars had been sweeping the view from the overlook they would have witnessed an outlaw with five thousand dollars on his head thoroughly suffering through his release up against the trunk of that tree and you on your knees there making him suffer. Just the thought of being discovered built up in you that delicious quavering tension between magnets of the same pole. Wanting to be seen. Not wanting. Somewhere in that stunning ornery space, you had made him come within an inch of his life.  

He groans as you open wider and he hits your throat, past the reflex to gag, and it makes your mouth slick and hot around him. A small gush of spit spills to the web of your thumb where you hold him, like a telltale secretion. You carve your other hand into the divot of his hip when his ass tightens, and he starts to guide your head a little faster now. The possessive power in his hand on your head always induces a hint of not entirely unwanted desperation in you. For all his restraint so far, you let him take control, for a moment. Because the moment you take it back, that precise pulse when you pull up and then suck more intently than he was expecting and catch him off guard, the moment you center yourself on him, pin his hips and start to fill your throat with him on every deepening, faster, choking thrust, his breath will quicken and rise; his hips will buck, he will be unable to say your name nor any word he knows, and come apart. 

But not yet. Jesus, you are soaked. Your chin and cheeks and elsewhere. Abruptly, his stomach contracts and he lets out a soft Whoah, the only word that comes automatic to him, and instantly looks sheepish, sweaty and jaw clenched, and when he sees you glance up at him, he pulls out of your mouth before he can't stop, gripping the base of his shaft to hold himself back. 

Your cunt aches just seeing him handle his cock, and you wipe your face as the two of you read each other, breath heaving. Any plan you had, you forget it the instant he comes back from the ledge of his high and his eyes darken on you.

Fuck, he’s strong - it stuns you how deftly he flips you over with his knees and hauls you up under him, and you would readily beg for his thick cock in you that instant, even relishing the pain of being stretched, but he has other ideas. He gathers you up to him with one arm and kisses you fully, his tongue as strong as the rest of him. Under your hands, the slabs of his back round up with the thrust of his hips as he grinds his cock against your cruelly clothed cunt. When he bites your lower lip and releases you, you let out a raw sound cut short by his lips on your neck, your pulse, your ear. His hands push up your sides, seeking your breasts, frustrated by your shirt, which he won’t even bother unbuttoning; he pulls it off straight over your head, and wrestles his own clinging sleeves off behind his back and throws that shirt god knows where and lets the top of his union suit hang off his waist.

You notice each other at the same time, uncovered, bruised, scraped, breathless. “What the hell happened to you?” He takes your left hand, the bruise spreading deep over your forearm still dark, and touches your wrist, and up that tender mottled stain.

“Your damn horse kicked me." 

“She what?” He glares, as if he’s surprised at her doing such a thing. “You sure it ain’t broken?” He says between kissing up the inside of your elbow at the same time he feels along your arm for any reaction.

You wince and try to pull back. "What happened to you?” You reach up, your fingers hovering near the mean scrape down his side, from his armpit to his hip, bruised and scabbed.  “Jesus you fell didn’t you?”

He won’t lie, but he would prefer to keep making his way up your arm than answer for it. 

“Arthur.” You feel a dip in your stomach to think of how close he might have truly come to the images you had to dispel from your mind every night.

Almost don’t count,” he mumbles into your shoulder, and scrapes his teeth over your collarbone in a light bite, and he won’t let you argue or get a better look, although he’s careful about your bruise when he lifts you under your arms and pushes you higher on the bed. While he sucks and lightly grazes your left nipple with his teeth and kneads your right breast with a deprivation that makes you sink into the pillow, he’s inching your pants down and acting like it’s a goddamn tragedy he only has two hands. It’s not long before he’s got you weak, forgetting crevasses and horses and the color of his wound, and you bite your lip to hold in a whimper, dig your fingers into his upper arms, and as he drags your pants off and grips your thigh there’s just no stopping yourself from – 

In the moment he turns away to kick off the rest of his clothes, you notice the wash basin on the dresser, a towel drying, and realize with dawning chagrin that he washed up when he went to get the room, whereas you reek like a day in the saddle. 

All the times you've let him taste you without so much as a thought, and all of a sudden now you're closing your knees and losing steam when he turns to you. 

It's a jarring thought on its own, that it would occur to you now. More jarring still that it has you rattled. After everything together. 

In any case, you aren't about to let him take his turn without a chance to wash the saddle off you. He doesn't notice your shyness at first, until he starts to pry your knees apart and meets resistance. 

Head quizzing sideways, he peers at you. He rests his arm on your bent knees with a passing shade of seriousness or irritation or possibly concern; it's not easy to tell, the way the firelight touches the sweat on his face. You sit up, try to lure him toward you, and guide his right hand down instead, meanwhile trying to find it in yourself to ignore this baffling insecurity. He obliges for a little bit, which helps neither of you, and he kisses your knee and again tries to work up your thigh. “What is it?”

“Nothing, I just -”

The searching squint at you, one brow arched, almost breaks your resolve, but you grab his wrist again and this time as he pulls it away he notices you longing for the washbasin and starting to get out of bed. With a teasing grunt of effort he takes you by your waist and easily sits you back, and now you’re plain pissed off, being thrown around like that. You grapple again, grabbing each others' wrists and yanking away, and he's almost smiling with each smack like it's a game he'll win until he accidentally grasps your bruised forearm and you shout and he winces with an apology. And he might have let you win, but first he shoves you back one-handed to the mattress. When you try to sit up, he holds you down, iron hand planted on your sternum.

“What’re you tryin to do, Red,” he says, knowing goddamn well, and you glare and don't necessarily want to say, but for fuck's sake you're less in the mood now and just want to be clean and, if you really had your way in this exact moment, alone. And if he picks you up again, maybe one of you won’t be leaving this room upright.

“So you get to wash up and leave me smelling like a horse?” You can feel your cheeks burn.

Steely gaze on you, like how you imagine a bottle feels when he's aiming at it.

“That it?”

You don't have any other reason on your tongue. The liar in you is lost for words. Maybe how the bottle feels when it's shot.

The look on him could stop a train the way it stops you. He crawls between your legs with the dismissive confidence of a panther showing its prey how things are about to transpire, bridges over you and stares you down. He is achingly deliberate, lowering himself and slowly brushing his nose up the line of your jaw, making his way to your ear. His breath is hot and trembling a little when he growls,

Let me have what I want.  

As if to pry your very will from your grasp, he collects spit on two of his fingers, runs them up your slit to prepare you, and slides his middle finger in your cunt, watching as you take it panting, like this is the least of what he will do to you now. 

When he backs down from you, he's too focused on your peaking breasts, the curve of your ribcage, to notice your ceding blush, dear god. You hold a hand over your eyes and fall back.  He traces the hollow of your navel. The softness at your hip. The moss of your pubic hair. The curve of your thigh. You relent and let him lift one leg over his shoulder. He continues to work his finger in you, then two, waves against the roof of you, as he kisses your open thigh, and when he draws his fingers out, loves how your back arches with his first shameless taste of you.

In your weeks together, he has learned to linger and bring you to the brink several times before taking you over. 

What you didn't realize yet was what it would do to an outlawed thief and killer like him after weeks apart when you withhold from him what he's wanted all that time.

Rapturing saints don't know this kind of ecstasy.

The first time you come, he's watching with an expression of almost smug satisfaction, almost, because he's holding his hand over your spasming stomach in awe of the strength of your release, as if he hadn't meant to go that far. He's catching air himself, wiping his chin. 

Gradually, indulgently, he brings you back with the lightest of casual licks, telling you how he thought of you while he was away, and then admitting, when you admit the same, that he took himself in hand a couple of times. He’s telling you about the hot springs he found and how he wants to take you there. He’s nuzzling your inner thigh with his rough jaw, sometimes grazing his lips near your clit until he knows you can bear it and he can ease full kisses on your cunt, his tongue entering, lapping, as if he’s teasing a fucking pearl out of an oyster with his tongue alone. He begins to stroke himself while he eats you, eyes closed, and you get a strong rebirthed flutter in your stomach to watch him handling his length, how ready he is. He’s waited patiently, and you savor the sight one more moment before he puts his full mouth on you and you are swept under his control.

You twist under him, hardly able to keep your eyes from rolling shut when he steals a last full taste before he looks at you, and your chin quivers as it sinks in how much you missed him all that time, his tenderness. You touch the nape of his neck and he pretends not to know what you mean, and sucks your clit, coaxing your pelvis toward him like a trick he can do, and the moan he gets from you then makes him stop and hold his fully erect cock tight and still for a moment. Jesus, sweetheart, he huffs into your thigh. I missed that sound.

When he eases himself up on you, you lie panting at the ledge, yearning for his cock, settled thick and stiff in the crook of your thigh and pelvis as his fingers trailing up your side, his contemplation of you, his strong hand rounding your breast. He smooths the hair out of your face and kisses you, his lips soft from eating you, and you’re surprised your own taste isn’t as bad as you feared. For a heartbeat, you are about to be distracted by that revelation, but he raises your jaw with his thumb, and his eyes overcome any other thought at all.

I missed you - He loses breath on the last word as you arch into him and roll your hips. Your bodies align by some power beyond yourselves and he bulls the head of his cock between your lips for that last delirious throb. 

When he pushes into you, his head bows and you sigh with his long and aching slide, the verge of trepidation, as if this time you really might not be ready. Arthur’s chest curves up from you and he begins to thrust, that slick and thick submersion, driving himself deeper, and you see the pulse in his neck as he restrains himself in between. He props himself over you, and one hand slips around to the small of your back with a lift. Under you the bed shakes and rocks. He tries to grip the frame to keep it from drumming the wall. Goddammit he mutters, and to provoke him you jerk yourself on him vigorously so the bedframe cracks against it. The gall on his face at you. 

He kneels back and hauls you upright with your legs around his waist, pulling you up to him with a hand skimming up your spine, and you lower down on him again with your arms around his neck, your chests and stomachs sliding together like you can’t possibly get as close as you need to be. 

“Tryin to get us thrown in jail, makin a ruckus?” He spits out a strand of your hair caught in his mouth.

“Why, am I being bad?” You try to sound daring, which is impossible when he’s gripping your ass like that and starting to buck you slightly, and it comes out sounding more like you’re shivering. 

He regrips your ass. “Usually.”

“You spoil your horse,” you shudder, and for a split second his eyes spark with genuine indignation at your insult.

“Never.”

You scoff at the same time he bites at your neck and your head rolls weak onto his shoulder.

“Not like I'll spoil you." That devilish sneer rasps in his voice as he pulls down on your shoulder and pushes up with his hips, urging himself deeper into you. Against all possible resistance you wilt into him, gasping.

At your ear, the fragments of words that escape him in his progress quickly become as sincere as they are filthy, your name unchaste on his tongue, an immoral invocation, an oath divulged under duress. He kisses you hungrily along the side of your neck. When you look down at his flushed chest and tightening stomach, the hypnotic sight of his wet shaft fucking into you, you push against his strength, easing back, feeling depraved to watch his full length pulling out of you and feel the firm rim of his cock about to slip. And you keep him there, his tip licking at you, prodding your entrance, both of you beginning to pant with unrest, and he searches you for relief before you pull him tight with your legs and run yourself down on him to the haft.

The flare up your sides from the marvel in his eyes is more than you can withstand. You seize the back of his neck and kiss him hard, your teeth clicking, and you feel him smile before his tongue wrests and slips with yours. In his arms you feel weak and light and he grips you tighter as his pace picks up and helps you ride him.

When he can’t get fast enough for what he needs, he pulls out with a grunt and shoves you down on the bed, his cock so ready and shining in the firelight you whimper with a sudden empty ache. He pauses over you, catching his breath, backs off the bed and drags you by your hips to the edge.

You want more? His hoarse voice turns dark with a smile, but you can hardly speak from the thrill in your core when he talks to you like that.

He stands over you, his cock swaying on your belly and you begin to stroke him needily, and he groans, taking in the sight of you before he smacks his hand with brutal strength on your ass and keeps it there, feeling your pained twitch, loving the sight of you stung. His praising thumb soothes your hip. You cry out when he smacks you again.

All that time, sweetheart, what'd you think about. Something harsh and wild in his voice. He rubs his thumb up through your fresh slick to your clit under the base of his cock. He begins to massage in idle circles at first, and then more urgently, each one like he is controlling your very pulse. 

Just you and me, like this. Panting, you run his shaft through your fist slow and tight and watch a look of adoring torture overcome him.

He seems to falter now too, flushed, and lifts your left leg over his shoulder, and sighs as he urgently aligns his head at your entrance and gives you one long, slow thrust, another, and he can’t hold back any longer. He has to fuck harder, rutting like he can't stop. Before you can so much as grip his hand on your thigh, your rising release is breaking inside. You can only gasp Arth - ah - I before it surges in you, clenching his whole length so tight he gapes slightly, eyes squeezed shut, and whatever he says, you can’t hear it anyway. 

He falls to a hand over you and holds you through it as if you’ll shatter. With a kind of dazed endurance, he slides out, gripping his dick and starting to stroke himself, glistening and totally rigid, his chest heaving. And despite your legs still shaking, you slide off the bed and get on your knees, taking him into your mouth, tasting sex and sweat and salt, kneading his tightening balls, gripping his ass as you fuck him into your mouth, into your throat, needing to give him everything as if to teach him need. His surprise pleases you; the twist of euphoria on his face, the muscles of his thighs jumping, his wet hand cupping your cheek then combing behind your head and taking a handful of your hair. How he rises slightly on his toes, hips twinging, no longer in control.

F-I’m comin  - A kind of gutted caution, as if he’s very sorry for what he’s about to do to you, and so when you pull off his cock with a wet final suck and gaze up at him, giving him a firm glide of your fist down his shaft, you might as well have pushed him off a cliff for the way he jerks with the first shot of warm spend against your neck, down your collarbone and breasts, and he sucks air through his teeth when you lap the rim of his cock and gently let him back into your mouth to taste the last abating pulses of his cum. You swallow. Draw off of him with a brush of the tip of your tongue, your lips closing softly in a hum. His hand never left your head and doesn’t leave it now. Tender, his fingers sweetly stroking. You both just breathe for a minute, as if you haven’t been on land for a time, and it all rocks just like the sea.

 

The dying firelight flickers on the faded wallpaper, the tarnished brass of the bed. You stand now in the middle of the room beside the enamel basin on the floor. He uses a cloth to wash himself off you. Starts at your chin with a dab up to your lip, along your neck, while lines of cool water and soap comb down your front. He takes his time. Soaps the cloth again and washes up and down your arms, moves around your back, your shoulders in broad, recognizable strokes.

“Am I like one of your mares?” you tease.

He doesn’t smile, running the rag down your flank, the curve of your hip. “Finer.”

“You spoiling me then?”

“Ain’t spoilin.” He trails off, as if he can’t really find the words for teasing. He kneels and smooths the rag up from your heels, the length of the tendons, the soft ridge of your calves.  Rinsed, wrung. With duteous attention, up the inside of your legs. When he looks up at you, his hand attends between them. The room seems to sweep around. He rises higher on his knees, holds you around the waist to keep you upright. 

“Okay there?”

You hold his shoulder until the feeling stills.  

Words. Chambered like rounds. Things he’s thought to say all that time gone. Things you would say too. You can see them in his eyes as he watches you. He clears his throat and faces your navel, and instead of saying what he was going to say, he wipes away a rivulet running there. He gives you a quick kiss on the smooth skin of your belly. 

“We best sleep,” he says. “Long ride tomorrow.”

He staggers to his feet, rubs a cramp in his calf. Before he gives himself a cursory wash, he swats your ass to send you to bed. 

When he flops down beside you, he yawns deeply. All the time you’ve known him, he has had the uncanny ability to fall asleep almost as soon as he’s lying down. His hand rests against your thigh, the back of one finger stroking you a couple of times and then still.

You, on the other hand, are fully awake in the glow of the saloon across the street. The drunks in the street are arguing, singing, stumbling to wherever they will pass the night. Your body seems to anticipate the journey ahead, almost quivering, nervous, and is this a feeling of dread you have or the fear of being so close to free? 

On the road to Valentine, you made one final stop, at the burned-out town below the overlook. A few weeds had started to venture up like dazed survivors through the remains, strikingly green against the blackened ground. In the sheriff’s office, you lay on the floor and felt around for the lock box, first with a wave of panic thinking it gone, and immediate relief when you touched cool metal and pulled it out. The leather fold was still there, its contents still there, and you stowed it deep in your saddle bag. As you mounted Georgia again, two crows flanking the entrance of the town took interest in you leaving, and you remember now one of them had flown away as if it had a duty to report on what you had done.

The condemned man from before blurs into your mind. You somehow know the terror of a tenuous creaking trapdoor under your feet, cracks between the boards revealing the empty space below. You somehow know the weight of rope around your neck. All your sins broadcast for everyone to know. The sting of being known for more, and far worse, than you ever wanted to let on. You can imagine standing with your hands bound, and out in the crowd Micah, Dutch, and the one face you wish couldn’t see you there. Seeing you for what you really are. 

No one can sleep like that.

If he’s right, there is enough gold to need all three horses. Two days up, two days back, he figures, and one last job, and the day they return to camp he will tell Hosea first. They’ll go fishing and he’ll tell him, and Hosea will put a hand on his shoulder, give him his blessing, maybe say he wished he’d done it sooner. 

With Dutch, he’ll take him on a morning ride. They’ll rest their horses by the lake. No sense in pleasantries with him; he’ll know all along what’s on his mind.

He’ll say Dutch, I’d be dead twelve times over if it wasn’t for you. I owe you everything I have. But it’s time to get out, old friend, I know you saw it comin. Ain’t easy for me, but I gotta get out while I can still make a life for us, and you gotta get out, and I found enough to make it possible. 

No groveling. No justifying or reasoning or pleading to his better nature. It’s likely Dutch won’t talk to him much after that, or he’ll make a show of inviting Micah closer. He’s not naïve enough to think it won’t be hard. If it takes every cent he can get off that gold, then that’s what it takes. The other two thousand he has set by can at least get the two of them on their way. A small house on a plot of land, a little to live on for a while. He’ll already have most of his things packed. Charles can have his tent, the wagon, the damn cot.

She’s asleep in the crook of his arm. Eyebrows pinched in a labored expression. He wants to touch her but not wake her, to cool down whatever is bothering her mind. The lacy curtains swell and fall with the night air like a sigh, and she stirs feeling it on her bare skin, and he pulls her a little closer. After those weeks, and facing the next few days, having her close now is all that feels right. 

His skin crawls when Rider comes to mind. Wax-faced, hollow. What betrayal does to a man, the one who did the betraying. 

It hadn’t really surprised him, how it all turned wrong. The slow ratcheting clicks of the hammer froze him, and he closed his eyes and put his hands on the table.

The yellowed, folded map lay between them on the table, Juney’s LeMat cocked and held at an angle.

“Mark my words they will hunt every last one of your gang and they will find them. You got no idea what’s comin. And hell ain’t far enough to hide you.”

“Goddammit, Rider, you point that thing at me and I will answer.”

“Your five-thousand-dollar head comes in here, thinkin you can ask for Tom’s gold and I’d just hand it over?”

“Well my fingers was too cold to pick your pockets.”

“Too cold for them triggers too.” The LeMat made Arthur’s skin prickle with a flash of sweat as it veered closer. A meaty, Confederate gun with its smoothbore barrel he had no respect for, that shotgun revolver didn’t know what it wanted to be, at close range didn’t need to.

“Juney, put it down; everyone saw you started it.” The barkeep held the shotgun across his chest. Chairs screeched as the other two men backed away out of firing lines.

Arthur sighed. “Keep it easy there. More barrels ain’t helpin nobody.” And he pointed his finger at Rider when his grip twitched. “Hold it - now I ain’t come up here to kill you, but ain’t no one gonna mourn if you get stupid right now.”

Rider smirked. “You think you’re different -” Then the LeMat swung into field.

It doesn’t rightly bother him, having put a bullet in that creep, though it lays his present circumstances under a pall. Something about this was made the smallest bit less pure in some way he can’t quite decipher and doesn’t want to think on very long. But she stirs beside him, her hand on his chest, and it doesn’t matter. Not much time now until they’re free.

You wake with the first hint of morning. And find him beside you in that same thin light. No musty canvas, no creaking cot beneath you, no bedroll spread on hardpacked dirt. A bed with room for two of you and this man beside you gazing up at the ceiling, chewing a clove toothpick. He sets the toothpick aside when he feels you waking and turns to you. You nestle yourself under his chin against his chest and avoid bumping the scrape down his ribs as you lay your arm on his waist, and even that old stained mattress on its creaky springs is like a cloud to the two of you. 

You stretch long in his arms, and when you feel his half-hard erection you press yourself more firmly against him. He nips your ear, sleepy, unhurried.

“Mornin,” he says low, his breath humid in your ear, a slow touch of his tongue like an idle inclination before he kisses the cartilage there. It’s such a pleasurable sensation you almost drift off again to the contact of his fingers along your neck, his body moving lower, but become entranced by what he’s doing, what you’re hearing, in your half-awake haze. He stalls at your breasts like he has to give thanks.

And pausing over your stomach, he planes his hand over you. Don’t wake up yet, he murmurs as he sinks lower.

You stretch your arms overhead into the pillow as he gently parts your legs and grazes his lips on your inner thigh, keeping you in this misty twilight state, the caress of his fingers interspersed with such soft kisses you nearly believe you’re dreaming, but for the roughness of his face that makes your eyes roll back when his tongue possesses your cunt. And you wonder how many mornings would be this way, a ritual of waking and fucking, and you long for the simple purity of such a life. A room, a bed. This man. His hot breath on you, his fingers slowly parting you. When you moan, he presses his lips to you but only lightly glazes your clit, taking his time. Each approach of his tongue rises with more impulsion, more pressure, and his shoulders press into your thighs, his devoted hands now carving up your sides and holding your waist.

Arthur -

What sweetheart, he whispers, but you can’t think of what you were going to say as he tastes your clit more fully, his captivating tongue sending currents up your spine, then harder as you roll against him, and his hands cradle your lower back, and he hums to feel your waking want. Your waist rises, and he crawls up your body, his face next to yours. He kisses your neck as he reaches down to align himself, and you grip his back and hold on through his penetration, his restrained slide out, his thrusts so deliberate and wet you feel every lineament of his ridge and the rim of his head, every muscle of him inching heavily with yours. You hold onto him, shoved with the slow knead of his body riding against yours, the crush of his weight on you, each grunt of his exertion until you begin to spill in a breathless carnal daze. 

When you give in, the sound from your throat is more of a whimper as you break weak under him and he kisses the corner of your gasping mouth. As if to sustain you he breathes against your cheek you come so beautiful for me. After another couple of harder thrusts he pulls out and falls to your side, stroking himself and grimacing slightly as he finishes on your thigh in thick, ebbing spurts. He sinks to the mattress, drained, on his back beside you. His left fingers find your right and sleepily draw them in, linking, his thumb stroking the edge of your hand as you lie side by side gazing up at the ceiling and the ideas in your minds playing out there. Whole lifetimes of notions flicker and pass like flowers blurring alongside the road and you can hardly see them fast enough to pick them for yourself. His hand on your hand is the only constant thing. After a while he curls up to grab the wash rag and wipes your thigh clean, and then you lie together. You wish it could always be like this as you drift back to sleep in his arms. No jobs, no gold, for a while. Just that room with the peeling wallpaper and tin ceiling; you could be content there. Apart from the muddiness of the town, the stench of livestock, it’s better than most places you’ve ever lived. Wanting things - that’s where all trouble begins. But you open your eyes, alone in the bed this time, and all you can do is want.

He’s already dressed, oxhide chaps on for a long ride now, and sits in a chair getting his boots on. 

“Better get up before I get you up.” His voice is soft, teasing.

You scrunch up in bed another moment, and finally throw off the covers. He has draped your clothes over the foot of the bed, and you step through your pant legs as you hop to the floor. You turn your shirt right-side-out and unbutton it, recalling his face when he’d peeled it off. It makes you smile while you put it on. 

Chaps. Boots found under the bed. Hat recovered from the floor. Ready, you follow him down the hall and downstairs, into the silent lobby. The few people there quickly find other things to absorb their attention. Their blushing cheeks and clearing throats give them away and you try to hide your face. For his part, Arthur walks as tall as ever, straight-shouldered, and touches his brim with an affable hello at two matrons practically hiding behind their books.

You smack him on the shoulder when you’re out the door. He’s got the horses saddled and ready, and mounts up looking a little stiff. He stretches his neck side to side.

You get up on Apollo and realize with a wince you’ll be remembering last night all day. “Where we headed?”

“West side of Big Valley. Gotta make it there and back by Sunday to meet Dutch.”

Your heart throbs to be reminded of it. 

When you were in the saloon, he had noticed the reluctance in your eyes right away, but let you get a couple sips of whiskey in you before he said anything.

“You gonna tell me what you don’t want to?”

You rotated your glass on the tabletop stained by the phantom rings of many drinks spilled, and sighed. "They said to tell you about a job."

And as you told him the plan Micah had told you, you felt that sinking regret in your stomach, as if you had knowingly set something in motion, and it’s with you still as you watch Arthur turn Georgia away from the hitching post with Trula, heading down the thoroughfare in the morning sun already hot on your backs. 

He comments on the blinding blue lupines as the road breaks open into the wide valley. “Real pretty country here.” He glances back at you following, glad to share the view. The stream shines like hammered silver and steams into the crisp air. The distant ridges on three sides make it all seem miniature in scale, exquisite in detail as a doe calmly grazes, a hawk soars. And everywhere, the stunning wildflowers lay spread out and brilliant in the mountain sun.

And in the splendor of that setting with his face turned to you, the sensation seizes you all at once of watching something precious thrown, about to shatter.



Chapter 10: The Hanging Dog Part II

Summary:

Palest blue, the cloudless sky. You can’t make sense of it, pale as it is.

Palest sky you’ve ever seen. And silent but for your ragged breath.

Then, in the corner of your sight, a soot-black spread of wings.

Notes:

cw/tw: Despite some inherently creepy content for one character, there will never be depictions or descriptions of anything underage in Redbird or Red. Specifics in the end notes.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Palest blue, the cloudless sky. You can’t make sense of it, pale as it is. 

Palest sky you’ve ever seen. And silent but for your ragged breath. 

Then, in the corner of your sight, a soot-black spread of wings.

You had spent hours by then, climbing since first light, keeping the obelisk in sight, now a mere chess piece among the pines where the horses were tethered. At times you had to pick your way north through the trees for what felt like a mile before you could backtrack that same distance higher. He would boost you up to a ledge, and pull himself up or you’d help him, although near the top you both took longer to recover and had to push each other more, and the afternoon storms were brewing with a chill in the air. You had begun to shiver from the sweat in your clothes, and finally the last twenty feet or so loomed craggy and vertical from where both of you stood catching your breath from the last climb. Misty clouds rolled around you from over the mountaintop, obscuring the view.

“Think we got it in us?” he panted, bracing himself on his knees, spitting to the side and wiping his mouth.

“I’ll go back and kill him again if it’s not here.” You gulped air as you staggered down to sit and shake the gravel out of your boots. 

Arthur ducked out from the wreath of rope slung across his chest and let it drop and crouched beside you, tearing apart some jerky to share, both of you so exhausted all you could do was chew and stare into the vertiginous gray air you had scaled through already. 

Then the rain began to fall, and although you weren’t ready you got up and started climbing before the rocks got too slick, and your hands were so cold your fingers were getting numb, your teeth chattering, and once he slipped and you shouted for him and nearly slipped yourself, but both of you, hearts pounding, regained your hold. Found your footing, pushed up, gripped tight, and again. This blind ascension toward unknown ends. You didn’t know how you would get back down.

And then you were there. At the cave, just like on the map, an entrance shaped like a crooked spade. You crawled on all fours over the ledge at the top and stayed there heaving. He crawled up after and collapsed on his back beside you, and you might have recovered a little longer, but it began to hail, so you scrambled for the shelter of the cave. 

Inside, you hunched under the low ceiling and started to move further in when he stopped you, his hand on your arm. He held the map back from you, as if he suddenly regretted bringing you up all that way. “Maybe it ain’t there,” he said. “Maybe it’s only another lead. Or nothin.” 

“Arthur Morgan.” You put your hand over his, and marveled at him. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen you nervous.”

He gave a withering scowl at you teasing. “Just don’t do any good, gettin hopes up.”

“If it’s not there, then we keep hunting.” You grabbed the map from him and oriented yourself in the near-darkness while he lit a match to see around. Small markings guided you. He lit a cigar and the ember glowed blood orange, and you groped along the stone walls until your hands were cold and raw as filets of fish, until you felt the comparatively soft surface of wood, the iron stays, iron studs. The lock. You plugged your ears, and he palmed one ear, pressing his shoulder to the other while he shot the lock away. 

A high whine bleeds from your ears under that impossible pale sky and you burn with the glare of the sun. White heat. You close your eyes in pain. A flash of orange when a boot kicks your ribs. You gasp and choke on the limestone dust that chalks your face and eyelashes and cakes in the trails of your saliva. Like a swinging blade, again that streak of wings slices your view.  

Down in the valley, when he thought you were sleeping in the tent after setting up camp, he walked a little distance away, his journal in his hand, and sat by a blackberry bush. He opened to a new page and smoothed the paper, bending it straight. He picked one berry and turned it around in his fingers, beheld it rolling in his palm for a while before tipping it into his mouth, and then concentrated on one cluster of the bush and began to sketch. 

His body was perfectly still while he worked, his concentration diverted to his sketching hand and his deeply focused eyes, drawn from the rest of him in the meticulous act of creating something lifelike. Framed through the opening of the tent, he might have been a picture himself, as still as he was, and you watched him for a long time in the cool shade. Sketching. Selecting a berry. Examining it. Eating it or setting it in his tin cup at his side. The quiet scratch of his pencil on paper was drowned out by the murmuring stream. 

He closed his journal and picked up the cup and came back to you in the tent. You stretched on the bedroll as he sat down beside you and settled the cup between you.

"So ripe they won’t last an hour I bet," he said, picking one out and holding it up for you. Fat, shiny, each drupelet skintight with juice. You bit it from his fingers and it gushed against the roof of your mouth, sweet and hot from the sun. His thumb swiped over your lower lip, like he was marking you with the stain of the juice, and you licked it off.

When he set the journal down for a moment, it flopped open to the latest page, and to torment him you grabbed it and rolled up onto your side, pretending to steal a peek, but this time he didn’t jump to drag it away from you. He tensed but let you look. His sketch of the cluster of blackberries, like phases of them, one fat and heavy on its stalk, others smaller, lighter. Somehow in pencil still a suggestion of the color, the shape of light on the surface of each cell like they were clustered drops of blood. You glanced up at him and turned back the page, and he let you.

It was a sketch of you, gazing out the hotel window, and it was as if he had figured out the substance of your private thoughts by the clutch of your hand, the concern in the curve of your brow, the wondering way you leaned and looked out, rendering permanence out of a moment that had waned before you would have noticed it passing through you. You flushed to feel so discovered, and when you looked at Arthur he was engrossed in the study of his own hand. He didn't stop you, watching you turn the page again. Trula and Apollo stood on the page tethered in the shade of a tree, Arthur’s boots crossed in the foreground, and in the distance the roofs of Valentine.

The next page back was an abstract assortment of symbols. Human figures in a circle. Hand prints. 

“Somethin I saw on the way. Strange to see, all that way up.”

“Looks like a nightmare.” You rotated the page to get a better look.

“I moved on pretty quick.” He lay down and clasped his hands on his stomach, kicking off his boots. 

You picked another blackberry from the cup, and it started to seep from the lightest pressure of your touch. Juice channeled in the edges of your fingernails, the creases of your knuckles, the lines of your palm. You popped it in your mouth right as it dripped once on the page, and your eyes went wide with apology to him, but he smiled with a shrug, as if any mark you could make there would merely improve it. As you licked your fingers, you glanced down. 

The fine sweep of his handwriting caught your eye first. Flourishes not too fancy, but distinct, lovely waves, more expression than ornament. I have stared down a man with a gun to my face, but I come undone when I see her. 

His hands unclasped once he noticed the page you were on, but then he stopped, hand hovering as you read silently, and you felt him watching you. 

Whatever that feeling is, some kind of peace and passing sadness, like I’ll lose her if I look away. I don’t know another thing like it, feels like I don’t know nothing in this world anymore except that I love her, and can’t remember what I knew before.

An A. An N. Two wisps formed a heart. The spatter of blackberry juice over them he allowed there as evidence of you. Your skin tingled head to toe. Your heart pounded as his hand covered the page and slowly closed it, not concealing it, only pausing you, and he moved it aside. 

He pulled you to him, and you moved over to lie on your side, head propped on your hand so you could see him, your arm over his chest, feeling the ripening swell of fragile hope within you both, what you’d hardly wanted to rest your minds on for fear of it bursting.

You needed to see it in his face, not shy to take your time anymore, nor shy to see him focused on you. He reached up and drew the hair out of your eyes. His lips curved, twitched with his curiosity, their shape always the first unconscious tell of what was on his mind. His eyebrows too, sometimes giving away the wonder of the world he’d viewed as a younger man, and other times, just as strikingly, hardening in deadly focus, seeing things for what they really were. The creases at his temples when he smiled. The turquoise blooms in his irises, the consuming depths of his pupils. The place where his nose had broken. The scar there. The scars upon his chin. The fading indentation of his hat band. Marks of a lifetime on him. All at once you felt impatient to see that face in all its expressions every day of your life, and wistful too, that passing heartache, at each glimpse already fading in the past. 

“Why you so sad all of a sudden?” he asked, his brows crowding in concern.

“Why do you say that?”

“You’re lookin about ready to cry.” 

Your tears did fall as you kissed him, because you could not hold anything back, and he smiled against your mouth with his hand on your cheek, and you thought you felt one slight quiver in his lip.

In the corner of the tent behind him, eighteen gold bars lay in three leather sacks. Neither of you cared to look at them much. As if they emitted something corrosive. They were not yours before, and wouldn’t be yours again soon. They had traveled with you back over the miles, this precious cargo, two generations of riches, these mere glints of metal you had beheld in the recesses of that cave with such unbridled excitement for all they meant; you had sagged, dirt-smudged and sweaty from the climb, and laughed out loud and he’d pulled you to him and held onto you, breathless. Your skin, his skin glowed when you stood near them. It felt wrong to stare at their tempting gleam, and so you stashed them away in their sacks. Soon there would be only memories of a whole different life behind you, your passage paid, your futures clear beyond this present haze.

And then in the early first cold light, you woke to Arthur’s arm draped over you heavy and firm, as if you would be stolen. Scars and freckles on his forearm made a map of him. You traced one scar, deeper than most, hooking around to the inside of his wrist and the light blue tributaries of his veins, ending at a juncture with the lifeline of his palm. Your finger followed that deep curve, and his hand stirred at your touch and grasped slowly around until it found your arm and squeezed. He nudged closer under the wool blanket, his bare chest to your bare back and his cock firm against your ass cheek. He pressed against you lazily, still half asleep. 

Outside, a gray, fungal fog gathered low at the river and in the grasses, a netherworld revealed through the flap of the tent. No birdsong in the air. Pines rose ghostly, dim and stoic in the cloudcover of the mountainside.

You backed into him and he stirred harder into you. His arms squeezed you tight in a sleepy embrace, and when you swatted him, he threw his leg over you and weighed you down; a yip escaped you, and his chest rumbled with a low laugh. He swept your hair aside and kissed your neck, dabbing his mouth in a line of affection down onto your shoulder blade. Slowly, his hands awakened on you and his right hand entwined with yours while his left trailed down your arm and brought it up over his head. His scruff lightly abraded your skin as his lips came around your ribs and he felt the first softness of your breast, inhaling like he was more content than he could remember being. 

While he tongued and grazed your nipple, cupping your breast gently in his calloused hand, you ran your fingers through his hair and your breath caught as you started to sink into melancholy. You blinked away the tears that pricked your eyes before he could see them, and turned onto your stomach, needing him now. 

There was something right and natural about the way you fit to each other, his chest and stomach on your back, his right arm under your chest to prop himself and hold you. An erotic pressure built in your stomach to feel his weight and muscle moving with you. His free hand slid further down, between you and the bedroll, and his middle finger slipped to the top of your slit and rolled there a calm, firm circle, his hand warm, his lips still touching any surface of your skin that he could get at, his eyelashes so light on you when he blinked you felt like crying.

He bent your left knee up and positioned his cock against the wet fluting of your slit, a soft sound in his chest to feel your body already eager for him as he entered you. Your breath steamed in the crisp air like a spear. The ache of his cock arched you into him, and he thrust deeper with a groan that went through you, and he grasped your breast as he fucked you against the ground until your ribcage bruised and your moans begged for more. He buried his face in your hair and pushed in, rounding over you. When you needed each other deeper, you curled around in the way you had become so accustomed, legs and arms making way, parting, until he could hold your neck and see your face and watch you as he entered you again, his face close to yours, and he spoke in your ear, sweet fuck it took your breath away.

You squeezed your eyes shut as you remembered what morning it was, though your nagging fear was overpowered with his next thrust, and soon you were desperate for him to drown it. You tried to pull him into you faster, your hips beginning to rise with need. 

Harder. Your voice came out as a demand, and he regarded you first, then obeyed with a deep drive of his hips, forcing a moan from both of you. Again. Again. He rutted you until it hurt. Harder.

You want to feel it later? His teasing growl. For all the sweetness between you so far, there was something familiar in the valley fragrance, the scraping against your back, the intensifying light of that morning, that ignited aggression in you, wanting to incinerate the fear that threatened to overtake you. 

Lay down. You forced him off you, and he obediently shifted down under you, surprised, newly aroused as you roughly straddled him, your weight on one knee to get high enough, and pulled his cock up between you, skimming your cunt. He twitched at the hint of touch and his hips jacked up willingly but you rose and shook your head. You stroked up his length and gritted your teeth, relishing the rising drops of precum that beaded and then trailed down to your pinky. Lightly, you drew it back up to the sensitive rim and watched his breath hasten, his blue gaze on you a mix of wonder and light distress, which you were more than happy to provoke a moment longer.

When you touched him to you, and sank in increments over the head of his cock, he sucked in through his teeth and your whole lower body clenched, and then you watched his chin jut up as you torturously speared yourself on him, drawing up again by inches, then taking him deeper still. When he lifted his head, you appreciated his helpless stare for several heaving desperate breaths. And then you began to fuck him. 

The flush of red up his chest and neck as you rode him, the intensity of his glare on you, spurred you to roll your hips harder, grinding him through you. You seized your time now; there was nothing in you that could hold back. Everything was temporary. Nothing could remain, if the threat growing in your mind that day became real. If it couldn’t be resisted, then you would defeat it. The pain in your gut fought the ecstasy building there and you braced your hands on his pumping chest not knowing which one would win.

Slo- shit he groaned, bucking up into you now, his fingers digging into your hips. Sweetheart…unhhfuck -

His voice cracked, his strong hands pushed you off his cock as he started to come and you slid down his pulsing length watching his suffering face, his struggling breath. You settled yourself back to straddle his thighs, both of you coming down like lampflames, until he was able to open his eyes and wipe his hand over his face as if realizing where he was. His spend painted the flat of his stomach and sternum, and you dug a handkerchief out of your things, your melancholy again pooling in you as he cleaned away this residue of fervor that faded like echoes in that valley.

“That was…” He was still staring up at the ridge of the tent, his hand on your thigh falling when you moved off him. You got up to find your clothes and he grasped your ankle. 

His eyes did the asking, and for a second you almost melted. His hand traveled up your calf. You found your resolve.

“You have a job to do.” You reached down and drew your thumb along his cheekbone and he kissed at your palm like a passing nip.

“It ain’t goin anywhere.”

Yet you had that sense of something leaving, a current streaming away. 

“What’s the face for?” His voice was pitying and amused, his hand holding your calf tighter, then rising up to the back of your knee. “Even if we got back a day early Dutch would still be sittin there wonderin Arthur! What’s taking so long?” He mimicked Dutch’s throaty grumble with a laugh. 

“I’d rather not have him thinking about us more than he has to.”

“Ten minutes. You can clock me.” He dug a watch, undoubtedly not his own, out of his satchel and held it up like a lure. When you grabbed for it, he snatched it away for a second and then handed it up to you. 

You forced a smile, opening the watch, looking down on him waiting, and stepped over his stomach, hunching under the ridge of the tent, legs parallel to the sides. He propped himself on his palms and gazed up.

What was this fucking expression? Why did it hurt your heart when he sat up and planted kisses above each knee? When he closed his eyes, continuing up your right thigh? This dread inside you dilating like a slow splash as he worked up your inner thighs and you realized how much you’d yearned for every moment of this, all of this, all these weeks. And though it was in your reach, though you could both pretend, you hadn’t ever really been able to have it all that time, and until the last job was done and the last gold bar set down, it still lay just beyond you.

Suddenly, with that look flashing in his eyes, he moved up into a crouch and took you in his arms and twisted you in the air in one movement, swept the goddamned breath out of you, and laid you lightly down like you were a doe and he was preparing to skin you.  Before you could get your equilibrium, he was making his way down your body, and then, well...there was no ignoring the way he made you feel, for that bubble of time, where he would disobey orders and put off the world to make himself comfortable between your legs and coax you back from the sadness he perceived, transforming it to that brimming, endless spill. You nearly spoke the name of that feeling aloud. But then his mouth was on you, his fingers inside you, summoning you, and you couldn’t think of a goddamn thing.

He was wiping his mouth and leaning on your knee, pleased with his work. You lay on the bedroll gasping, and he took your hand and twined his fingers with yours. Kissed your knuckles casually, then got up and ducked out of the tent fully naked and walked away. You could hear him pissing some distance away, over the babble of the stream, and it was a jarringly familiar thing, as if any day now he was going to walk in through the flare of light in a doorway somewhere with a bundle of firewood and plant a peck on your wifely cheek, and the very thought left you unsettled, though you weren’t sure in what way. 

The watch showed nine minutes. 

After he made coffee and you ate a meal of biscuits and salted meat, he packed up your things and the tent while you tended the horses. You faced west toward the mountains and that wide open valley where nothing could hide but a cougar in the tall grass, and for the last time deluded yourself that nothing would happen. 

One last job.

They would stay at that cabin on the lake, with the piping. Maybe they’d stay there a good while, or maybe they would decide to start looking for a place right away, a legitimate purchase. Start out well. He didn’t want a view of Blackwater for very long, was the only provision on his mind.

But he’d ask her, he figured, sitting together on that dock at sunset. Or so he pictured it.

There were a thousand painstaking steps until then.

He dismounted by their horses, near the low mesa to the east of the Twin Stacks and climbed up a ways to where they waited. 

“Dutch.” He nodded reservedly at him and got an icy stare. “Micah.”

Micah sat splay-legged on a boulder while Dutch stood smoking nearby in the rare shade of the crook between two low rises, looking uncomfortably warm, sweat dripping down from his temples, his black hair shining.

“Morgan.” 

“Where you been, son?”

“Huntin. Think you’ll like what I got.”

“Was it all you hoped for?”

“You could say that.”

“Good.”

“Your little woman gave you the message after all.” Micah struck a match on his boot.

He kept his eyes on Dutch, who in the heat seemed weakened, apathetic.

“What’s this job then?”

“Peace, Morgan,” Micah answered before Dutch could begin.  “Peace, and O’Driscolls.”

And Micah told him the plan. The simplicity of it. How all plans go when you’re pitching them. Perhaps that’s when he should have known. This feeling he should have known all along.

But he went along with it, confusing foreboding with the end of a good thing, his good gut-sense for matters confounded like a thermometer near a furnace. And still he went along with it. Had he been thinking, would he have noticed Dutch’s quiet? The busying way his fingers checked his watch and smoothed his mustache as if his whiskers kept standing in alarm?

“With your eye on us, son, can’t nothin wrong befall us.”

He would think later about how susceptible he was to Dutch’s praise. How it had gotten him to do things he would have rethought for himself alone. What that says about a man. Then again, together they operated like a single man, hardly needing to communicate in words. Sharing a mind. 

Once in a town in Texas too small for the kind of traveling act that had come through, he had seen a stage show. Fire-eaters and all. And a man stepped out festooned in wires that glinted in the low light like spider silk, and on the end of each, a painted piece of tin like shattered pieces of a dinner plate laid out in the right form, so that all together they made up a quivering, gesturing, tremulous copy of the body they stood apart from, attached to, dressed in black. The man in black moved and the pieces moved too, and it had struck him at the time like it was the shape of the man’s own nerves, like his observant misgivings preceding him down a street. An uncomfortable act to watch, even while the audience laughed at the lifelike ways the puppeteer made the shattered man move and gesture, and by some angles appeared to walk straight into him like a ghost. The figure even seemed to come to life on its own, consider the audience, to think for himself, and in the captivity of the performance took on believable characteristics. Dutch, seated beside him on the bench, had nudged his arm and commented on the cleverness of it. Though cleverness wasn’t what he saw, so he’d assumed it had gone over his head. 

“What is it?” Nell asked when he returned for his rolling block.

“Just actin as a lookout, nothin much.”

“Lookout for what?”

He scraped some grime from the stock with his thumbnail. 

“Arthur, what.”

He hated doing this to her. “Sweetheart, stay back this last time.” 

And the deserved spite from her as she turned and reached for her rifle in the saddle. “Now I’m definitely coming.”

“Honey I mean it.” He held his hand against her chest. 

Her serious glare as she leaned into his hand pained him. “We’re partners, Arthur. I watch you. You watch me.”

“Goddammit, Nell. I know. Just this last time, sweetheart, just me. Can you trust me?” 

“I trust you fine. It’s Micah…” she muttered.

“Gotta let me be a fool sometimes.” He kissed her on the cheek like he was leaving for something ordinary people did. Goin to town or the like. 

Most of the time.” She sulked. 

The last thing he remembered clearly was how she came up to him, put her arms around his waist, looked in his eyes and told him to double check his scope. She thought it was right of center a hair. God he would love her straight into the ground. 

She lit a cigarette and stayed with the horses and all that gold, watching him go. 

From there, the hot midday trek was something of a haze up to the lookout, which, he realized, was the mesa they had been on one night weeks and weeks back, watching an oil wagon come through, and she had stood with his gun and held out a liquor bottle like an oath, and it seemed fitting, almost ordained, that he should be carrying out this deed there. 

The glassy roundness of the scope sight in the shimmering air caused a double effect that made him blink hard, sweat in his eyes.

Quick shuffling footsteps on the gravel.

The sound of his own skull getting hit.

And the strange familiar sense of peace, that moment before the world went dark.

Finally, there was just something not right about it all, so you ran up after him, roughly the last thing you recall being the sound of several horses, although there were no wild herds you had seen.

You had almost thought you could leave it behind you after all. Almost fooled yourself enough. But it all catches up one way or another.

When someone steps over you and you stun awake, you see him lying there out of reach, unconscious, bleeding from the temple, his bright blood dashed against the limestone chalk. The high whine in your ears begins to break up into the gibberish of voices, and before the blinding brightness of the world goes black under the shadow of the vulture’s wing, you think you hear your name. 

“Scarlett, Scarlett, Scarlett.”

You swung with the listlessness of a child’s toy.

You were nineteen years old. Just a baby then, though you’d felt like you owned the world, for a time. Then you woke up dangling upside-down. Your hair swept the floor like a wet brush.

“How you doin, honey?” 

You could hardly hear over the pulse throbbing in your head.

“You keep making more trouble for me, baby, and I don’t know what to do about that.”

You could only see out of your left eye, and when you twisted around you had a view of Colm’s worn sheepskin slippers and his pinstripe trousers as he paced.

“What would you do, in my position?”

“I don’t know.”

“You what?”

“I don’t know, daddy.” Your air left you as you uttered that word, feeling queasy swaying there. Though you were always queasy to call him that.

Grown man makin grown girls call ‘im daddy. Makes my cunny dry up. Priscilla, in the District, had muttered. Her voice came to you a lot back then. No love lost for Colm when he came by, paying extra for his tastes.

Colm scraped his soles on the dirt of the skinning shack floor, pacing a sentry’s walk in front of you. “I got a pool of men ready to take your spot. I so much as ask, they’ll step up. It is a goddamn privilege to be in your position.”

The chains twisted you, swaying. “I know, daddy.”

He paced away with long steps, and then pivoted and shuffled in a spry lunge back toward you and bent over to see your face. “What’d you tell him, Scar? Now might be the one time we can settle this with you walkin away.”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” He mocked you weeping.

“Nothing, I just…” loved him. For a little while.

“What did you tell him?”

“I didn’t tell him anything!” You swallowed blood and tears.

“Well baby girl I don’t know what I believe anymore.” He stood, raised one foot and gently pushed the sole of his slipper against your shoulder to get you to swing. 

You clenched your jaw as saliva gushed in your mouth with a wave of nausea.

“Should I believe you?”

“I don’t know how to make you.”

“Thank you for seein it my way.”

Your tears streamed up your forehead into your hair. The lawman’s son’s body lay crumpled in the corner, and you knew from his stillness he was dead. 

And you knew to stop yourself crying and get back in Colm’s favor and survive, for that’s all you did back then, survive. You would survive that and all the trouble that followed. The pain of his death would stay sharp in your memories but buried, like arrowheads sunk in the soil. 

Against the iron force of gravity on your chest you roll to one side and push yourself up to your knees. Arthur is on the ground, stirring awake, and your mind is racing as six guns hover on you like black and piercing eyes. Stay calm. For fuck’s sake, stay calm. 

“Holy mother of christ, boys, take yourselves a look, that slimy geezer was right.”

“Bagged us the royal stag.”

“Arthur fuckin Morgan, boys.”

Arthur is crawling up to his elbows and knees. The man closest to him gives him a hard kick in the side and another to his stomach.

“And how about you love.”

When their attention swings to you, Arthur’s hand slips automatically to his gunbelt. You want to scream at him not to move. Six of them. Armed, half-drunk, and trigger-willing. 

“Holy shite, holee shite, Scarlett?”

Your heart plummets; it might as well have crumbled in ash. If you have one at all. Arthur’s face blanks with confusion; you can almost hear your unfinished name in his mind. The boy you think is named Johnny, nearest him, cocks his revolver and snatches the Schofield, and whips him in the face with the grip. You can hear the crack of bone, and he falls to the ground, rolling in pain.

“Shit I’m sorry for clubbin you Scar, I didn’t see -” Tommy pulls you up and starts to pat the dust off you and you shove him off.  “Were you out huntin this one then?”

“You know them?” Arthur rasps, blood spattering from a cut on his lip.

O’Hearn, to your left, starts to hoot. “Oh Scarlett, she’s a wily cunt, boy. Don’t take it hard. You ain’t the first.” 

The storm in his eyes when he hears that. He hasn’t come to any judgment yet, but you can see him getting close.

You want to die. Jesus fuck, you want to die. You touch the Cattleman at your hip like the only comfort you have left. There is nothing, nothing, that can explain you.

A bang rips through the space between you, and you and Arthur snap alert, and your gun is up before you notice the quiet pale boy you've never seen before and his pistol casual in his quiet hand and the vulture collapsed and dead some yards away. The boy's icy eyes graze a long arc from the vulture to you, and you think a smile slugs over his lip as he slips the pistol back in his belt. You holster yours.

A trickle of blood snakes into your eye from the wound at your hairline. The whine hasn’t completely left your ears.

“Wait till Daddy sees you bringin this trophy buck comin up the road. Back in favor for sure.” Stuart is lighting a smoke and goes to punch your arm in a stroke of triumph but you glare him down and he demurs.

Arthur is having the expected trouble of putting this together. “You’re his -” 

“No, it’s not - ” 

The ghost of every touch he ever gave you feels like claws.

“You was gone so long, we was sure you run off and got yourself married again.”

“Married?” Arthur isn’t even resisting the boy you don’t know tying his wrists behind his back now.

Even if you could speak for yourself, you wouldn’t have the first idea of what to say, but Stuart is running his goddamn mouth off, practically staggering with glee.

“I will never forget the sight, you was a right cat on fire when Colm came up there and dragged you back.” He snickers like a fucking hyena.

The memory stings in an entirely different way now, and you burn, purely burn with his eyes on you, more naked than you’ve ever been in front of him. As if you’ve turned into a snake and bitten him, as if he wants to crush you dead under his heel. 

You watch yourself change in Arthur’s eyes. 

When they tell you Colm is waiting at Lone Mule Stead, you freeze and hold your bruising, pounding head. To them, what it must look like, you don’t know, but you cannot meet him there. You cannot let them bring Arthur there. The boys at Lone Mule are the boys from Six Point. They will rightly shoot you soon as they see you, for what you did, and do god knows what to him. 

“No.”

They all look at you. Arthur looks at you.

“We’re not going there.”

“But Colm said -”

“Well he told me different; you want to pester him about it?”

“No, Scar -”

“See how fast you get clipped for pulling that shit, Tommy.”

“Yeah okay Scar.”

“Where we headed then?” Stuart asked, hauling Arthur up to his feet.

You hate to think of it that way, spoiling it. That tranquil lupine valley. A bowl holding the last fresh traces of your time together. But if you want to have any chance at all, it’s the only place in the world you can go right now.

“We’re going to Hanging Dog.” 

“You ever hold one?”

In the near-dark of the cave, he’d lifted the first precious brick from the chest. Its sides scraped against the others like an ax dragging slow on stone. “How much you think it weighs?” The glow off its surface gleamed on his teeth, his expectant half-smile.

You reached for it, then eyed it and the strain it put on his arms to hold it out. “Fifteen pounds.”

“Fifteen?” He looked playfully insulted. When you held out your hands, he lay it in them, cool and smooth as polished stone, letting you realize its weight before letting go. You rocked forward. He smiled again.

“Twenty-seven point four pounds, or supposed to be.” 

You marveled. “How many are there?”

“I counted eighteen.”

You both calculated it in your minds. It equaled the weight of the world. To tie that burden, lowering it by rope in three bundles many times over to the bottom of the hill, took an entire day, and more times than you could count, you both wondered aloud if it was worth it. And it was. No question it was. In the end, all you hoped for was the moment it was no longer yours.

Three leather bundles balanced well on three horses, most of the weight on Trula’s sturdy back, and still your hidden cargo. For now. Though they let Arthur sit tied to Georgia’s saddle most of the way, out of some stroke of inspiration they’ve pulled him down and tied a goddamned rope around his neck - you ache to free him - and have forced him to walk behind Johnny’s mangy horse these last few miles. You would have killed them all if you had any prayer of doing it right, but your eyes still blur like you lie on river rocks watching the wrinkled skin of the surface above. Your ears whine. You’ve thrown up two times along the way. Now you ride behind, with Georgia and Trula tethered, while the others act like it’s a victory parade, sharing a bottle. Only the pale boy is alert, and seems to notice every time you raise your head. You’ve tried to catch Arthur’s attention a hundred times, but over the miles he has transformed.

He is a stranger to you now. His jaw set hard. His mind, the one you know when he is at his most ruthless, is figuring the odds, counting guns, reckoning his chances to get loose, to fight, to kill the way you’ve seen him do so fluently. You watch him doing it now. Putting pain out of his mind. And you. He falls to a knee and you gasp, but only he hears you, and stumbles upright as if you aren’t there. Thief. Killer. Outlaw. He won’t look at you. Ever again, if possible. You hurt a man like him, you ought to expect what’s coming. 

The image floods to mind. The trap door of the gallows dropping. The prisoner falling, the dull snap of his neck. The outlaw who rode in front of you did not turn to look, hardly a twitch of muscle at the sound of a man dying for his crimes. It might as well have been you.

Somewhere in that valley, the lonesome bugle of an elk haunts everything in its hearing. As you pass under the gatehead of Hanging Dog Ranch and the sun disappears into the mountain twilight, you make a silent promise. If it’s the last thing you do, which it has every chance of being, and which you at this point desperately hope it is, you will get Arthur Morgan out of there alive. No matter what it costs.



 

 

 

Notes:

Yeah, the daddy thing. Blech. It's a risk, and all I can say is go ahead and hate it; I do too. And despite what it may suggest, there will be no graphic depictions of sexual assault/abuse, underage, etc. anywhere in this fic.

Chapter 11: The Hanging Dog Part III

Summary:

His head pounds. He wakes with a swinging sensation. Sound of chains. Smell of blood.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

What have they heard? Of the mess at Six Point Cabin and what you did? Their brothers you killed? The fortune you stole?

You ride in past the men who are drifting from the bunkhouse to see what the commotion is and wandering across the yard. When they see you, their confused, distracted faces ask the question on their minds. Where had you been, all that time. Putting it together like simple joinery when they see him. You search for any pinch of suspicion in their eyes, each one who nods or calls to you in greeting. 

They drag Arthur away toward the skinning shack, their wildfire excitement spreading everywhere in minutes, and a small crowd gathers at the door. You feel numb with the strain of pretending. As if, by pretending hardness toward him, you are bargaining for his life with the gods. In exchange, you will slowly turn to stone.

In the horse barn, the stable hands lean on the lower half of the door and watch the scene across the yard.

“I want these horses well looked-after. North paddock.”

“Yes, Scarlett.”

“And get that gold stored.”

“Yes, Miss.”

“I know the count.”

You watch it taken away, two men hobbling with a bundle at a time. A ransom now, and it won’t be enough. On the way, Arthur had made the expected offer, one bar each, then two. You couldn’t tell if it was a pointed rebuke of you, to give it away so freely. Tommy had appeared interested in it, but the pale boy stopped them. It wasn’t about money, he said, in a voice that sounded too deep for his spectral face, gazing straight at Arthur. Anyway it was a pittance to Colm, he’d said. They would all get their reward, in the end. Arthur had stared at his back as if he were planning on shooting him into lace. 

A cheer fountains up outside and it takes every bit of concentration you have not to react. 

It is a time for shedding all but what you can carry. As you shoulder your saddlebag and make your way across the yard you look for faces you know, but there are more unfamiliar ones now, many of those mere rangy boys, easily recruited, easily forgotten. The men who have crowded around the door of the skinning shack part for you, and as you enter the room a bucketful of cold water crashes over Arthur’s slumped body on the floor and he jerks awake. 

“Get up!” Stuart throws the bucket aside and it crashes against the stone wall.

He rocks away from Stuart and his sides clutch like fists with every breath. He crawls up to his elbows, and a knee. 

“You want a go, Scar? Must of been dyin to.” He holds out a club and you throw it aside.

“You’re fucked in the head, Stuart, I see you waste no fucking time.”

They all laugh and Stuart presses his boot against Arthur’s hip and shoves him. 

“We need him alive, you idiot, that’s enough.” You want to run to him. Cover him with your body. Check every wound, and shoot every last one of those bastards between the eyes.

You face the men until they trickle out of the shack, and glance back at Arthur. Stuart is chaining his ankles, and your stomach lurches to see them start to drag him upside down. You give yourself the night or less if you can manage. One night at most. Till life or death or the unimaginable.

As you turn to leave, the pale boy stands in your way, and you shout, a shock ripping through you.

He steps back from the doorway and raises his chin. Black hair clings to his face and neck like roots grown over bone, and his ice-blue eyes seem pained to take in even the dimmest light, so he has kept his hat brim low, and raising his head to peer from under it the effect is akin to lifting the top of a chest, revealing a blackened, still-beating heart.

Your hands grip the sides of the doorframe.

“What do you want,” you say, your voice low and feral now from your tightening throat.

“I've come to see him.”

“Ain’t to be seen. Wait for Colm.”

He takes his time to view you. No expression comes to life on that ageless face. No malice, nor insult. Rather, his eyes rise to meet yours as if he could sweetly pet a creature in his lap and then turn his blank smile up at you and with hardly a twitch of his hand snap its neck.

“You’re new.” You straighten, making yourself large though you feel weak, like the weeds in the yard that buckle under the weight of their flowering heads.

“If months is new.”

“When did he take you on?”

“May, I’d say.”

“But you’ve heard of me.”

“I know about you.”

“Tell me your name.”

“Donal.”

“Donal what.”

“Just Donal will do.”

“Well this you might not know, Donal-will-do.” Your heart pounds and you spit to the side so you don’t have to swallow dry and let on to your failing nerve. “So long as I am here, if you get out of line, I will feed your goddamn chicken carcass to those hogs right over there. If you got a wild hair, go run with the Six Point boys and stay there. You get me?” 

Placid smile, nod. “Yes ma’am.”

“And stay the fuck out of here.”

He nods, and could almost pass for meek, except for his glance that lingers until his brim shadows over it, showing you the cold depths of his contempt. Then he steps up close, the threadworn wool of his suit brushing against you smelling of creosote and smoke, and he leans over your arm. He presses against it until your knuckles whiten with your grip.

“You good, yeah?” he calls to Stuart.

“Good, yeah.”

“I’ll come by later.” He turns, his smear of a gaze daring you. You step out to watch him leave, his weaselly way of walking sideways forward.

Stuart has settled himself in a chair on guard and is rolling a smoke. You take a last look back at Arthur, who hangs motionless upside-down from a hook in the beam, and then O’Hearn closes the door. 

He had never seen anything like it. 

A girl - a woman. Holding off three gunmen.

She, behind the river embankment. By a half-uprooted tree. He remembered that. How she’d reloaded leaning on one elbow. Her hands didn’t shake. Saw her lips counting their shots.

When she found her opening, she didn’t overthink it. She twisted upright, steadied, got her eye in, and fired two rounds at a time. 

He had been watching all of it from the outcropping with Javier. Three O’Driscolls, chasing one woman at a hard gallop. 

“Better get down there,” Javier said, turning. 

But then she slipped down the left side of her horse as its head dropped and it faltered, and she clung to the saddle as she came upon the low washout and dropped with a roll onto the sand. Auburn hair flying like a wheel on fire.

Both he and Javier were halfway on their mounts when she scrambled up and crawled into position. She held her aim until she had it, and tagged one of the pursuers straight in the throat. He grabbed his neck and died off his horse like a squirrel tumbling out of a tree. It was such a perfect shot, Arthur held out his arm to Javier. 

Instead, he unholstered his Springfield and dismounted, and got down to a knee. From his scope, he watched her, and laughed aloud when she clipped the next one with her first shot, which spun him a quarter turn, and killed him, still reeling, with the second. 

The third hid out and gave her more trouble, and was trying to rattle her by not returning fire. Letting her think he might be wounded or dead. Letting her wonder if he had slunk away, or taken up a position where he could pick her off.

She crouched, checking her weapon, and Arthur followed through his scope as the third O’Driscoll crept to the north edge of the embankment. Dread rose up in him when he saw him come around to flank her. 

She saw him the split second he turned into view, and they fired as one. She stood up and took one step, then staggered to a knee, and fell, and the O’Driscoll continued to lurch toward her, firing round after round. She did the same, left-handed, lying on her back.

Arthur pinned the O’Driscoll’s face in the crosshairs and dropped him.

They were down there as fast as their horses could sprint them. He had dismounted at a run, found her sitting up and bleeding a good deal from her right shoulder. 

The O’Driscoll, for his part, had a hole under his eye, and another in the middle of his chest.

“He would’ve died; just had a couple more steps in him. You got him,” he said.

“Was that you, who got him outright?” 

“I took the shot, yes.”

“Then thank you.”

“Miss.”

His hat had flown off on the ride; he went to touch his brim and ended up running a hand awkwardly over his hair.

“You got a bit of a hole in you, yourself, Miss.”

She looked down at her shoulder puzzled, as if a moth had landed there and was communicating to her with its mincing legs.

He knelt beside her when she started to lean and caught her. “Whoa there.” And he could not help himself to smooth the hair out of her pretty face. Up close even more so. 

“Where can we take you?” he asked.

“What?”

“Who can take care of you, Miss?”

She blinked like it was a question she had never considered.

“Javier, tell Grimshaw.”

“Are you real?” she asked. Her voice was dreamy. He was ripping her shirt open, trying not to look at her underthings, apologizing, pulling out his bandana. Her shape he couldn’t help but see.

“Miss, I don’t mean to hurt you.” He pressed his bandana to her streaming wound and she had sucked in her breath and jumped with the pain, but made no other sound.

“Who are you?” Eyes closing. Opening. Green eyes.

“Arthur.”

“Are you…” She looked quite white then at the sound of the agonized grunting of her horse down the road. “I gotta…” She tried to get up to crawl, and could not manage it.

Her horse, some yards away, lay suffering on its side. Javier walked over to it and looked back, pointing to his throat. When his revolver went off, she squeezed her eyes shut and tears trailed back to her temples. 

“I’m sorry about your horse, miss.” He tied his shirt tight across her chest, over her shoulder to bind the wound and wrapped her in his jacket.

“Just tell me are you with them?”

“Any enemy of an O’Driscoll is a friend of ours. Miss.” When he lifted her up, she smelled of gunsmoke and blood and the breeze collected in her hair. 

And the green-sashed O’Driscoll fool lay dead ten feet away, the toes of his boots splayed skyward.

His head pounds. He wakes with a swinging sensation. Sound of chains. Smell of blood.  

The wisdom went like this: It don’t matter what was lost. When it all goes wrong, you survive first. When the living are safe, you can assess the damage, mourn your dead, but not a minute before. You can put off the worst of it for that long. Make yourself a soulless form and go to work. You tell yourself any lie long enough to make it. And he has miles to go before he can think about anything greater than that, if he can just get his feet on the ground.

But hanging there, upside-down, it all rushes back unavoidably with the whooshing pulse in his ears. Stupid fool. The memory of her hurts worse than his face, his ribs. Burns like the branding iron they seared into the meat of his hip, and he can still smell the stench of it. To own him before they use him as bait or leverage or sport.

Morgan, you goddamn idiot. He feels sick. None of it makes sense. Follow your dick, see where it leads. That’s all she was. The pit he’d gone straight down. He can’t let himself think about it beyond that, or the truth will take his breath away. It does already. He can’t think at all; he can hardly see straight.

Flashes start to fade in and out of his vision, but he breathes and tries to clear his head. Sees the room, the game hook through the chains digging into his ankles. And him a hanging fool. A damned fool.

You almost flee from the shack, forcing yourself to stay calm. In the last of the light, the men have built a bonfire like a flaming tongue in the saw-toothed maw of pines and peaks around you gaping wide to the moonless sky. One of the men brings out a fiddle, and another man snakes his arm around your waist as you stride past and he wheels you into a whirling dance by the fire. You know to let him have a stolen few steps, so that he will feel someways a gentleman before you duck out under his arm and sidestep away, smiling all the while and pretending coyly back to all their heartfelt pleading. 

When you shoulder open the door to the shed you find a lanky middle-aged man bare-assed and fucking one of the girls over the end of the workbench and you shout at them to leave. 

He turns to you, his face a blur of fury, confusion, half-spent lust in the lamplight. “Who the fuck are you?”

So you draw your gun; your throat has clenched shut, and you can hardly breathe with the effort to hold back your tears. “Get the fuck out. Get the fuck out!” The girl holds the top of her chemise in place as she hurries out past you. He staggers over his pants trying to pull them up, muttering indignations after you slam the door. 

Alone in the midst of the clutter of old plows and hunting traps and hand tools, in the shivering lantern light, you whip an empty crate across the room, a broken chair, a hammer, a rusty saw blade, and you drop to your knees breathless and pull out the long case under the workbench to find your weapons still there.  

The men by the bonfire sing loud, and in that dark shed you crumple to the hardpack floor, biting the meat of your thumb until you taste blood, trying to stifle your heaving sobs.

Hours and miles and revelations ago, you lay in his arms in the warmth of the tent and thought your dread might be an illusion. The last spasm of fear before you were free. His hand cradled your neck as he pushed into you so deep it was as if your bodies were spliced at the root. For that moment, shallow breath trembling, hearts pounding, you searched each other’s eyes, both of you slick with sweat and half-crazed holding yourselves back, and you whispered those words to him, and in a grip of breath and passion gave in to urgent need. The moan from his chest rippled through you like a deep caress. As he hunched into you, heavy thrust after heavy thrust, you spread your fingers up through his hair and moved with him and writhed as he took you over, and claimed that labored delirium as the hopeful proof you had paid your penance, given sacrifice, made the necessary offerings to absolve you. And spoke the words again, lying face to face in the fade. He drew your hair back behind your ear, the memory of his touch forever joined with his voice as he said them too, and kissed you long and tenderly.

Why did it have to hurt him, when you would have taken any punishment to save him? Your heart breaks for all you’ve ruined for the sake of your selfish love.

He was the lawman’s son, who first loved you. You waited for him up on a sunny secret meadow each day after you first met - that bright day in Strawberry when you and Gus went for supplies, that day like any ordinary one, and Gus went to the cellar of the store, leaving you out front, and the tall boy with dark gold hair stepped out of the station across the way with a bundle of letters and packages in his arms. He tripped over his feet on the steps when he saw you. 

A small package fell and bounced lightly into the road, immediately crushed under the wheel of a cart. You ran over and picked it up, and joked about him probably not needing it anymore as pieces clattered inside. He later said he was surprised by your boldness. You were surprised he didn’t mind you wearing pants like you did and a gun, and liked his quick humor. He wasn’t speechless around you. He made you laugh so hard you would be hoarse and sniffling for an hour. You were nineteen. You had not had so much as a friend your age since you were small. It consumed your every thought, so you didn’t notice Colm paying attention to you leaving.

It became a spring of awakening. On a low overlook on the mountain, gone up to view the stars, he kissed you. And it was the first time you felt something different when you touched yourself, thinking of him, in the meadow one time after he left, and when the bright wingbeat of a bunting stole your attention, a strange ineluctable current suddenly began to course through you, lying among the lupines, unmistakable even though it was unlike anything you had felt before, an urge overflowing with frightening intensity, and you came and cried out, the world glimmering through your tears, and you lay stunned in that secret revelation, the confluence of ecstasy and need. 

Then the first time you lay with him. The first pain, the clench in his face, his careful awkwardness as he concentrated on you as if he was afraid to hurt you, and then when you held him tighter he succumbed to the involuntary act. That final strong push, the thrill in your stomach, the twitch of his body, his weakened weight on you. His pale hip in the sunshine. He sweetly brushed your cheek. He’d looked down, flush-faced, and confessed his love. 

He asked in midsummer if your family would mind it. If he should ask your father’s permission. From the look you gave him, he nodded, demurring, and smiled. She’s her own woman, he said before he kissed you, and you felt both grown-up and childish. You had all your lives together to figure out the rest of what people learn about such things. The nearest church was in Valentine; you had left in the early dark and met him on the road, and ridden with a dress bundled in your saddle bag and your whirling secret plans in mind all that way, your heart fluttering free.

And there he rented a one-room cabin from a farmer with the money you both had saved, and he carried you over the threshold, and both of you addressed each other with playacted formality, your new name, and for a long moment suffered to fill the silence in that tiny daydark room. But once you were in bed together you made sense to each other. There were white lace curtains despite the dimness of the place. When you opened the windows, they breezed in like cupping hands bearing parcels of light.

The week there together, that sweet and ordinary time, was like a chamber in your chest, a time and place sealed for preservation, sealed now to keep you out. You foolishly believed it could be that way forever, simple as it was, for you had asked no more than that. You loved him. All that precious while. 

It was with that understanding that Colm had been careful to tell him all about you before he shoved a knife under his ribs and left you to watch the tide of his blood spread bright over the floor.

“I was afraid it was you.”

Your hand flies to your revolver before you recognize him. The door stands open, and in the spill of light from the bonfire you curl again in the pangs of your sobs on the floor like a centipede under a lifted rock. 

The bearded silhouette in the doorway hobbles inside, pivots on his crutch, closes the door behind him, and leans against it.

He sighs. “You better have a good reason, comin back.”

Your forehead touches the cool side of the gun box and your tears fall sideways. “I’m in real trouble, Gus.” 

“That is what it looks like.”

“I don’t know what to do.” A wave of anguish begins to drown you anew.

He checks over his shoulder out the crack of the door. Then he makes his painstaking way to you on his crutch, getting around the gun box, and lowering himself, with a long groan, to drop to his seat on the floor, his leg outstretched beside you. His hand rests on your head. 

That touch, being seen by him so wretched; you feel the pressure of panic once more, hating yourself for wasting your damn time there weeping while Arthur hangs, and you get up to your knees, dragging your old Evans out of the gun box to your lap as you clear your throat and sniff. He takes your wrist.

“Hold on there. You’ve got some time.”

You trace the grain of the stock, your tears still falling.

“I wish I’da never taught you,” Gus says, drinking again, pushing the gun box away with his toe. 

“Why?” You wipe your face on your sleeves and drag yourself up to sit against the old wheelless cart beside him. “It’s what I’m good at.” 

“Good at more than that.”

“What else? Lying? Betraying?” You sniffle, wryly, and take the bottle he hands to you, and drink his shine and gag slightly.

“It set you on that awful path. And makes you think in times like now you have to risk it all.”

Your tears stream again at his gruff well-meaning words and you can only bow your head and let them fall. “I wasn’t thinking right when I brought us here. I’ve only made it worse.” 

He pries the bottle back from you, and drinks, and huffs at a thought he comes to. “You recall the hawks? All them years back?”

How could you forget the blood-red eyes of the goshawk on Colm’s fist.

They soared in that valley like minor gods in the sky, their wings thrashing the air when they lifted heavily off the gauntlet and climbed to circle high and survey, and they hunted the middle space with mesmerizing speed in the hellbent chase of their prey. 

For a time, a man who ran with the gang would come to the ranch and catch them for Colm and train them, and although Colm was impatient about it, coaxed him through the process of withholding and meting out their food to imprint them. Colm would make him take them out in the meadow on mornings good for hunting, and would stand there in his night clothes, his robe open and waving around him, and order Gus to wake you to come watch before you had a chance to eat. Sometimes four or five in the morning, sometimes for hours, you would stand there or be sent to flush out game from the low brush. You were fifteen or so, and a handy shot by then. 

He was impressed by their brutality; the way they dived headlong toward the earth but pulled up in the last seconds in a dance of perfect form and timing seemed to delight him, if he could be delighted at all, their murderous talons stretched, their wings beating upwards, spinning, reeling, clutching the struggling cumbersome bodies of rabbits and snakes. His favorite moments were spent watching them hunt songbirds midflight, chasing them in furious circles and plucking them like fruit out of the air, landing with their prize and tearing the meat out of their iridescent necks right in front of you. It always made you sorrowful for a while. The heads of cardinals and blue jays often littered the dustdry yard. 

“He liked that they was trained to come back to the glove, is my point,” Gus says sagely, poking your leg. 

Faithful killers. When they returned, their talons were still inked in blood.

He startles you with a loud laugh. “I’ll never forget Circe. That devil hawk.”

That one took particular delight in murdering the songbirds. She didn’t even eat them. 

It was a hot day, that day you stood in the yard hanging laundry when without warning a streak of crimson sliced the air above you in the yard with a tiny chirp, and then the drag of air under the warriorlike wings of the goshawk fluttered the hair in your face as she chased it, assured of her prey, grim and fast and gaining with ease. They tore through the barn, under the fence, even among the men. Colm walked back from the meadow, the gauntlet still on his arm, but would not call her. Above and among you, this bright little bird dipped and cut and fluttered madly and the hawk trailed, almost toying with it, but becoming frustrated when she was outmaneuvered, and the chase turned to a scramble, both of them spiraling right above your heads in the yard, men ducking, cheering on the hawk. 

“What was it, cardinal?” Gus asks you, before taking a swig.

Your fingers mull over the small screwdriver of your gun kit. “Tanager.” That streak of red still wakes your heart. 

“It was Colm’s gun, as well, weren’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“And here before me comes this girl marchin up, and swipes his gun straight from the holster. Before anyone knows what’s happening, she cocks the gun as it passes overhead and shoots that goddamn hawk.” He slaps his leg, laughing again. “Like a fuckin pillow exploded.” 

You snort in spite of yourself. “Wasn’t quite like that.”

“It didn’t feel a fuckin thing, I can tell you that much. I’d give my other leg to see it again. And Colm! He didn’t know if he was mad or impressed. Still never seen a man more dumbstruck. And, I reckon, that pretty little redbird got away.”

“It did.”

“Took your first job not long after, I suppose.” Gus sits with the bottle hanging in his hand looking forlorn again. He was always kind to you, kind as a man could be who had done his crimes. He taught you to shoot and to hunt before he lost his leg and afterward made you practice while he drank to soothe his burning nerves, and he taught you about certain things a girl with a dead mother needed to be taught in about as bumbling a way as a person could teach them before it dawned on him to enlist the help of a whore. 

“Why did you stay with Colm, Gus?”

He takes a long drink, and sucks it off his mustache, clearing his throat several times.

“I am a man made of his habits,” he says, jostling the bottle, and sighs large. “I fell into a rut one day, and pacing along it up and down, wondering, ‘Fergus, should you leave,’ I only made it deeper.” He swats the air in emphasis.

“If someone were to help you out?”

“My sweet girl, I had the poor luck to get old out here, and I hope not to get much older.” He drinks and coughs. “I’ll die drunk as a carp, god willin a plump girl beside me in my bed, don’t you worry about me.”

You pick up the Evans and cycle the lever until the action smooths. As you reach for the box of ammunition, a sweep of fear sucks your breath away and you hold tight to the rifle in your lap.

“They’ll kill him. I’m scared, Gus.”

A new raucous round of singing outside fires up. 

“You love him?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“There’s no talkin you out of it.”

“No.”

He’s silent for a long minute. Long enough for you to begin loading cartridges into the magazine of the Evans, until he lays his hand on yours and stops you.

“Your mother was a fierce one -” 

“Gus, don’t st-”

“I’ll say my piece.” His knobby glove of a hand closes over yours. “A woman out there alone with a daughter, doin well by her, runnin that place. Takes a fierce kind of person, I didn’t know the meaning then. Nor Colm. None of us old bastards cherished her like she deserved.”

Her torchflame of auburn hair. In your memory, she looked back at you and grinned with joyful mischief as she asked her horse to fly.

“But I never known such a brave girl as you. No braver livin thing.”  

You covered her body with your own. And then you got up and took her gun and shot the man that did it. You were ten.

His eyes shimmer mercurial in the lamplight. He wipes his nose and sniffs. 

“I am ashamed,” he says, his lips pursing and screwing in every way to hold back the emotion rising in his face. “I could’ve got you away from here back then. I won’t say all my poor excuses aloud.”

“Don't be, Gus.”

“And now I’m not in a way to help you like I ought.”

You hug his neck.

“Forgive an old coward.”

“Forgive your wild girl.” You kiss his cheek.

Then you push yourself up and wipe your face on your sleeves. You load each cartridge as if you are lining up all the remaining moments of your life, and he sits with you and waits. 

He swings a few feet from the hardpacked floor beneath him that has been saturated over and over by blood and the guts that have slopped down on it from the bellies of the game skinned and dressed there. The rot-sweet smell is faint but stuck in his throat like a residue. His ears have stopped ringing but still they seem packed with cotton. His head feels like to split. In waking, he is filled again by an ache still deeper, and struggles to suppress it, little good it does to think on it now. 

“Evenin.” The O’Driscoll reclined in a chair on its back two legs seems glad he’s awake. “Have a nice lie-in didya?”

“Your boss here yet?”

“You mean Colm or the lady?”

“Reckon they both order you around.”

His smile clenches.

The door opens and a man ducks under the frame, bigger, the kind you send in to draw out information, and Arthur shuts his eyes. He tries to will away some of the pain, separate it from himself somehow, but his wounds throb insistently and the pressure in his head keeps him near to passing out.

Behind them, the door stands open and the pale kid from the ambush slinks inside looking like a corpse in his black suit. The other O’Driscoll in the chair gets up and the kid sits down. He’s got his satchel, and glances over at Arthur as he flips open the top and begins to go through the contents, strewing them on the floor of the shack one by one. A watch, the fold of cash he’s kept with him, a bracelet he stole, tobacco, a flask, and these are divided up among them. His journal, set on the seat of the chair, under his thigh. A scrap of navy blue silk held up.

“What’s this then?” He’s curious about it, lifts it, sniffs it, looks at him.

Arthur closes his eyes and endures the sickening swing. And he hates how right Dutch was. And he hates himself for being so careless, except careless it never was, it was anything but that. None of it quite lines up, like rifle sights out of zero.

The kid stuffs the silk in his pocket. “I take it that all came as somethin of a shock to you up there.”

“Ambushes usually do.”

The kid smiles. “A few of the boys is wonderin if you can settle a matter that’s dogged them. It’s none of my business, really.”

The big guy doesn’t wear a gunbelt or a knife. The kid wears his pistol in his belt, and the other one has a holster and a slow-looking arm. Seems incapable of standing upright too long, leaning against the wall. Her face as they tied him up, full of a thousand expressions. He has to squeeze his eyes shut.

“The boys are split, and the wager is whether she’s a cold fish or whether she will start to buck when you fuck her.” His gaze turned an insidious shade of evil with the slow vile spread of his lips. 

The big guy chuckles, and Arthur clenches up as he punches him in the gut and he grunts and twists in the air.

“If I had the time, I’d enjoy this,” he said, standing up, “but Colm is on his way. So I’ll ask you once and let you noodle on it a while: Where you told Mac to hide the score in Blackwater.”

“Don’t know what you mean.” He groans, swallowing bile.

“Dutch still got you thinkin you’ve got a chance. That’s cute.”

“Surprised you even heard of him. You just start shavin?”

The kid nods at the big guy, who delivers another punch aimed below his ribs and knocks the wind out of him, and while he’s gasping for air, the kid goes on.

“There are deals bein made all over about that goddamn Blackwater mess. No one would blame you makin one of your own. Pinkertons, lawmen, Colm. Skeldings, even Del Lobos. All got a seat at the table. If you wanted to deal, you might still walk away from all this. Hell, I’d even give you a runnin start.”

The kid grabs a handful of his hair and yanks his head up to get a look at him, his almost colorless eyes switching back and forth as if he is mapping him out, and lets him go.

“Loyal to the grave. Always thought that was the stupidest way to die.” He picks up the journal and fans through it, and a couple of dried flowers slip to the floor. He scuffs his boot over them as he turns around. “She’s Colm’s best hand. She knew all about it. I wonder what you make of that.” 

He nods at the big guy. Then everything goes dark.

In the dark hours of morning when the men still around the bonfire are thoroughly drunk and the ones on guard listless and numb, you sneak into the skinning shack, and the sight of his hanging body stops your heart. Not moving. Beaten. In the candlelight you see the bruises on his face, how they’ve whipped him, drenched him awake in between. You brace yourself for the worst as you venture close, and with your own breath shaking you hold your fingers by his nose to feel for his.

He seizes your wrist and you muffle your shout of surprise. 

“We’re getting out,” you whisper, feeling around in the dark for a stool or something he can support himself on. 

He says nothing to you. You suppose you wouldn’t know what to say either. But it is a cold silence you’ve never felt from him.

You place a stool under him. “Push up on that and I’ll get the hook out. Can you?”

He grasps the seat of the stool and looks at your legs until you whisper that you’re ready. With the strength he has left, he pushes against the stool as you step on it, and it loosens the chains enough for you to lift them off the game hook. He falls into you and you both collapse on the dirt floor of the shack, and you feel his whole body tense up in pain. 

He rolls off you and begins to feel around the workbench for any kind of a tool, and you hand him the screwdriver from your gun kit. He makes short work of picking the locks around his ankles, and when he gets up, he immediately has to sit down again, holding his head. He breathes deep, trying to get his world right side up again. He doesn’t move when you crouch beside him, rubbing between his shoulders. From the way he is breathing, you think he might be putting two and two together about all this mess and understanding you better. Hope even sparks up in you, enough to let you think, if you make it out alive, he can let bygone things remain there like an opaque shed of skin. 

“How many on guard?” He massages his ankles.

“Four on this side. Most of the men are too dr-”

He is already heading for the door, and grabs the Evans from you and cracks the man walking there in the face with the stock. The man falls, no time even to be surprised before he hits the ground, out cold. Arthur crouches and moves ahead, and you hurry to stay close behind. 

The next guard gives a strangled yell before Arthur gets his arm around his neck and snaps it, and the two of you freeze as voices of the men nearby wonder if they heard something.

You turn back and move quick through the shadows, following him as you now begin to run, and the fence feels like the boundary of freedom, and it’s only fifty feet away when a large shape lunges out and tackles Arthur to the ground. You skid to a stop and cock your Cattleman and speak only as loud as you dare.

“Get the fuck off him. Now.”

Arthur manages to get out from under him and is about to wrench on his neck as the clack of another hammer behind you makes your stomach sink.

“What took you so long?” Donal speaks in your ear but doesn’t touch you as he moves around you, his quick pistol aimed at your head. “I was sure you’d try something back on the road. Or was it harder than that to choose sides?”

“What will it be, Donal?”

“Start with what you stole from Six Point, and if you don’t have it, we can take it out in flesh,” he says, as if he’s already bored going through this tired negotiation with you.

You throw the saddlebag containing all its bloody stacks of bonds like rotten fruit at Donal’s feet and back away, closer to Arthur.

“Have it. It’s all there.”

He snorts and bends down slowly to pick up the saddlebag, peers inside, glances at you, and with relish lets it drop again. 

He kicks it aside. 

“What, that’s not enough, you greedy bastard? Take the gold, too.”

“Put the gun down, Scarlett.”

“You idiot. That’s fifty thousand together, more than you’d get for the whole Van Der -”

“Ain’t what he wants. Well, not everything,” he concedes with a shrug, and begins to step toward you.

You glare at him in confusion. “Of course it is; they hunted me d-”

“He said keep you, should we find you. Now, him -” He gestures with his pistol at Arthur, who has his arms held tight behind him by O’Hearn, who you never knew well, only knew what was said; you’d be glad to see him dead today, and now all the more. Donal leans sideways to Arthur. “You do any more rememberin about that stash, big man?”

“Just can’t seem to recall.”

Donal shakes his head, and shrugs at you. “Well, in that case, he’s worth the same amount dead.” 

His pistol flicks up and he fires. 

You whip around in time to see Arthur hit the ground, and immediately you’re falling to your knees beside him, checking him in the dim light of the bonfire for the hit. Your hands move fast over him, finding the wound in his shoulder and pressing down with all your weight, blood welling up through your fingers. He’s stunned and blinking hard from the shock and the pain, and with your face close to his you speak fast, your words forming the desperate cadence of prayers, no no no no no no no you’ll be okay stay awake, stay with me stay with me please stay. When he breathes deeper and his eyes begin to focus, you stroke his face. Keep awake, I’ll get you out of here, stay awake.

Hands claw at your shirt and drag you off of him.

“Where is it, Scarlett? What’d that Pinkerton say before you shot him?”

“Nothing, you fuck.”

“Ain’t what I heard.” 

“With all Colm’s boys shooting at me, I couldn’t rightly hear.”

“This might help you, hearing it.” He cocks his pistol and aims straight at Arthur’s head.

You shout at him to stop. To get the journal from his things. The fucking journal. Get it! 

Donal releases the hammer and nods to one of the boys, who runs back to the shack.

When it’s handed to you, you shove the men holding you away and step back. Donal’s pistol remains on Arthur, who watches you with disbelief in his eyes as you flip to the front and rip out the page with the map of Blackwater crossed out with the X, and slip the journal into your shirt. “I’m sorry,” you whisper. You can’t look at him after that.

You drop the map in the mud and take another step back. “The building west of where the large X crosses. Cellar,” you murmur.

Then you whip around with the Cattleman cocked and the circle of men ripples back a step. You whistle for Apollo. 

“No one fire,” Donal calls calmly to the men as he walks over and picks up the map. 

“You tell Colm anyone who comes looking for me is a dead man!”

A heavy arm suddenly hooks across your chest at the same time the other hand steals the Cattleman from your grip, and Arthur’s already dragging you backward. He’s overwhelming even wounded, and the cold muzzle of your gun pushes hard against your temple.

“Any of you bastards move, she’s dead.”

Donal seems halfway interested in letting this play out. “That’s a mistake, big guy.”

“See what happens when you tell Colm you let his prize pony die. I’ll skull her right now, you say one more word.”

It crosses your mind that if he weren’t so terrifying, you’d be turned on right about now. His arm presses across your chest like he’s clung to you before, and he’s panting, strong fingers digging hard into your ribs. You shuffle backward with him. When you stumble, he’s less than delicate about regripping you. 

“The cistern,” you whisper. “Left.” 

He swings left, and the guard in the shadows puts down his rifle. 

You shuffle back out of common range, though you think he should go another twenty feet, and he whistles for Georgia. You whistle again for Apollo but only Georgia shows. You help Arthur up and he growls through his teeth as you jump on behind him. He doesn’t give you any warning; as soon as his bare heels dig into her flanks, you can hardly grab him around the waist before her powerful launch. 

She flies through the valley in the starlight, neck lurching with every stride, lengths and lengths in seconds, stretching and collecting and shooting forward. Arthur leans almost parallel to her neck.

You glance over your shoulder. Two riders speed out of the ranch silhouetted in the wide glow of the bonfire.

“Give me your gun.”

He only urges Georgia and leans flatter. You can see his ribs spasming and feel his jolts of pain, but he is singleminded in a way that frightens you. He can ignore suffering; he can ignore you.

“Arthur - give me the goddamn gun. I’ve got a shot.”

And you jab him in the flank to wake him out of it. He cries out with a piercing note breaking in his voice and you immediately regret it, but he passes the gun back to you. His hand is shaking.

Holding tight around his waist with one arm, you cool your breath, exhale. Let the sound out of your ears. Aim between the floating airborne beat in Georgia’s gait and the one in your racing heart. Fire. Hammer. Fire. Hammer. Fire. You wait. 

One of them pitches off sideways. You cannot tell about the other one, but he reins up and turns around for the other. Into the cold dark, you and Arthur disappear with the drum of Georgia’s hoofbeats fading. 

A mile, maybe two pass under you at a full gallop. Georgia lathers hard and is snorting and starting to drop in her hind legs. In your arms, you feel Arthur losing strength, and you tell Georgia to slow. She won’t listen until he says it. It comes out as a low sigh, and when she slows, he can’t put down his leg in time and although you grab at his union suit he falls hard off her back. A stride later you jump down and run to him. 

You swipe his hair from his bruised face. You’re kissing him. Checking his shoulder, pressing down again to slow the bleeding. Talking him back to you. Just wake up please, wake up. Can you hear me, we're almost away, I love you. When he starts to come around, his face hardens on you and he backs away, scrambling to his feet. 

“Get away.” He squeezes his eyes in agony.

“What?”

“Get the hell away before I shoot you. I’ll give you to three.” His voice cracks. 

You’re holding the gun.

He snatches it from your hand and pulls back the hammer.

“Arthur?”

“One.”

“Let me explain.”

“Two.”

“Please!”

A word you’ve said many times. A word he’s made you say.

“Colm O’Driscoll? Pink- were you plannin to -” He hisses when he moves his arm, and props his other hand on his knee, trying to catch his breath. “Were you gonna tell me?” he gasps. He’s barefoot, his union suit badly torn at his hip where a wound glints like tarnished silver in the starlight.

“What would you have done?”

“I don’t know!” He clamps his fist, still gripping the gun, to his shoulder, and staggers toward Georgia. 

“Arthur, you’re hurt - let me -” you step toward him and suddenly he draws a breath and turns on you, and shows you in that instant what he can truly be. He stands straight and strong with the gun and his eyes aimed to kill you, his finger ready to flick at the trigger, like he has reached that part of himself that acts on instinct and will not flinch. His breath lets out and his body goes silent.  The air around you stills, like you always wondered about in the end. You blink and your heart slows, prepared to stop.

In the silence, the hammer of the revolver lets down with a distinct click and he rests against Georgia, breathing heavily, his forehead on his arm, and after a time seems to decide something firm. When he looks up, his expression damns you, his voice is hoarse with pain. 

“Don't let me see you again. Or I’ll kill you. Bet on that.”

He hikes up on her back, rasps at her to go, and she charges, and he’s gone into the dark before your tears begin to fall. 

So much can happen in a year.

Wounds will heal. Burns will cool. Bitterness may settle. Wars may come to peace, or further war.

A woman can make her way out of the mountains with nothing. She has had next to nothing before, but lost everything this time. Exhausted, she can steal enough to pay for a coach out of Strawberry. She can arrive in a city large enough to hide herself in. Be lost. Have no name.

She can get work for herself. A modern woman. She attracts the charming attention of a fop who could use her help. A nervous butterfly of a fellow. Harmless. Too preoccupied with dalliances and civilities to ask many questions. She can gather orchids and plumes and trim them to the right lengths. She can keep the till, for god’s sake; he can hardly be bothered to count money. She can feel safe, cocooned there among the fine curios and antiques in his greenhouse atelier. There is no risk a roughneck from her former life would ever happen to find her there. After many months, she can finally sleep without gasping awake in a sweat. 

After many months, her heart might begin to repair, in defiance of the natural laws of things that are shattered beyond saving. She might resist it at first, undeserving, but gradually accept the solace of a friend or two, and so, too, unavoidably, the odd stitch to her heart here and there.

She might allow a future for herself.

On the condition that she never has to look back.

 

 

 

Notes:

The title of the fic comes from this track, one of those gifts that just drop in your lap sometimes - Winter's Come and Gone - Gillian Welch

Chapter 12: The Fool

Summary:

So much can happen in a year.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Smokestacks blacken the air over the city in the distance, and the stench from the stockyards reaches him even a mile away. Stagnant cesspool of a place, dead fish and rotted-out nets and all the waste of its crowded tenements and mansions alike washed up in the bend of the river there. The water crawls with an almost imperceptible pulse. The air passes like dying breath. In the heat of high summer, it slows to a spiritless progress and pulls him along with it toward the bridge and into the city's dispassionate arms.

He reached camp, they said, in the middle of the night, worn down almost beyond recognition. His horse bore the appearance of a long journey and a streak of his blood down her side.

He suffered fevers. The bullet wound in his shoulder healed slow, the burn at his hip slower. Several times, Hosea insisted on staying up with him, not certain he would see the dawn. 

Dreams like visions, or waking visions like dreams faded in and out. A buck that raised its head to look at him for such a long time that he thought he’d really died. Another time, a skulking coyote cowered from him but would not run.  

Abigail sat with him. When she took his hand he had to turn his head from her. The reverend’s drugs made his eyes burn with tears he couldn’t hold back, and he felt hollow and weak.

He would not talk about her or what happened beyond what they needed to know, mumbling about the law and O’Driscolls and such. He could still smell her. The scent of her hair in the pillow. Her body in the canvas. He figured he’d die soon. Slip beneath all pain soon. At some point in that half-dreaming haze, her light open-mouthed sighs began to rise and fall with his own breath and he jolted awake to nothing but the airless tomb of his tent.

The next time he woke, the reverend sat there, reading in the daylight, the tent walls rolled up for a breeze. When the reverend noticed him awake, he held a canteen for him and lit a cigarette, though it made him cough and he recoiled in pain.

“We almost lost you, Mister Morgan. By God’s grace, here you are.”

“I don’t believe in all that, Reverend. I don’t mean to offend you.” He could scarcely manage a whisper.

“Nothing decent ever required faith to be true.” 

He shut his eyes. 

“I ain’t up for philosophy.”

“I won’t bother you with it. I only mean to say that you might deserve grace nevertheless, and you don’t have to think about it any more than that.” His cold hand clutched over his fist in a shaky gesture of accord.

Whatever the reverend’s good intentions were in saying it, the heaviness afterward crushed him, and lying there through the day he felt liable to smother. That night, with the blanket around his shoulders, he managed to get up from his cot and walk barefoot up the lakeshore. By then the moon was full or almost full and he could see bluegills glinting shieldlike in the shallows. Frogsong thrummed loud and constant, drowning out the echoes in his head but making his head pound. He got himself a good distance away and then wasn’t sure he could make it back, and sat on a large bark-stripped log that shone like a colossal bone or antler of a long-dead beast. Just sat there staring at the clear edge of the water washing up to his feet and back.

Footsteps in the sandy gravel stopped beside him. Stood there. The strike of a match. The quiet popping of a mouth on a cigar. A rush of blown smoke. “I thought you’d left us, son. Or I’d have come out lookin for you myself.”

A fever still dogged him at night sometimes, and he shivered despite the heat and the blanket. “I didn’t give you much reason.”

“No, you didn’t.” Dutch sat beside him. For a long while they watched the quiet lake. Dutch’s hand on his shoulder lay heavy. Gripped him. “We don’t have to discuss it, not one word, if you don’t want to.”

He glared at the lake, struggling to hold back everything that came to mind given the slightest suggestion of her in the world.

“But if we can put all of that behind us, son, the future is bright. You just can’t go toward it half-way, and I need you by my side. Do I have all of you?”

He nodded. Rubbed his burning eyes. The fever would put him in the strangest mind. Pictured himself a half-man, walking by an unseen power, still breathing, the unthinking instrument of Dutch’s will. Numb. Mean. Effective.

“You don’t look well.”

“I’m fine.”

He tried to stand without struggling but was still unsteady on his feet. Dutch stood with him and took his arm. “I would bear you on my back to the finish, Arthur, you know that.” And he was always sincere, saying such things.

He recovered himself by degrees, first in the distance he could walk, then tending the horses, and otherwise measured in buckets of water and bags of feed and bales of hay and stacks of cut wood. In all of it, the world had a new weight. But in carrying it a person became stronger. Or so he saw it. Anyway, staying idle only left him with time to reflect on futile things. As soon as he was well enough to ride, he felt freer. Started taking on jobs. Easy ones at first. Gathering Strauss’ harvest, all them sad fools stupid enough to take his terms. First that pathetic Polish fellow. The kid who only wanted to buy his girl a ring. The ranch maid.  Every time he brought the money back, the bastard’s reaction repulsed him. His eyes behind his filmy spectacles lurked dully with the expectation of having something owed returned, not brightened with the shine of earning. 

He was feeling strong for the first time the night he and Sean burned the tobacco fields, exhilarated and working again, triumphant as they rode away on those shires. They should have known better. Two days later, the little Irish bastard was dead. Shooting Sheriff Grey had been little consolation. Leaving a dozen bodies dead in that red dirt, neither. As he picked up Sean’s body, and felt his skinny weight fold over his shoulder, he wanted to burn the town to the ground. But they walked away, leaving behind that deathless wound of a place. 

And then it all fell apart in a blur. Jack stolen. That goddamned mansion burned, the Braithwaite woman with it. All their beastly shadows climbing the walls as she was dragged down the stairs, showing them something monstrous in themselves they had not known before. Righteous anger. A reckoning long overdue. Embers floating around them like they were undersea. The guiltlessness in murdering her sons and riding away from that pyre. Then Agent Milton, the soulless belly-crawler. Nell’s name in his mouth was a dagger he did not expect as Milton asked him how she was. Once they were safe in new hiding, in the house lodged deep in the swamp, and got Jack back from that slimy Italian bastard, he had gone off for a full month just to get the stench of the city off him. And though he came back with treasure he had found, Dutch was already talking plans about Bronte like they had all joined up. Micah now acting the confidant. Hosea quietly resistant, but when it came to arguing, always took what he called the high road and what always seemed, to Arthur, more like giving up. But he supposed that was what happened when a man aged and got sick in a life like theirs.

In winter he and John and Charles rode far up north, looking into a train job, up into the deep snow that never fully melted and where the sun that time of year never rose very high before setting, up near the mining town where he had shot the Pinkerton traitor no one had yet mourned enough to come after him for. Charles noticed him getting quiet, grim, so when John commented on it, What’s crawled up your ass, Morgan?, Charles hushed him and he didn’t have to turn around and say what was on his mind to shut him up.  The train job came to naught, nothing but flat car after flat car piled with white pine, a whole forest of pine shipped down, and the smell of sap laced with coal smoke hung in the air long after it had passed and the black smoke had cleared. 

It was on the bridge heading down where they were stopped by a couple of idiots who had just pulled out their guns. Two raggedy opportunists in stolen coats too large for them, sniffling in the cold. Arthur, in front, quickly had a bead on each of them.

“I wouldn’t do that, big feller,” the one said. His ratty sparse mustache made him appear eighteen at most.

“Here’s your warning to set those down and move. I ain’t askin.”

The second one opened his mouth to say something smart and got out half a word before he shot them both. The first one pitched off the bridge onto the ice below.

“Jesus, Morgan,” Marston said, dismounting and walking over to the second one, kicking him lightly before going through his pockets. 

Charles checked over the side of the bridge and seemed displeased, but to hell with him and Marston for doing nothing. 

“I ain’t swappin smalltalk with some dope-fiend that can’t handle his pistol. You don’t draw unless you’re ready to get shot at.” 

“Well you don’t have to get preachy.”

He dismounted and scaled down the ravine. The first one had landed on his stomach, and blood still shed out of his mouth onto the ice and steamed like his final breath lingering. As if to show him here is what your vile soul looks like as it vanishes into nothing. The bastard didn’t have but twelve cents on him and half a pack of cigarettes. 

He was far ahead as they were traveling back through the Grizzlies East getting near sundown when he had to pull up. For a minute he thought he was seeing things. A woman’s face in the rocks, and more than just what forms in the mind after enough time spent alone. A giant face carved there. As if she were captured trying to see out. He rode to a better overlook, and for the first time in many months, in the field of her determined gaze he started to reach for his journal. In the same moment his hand grasped the absence of his journal in his satchel, he saw something moving there, and grabbed his binoculars instead, and dragged that blurry fisheyed sight across the landscape until he found it. A man, swaying in the mountain breeze from a rope off the front of the scaffold. He sat there feeling sick and relieved he had not gotten halfway through a sketch before noticing the man hanging from his own incomplete creation. He turned Georgia away from it, and now could not expel it from his mind, not just the face and the man hanging from it, but the journal, now lost like the other, any impressions within only partially preserved in memory like the dustfilled prints of a man’s boots to hint at what he had seen. It was for the best that it was gone. Some things better left forgotten. Though they never really were.

It was in the spring he caught himself thinking back on all the carelessness of their last weeks together, urgency and passion that now seemed remote, the passion as well as the pain now dulled. He was washing the blood from his face, seeing in the water those flecks of rusty red that pathetic failed do-gooder had spewed at him, and it suddenly struck him, like a kick in the gut, that he could have a child by then. He held the sides of the wash barrel and squeezed his eyes to quit himself of the notion, but standing over that dark water shimmering bright on the surface he recalled her face, and all those soft times he would lose himself in her, those times they would see into each other and face the risk of it. 

The thought put him in a pitiful mood for the rest of the day, he could hardly face himself, and when Charles asked if he wanted to head into the city, which meant drinking and most likely a fight, he was up for nothing else. The sick do-gooder’s face had felt clammy and sharp under his fists - he’d felt even the ridges of his teeth under his thin cheek - and he couldn’t get rid of the sensation soon enough, happy to bury his fists in the solid gut of an Irish bastard out back of Doyle’s.  

He woke up in jail. A plug of ripped cloth stuck up his bleeding nose, a cut down his chest like it had been made with a razor, not deep but slicing his shirt down to the belt. He pissed blood in the trough, and his sides under his ribs were black and blue. He lay there staring at the ceiling ignoring the other fellers in the lockup guessing at his crimes. It took Charles until evening to find him there and bail him out, and back at Shady Belle he slept for two days. When he woke, the headaches were back for a week, and he set out on long walks at night when it was cooler, to ease the pain, and smoke, and go over and over in his mind about a plan that might get Dutch’s attention more than this failing Bronte farce. 

One of those nights around then, he noticed Missus Adler standing outside the wall, leaning against it, alone. He nodded at John changing out, leaving. A warm spring night. Frogs and moths and fireflies and the like. His boots crunched loud in the rind-like magnolia leaves all about. “You out here poutin after losin to Pearson again?”

She smiled over at him sadly, wiped her nose. Held up a whiskey bottle. “My Jake’s birthday.” 

“Shit.” He stopped. “I’m sorry.” And hesitated to get closer, thinking she might want to be alone. “I’m poor company for consolation.”

“It’ll be a year this month.” She nodded, blowing out her cheeks. “Feels like no time at all.”

“No. No it don’t.”

“Have a drink with me?” She held it out.

He took the bottle. "Can't let you stew alone."

"That's why you'll stew with me."

He raised it in salute to the air and took a drink. "Well tell me all about Jake."

She talked about everything they had wanted together. Farm. Babies. Family. Getting old. Spoken of now like a dream, or the lives of some other people, though who could manage such simple lives now, and where on all the earth, unimpeded, unthreatened, if not nestled in those quiet mountains far north, neither of them could imagine. By the time the bottle was empty, the camp behind them was quiet. Bats in the trees above flitted helter-skelter catching mosquitoes, and they both watched them fairly drunk. His hand brushed hers when he passed the last dregs sideways to her, he hadn’t meant it to. He started to apologize when she set the bottle down but took his hand.

She turned, faced him, calmly put her hand on his chest, and stepped in to straddle his left leg, putting her heels down slow as if she were making a decision in a dream. She pulled him to her by his belt and he staggered upright only to be pushed back to the wall, and this abrupt possibility, jesus christ did he want it; he wanted it so much he was in pain for it, and when she pressed herself against him he became undeniably hard with the touch. His hands somehow held her hips, and with the feel of her on him and the sudden urge that flooded him, he brought her close. Her breath came fast to feel him, and she held the back of his neck and he panted into her open mouth when she palmed his erection with her other hand, not in the least bit shy. But glimpsing her as she kissed him was like a shock, not to see the face that came to mind, nor the taste he knew, and the sudden burning flare of guilt hurt worse than denying himself this one now-gutted solace. He had to turn his face away, and the weight of her body eased back. He exhaled, held her wrists lightly, rubbing them with his thumbs.

“I can’t,” he said.

He could almost feel her pang of disappointment. He felt it as much himself.  “I'm sorry.” He tried to show her he felt guilty. In truth, he already breathed easier.

“You can picture her, Arthur. I don’t mind.” 

He almost gaped at her with that unsettling thought. “I can’t do that to you.”

“They’re both gone. We have to see it sometime. And us two lonely wretches,” she said, then whispered, “Don’t have to be more than a fuck.” 

When he didn’t move, she took his hand and brought it slowly up to her fine breast, and pressed it there. He found himself obliging, and with that uncommon softness in his hand, his throat ached. He felt sorry for her, standing so close to him practically trembling to be touched. Her hand resting on his chest felt hot with the realization of something lost. When she pushed her hips into him, he was already mostly hard again, and it would have taken little more than a word or glance for him to spill right there, as much time as it had been, and she started to undo the buttons of his shirt. He rubbed his eyes and tried to convince himself there was no harm in it. No harm, nothing but the final acknowledgement that the past was past. To feel hands on his skin again. To feel...

He took her breast more fully in his hand and pulled her in by her lower back, aroused by her dusky sigh, and her hand traveling down made him wince to give in, and her chin trembled and he had never seen her this way. Less for his own sake, he began to unbutton her shirt, and her shaking hands began to help him, and he suddenly felt as if he had made a promise he couldn’t retract, as desperate as she moved on him, as piteous as she looked, like to cry. She was different in her way, and he found himself wondering if she was pretending he was her husband, and if this had been the way they moved, a rhythm he couldn’t quite find. It didn’t rightly matter, but he couldn’t help but notice the smell of her skin so different, not unpleasant but different, her sweat, her breath, her hair as she swept it back off her shoulders. Her breasts were fuller, heavier, and she seemed to melt with the sensation of his hand sliding under one, her chest falling with a long sigh. And although he did as she motioned him to do, and kissed and tongued her tit for a while, the fleshy feel of her on his cheek and mouth, he felt further and further detached as she sighed with the sensation and held his head close. When she curled her fingers under his waistband and began to undo his trousers, though, it was as if his own heart refused to go further, his throbbing will be damned. He stepped back from her, goddamn it was a breathtaking pain to step back but his own spine seemed to peel him away. He held her fingers in his hand for a moment, away from his fly. Gently drew the edges of her shirt closed, shuttering that pleasant view. Tried to think of something to say.

“I want to, darlin." When she faced down, he tried to make it right. “Jesus, I would. Don’t want to make you feel wrong about it.” He straightened back from her, cleared his throat as he slowly fastened up, found it difficult to look at her, but forced himself to.  “You’re a fine woman. I just can’t.”

She pursed her lips and nodded, buttoned her shirt again, and sniffed. “It’s hard, you know. To go on knowin you’ll never feel them again,” she said, with a dignity he found himself admiring long after, and she took a cigarette when he offered one, and they both stood leaning against the wall as the sky lightened and birds waked up in the trees. 

“You loved her.” It was almost an accusation.

“Don’t start.”

“If you’re gonna deny me, let me hear you say why. Ain't many chances we get in life. You miss her, Arthur, might as well say it.”

“Yeah, well, don’t change what happened.”

“You sure it ain’t you bein a fool?”

“An O’Driscoll, Sadie? Really?”

She shrugged, smirked. “Wasn’t it O’Driscolls shootin at her that day?”

“I already thought all ways around it. You weren't up on that flat when it happened. You weren't at the ranch.”

Sadie tipped her head in concession and smoked. “Or maybe that knock on your head was harder than you thought.”

“I'm surprised at you.”

“Imagine how I feel.”

He sighed, scuffing his boot among the dead leaves like scattering dirt over a dug grave. “In any case, what’s done is done.”

“I’m sorry for you, then.”

“Oh really.”

“As your friend, Arthur. Might as well tell you the truth. Makes you mean after a while, carryin on that way.” 

“I was always mean.”

“Maybe.” She sniffed, smoked. “But you’re meaner now in some ways. I saw you happy once.”

“That weren’t happy. That was me bein a fool, back then. Before all that mess.”

“That ain’t true, and you know it.”

“What gives you -”

“Listen to me, Arthur.” She pointed into his chest, pushing him back to the wall. “On my Jake’s birthday, you listen to me and don’t say a word back. You ain’t a bad man but you’re on the razor edge of becomin one, doin like you do now. I don’t know what I thought - maybe a little tenderness, some companionship might do you good after you deny yourself every other thing. Maybe you’re just too far gone.”

“You were thinkin of yourself.”

She slapped him, hard, though it stung him more that she would do it at all. 

“Get some rest, dammit. You’re a shell. It’s hard to watch.” She dropped the end of her cigarette, ground it out in all that rustling dead brush. “You’re better, Arthur. You were better.” A crowd of expressions fell over her face, all stern and regretful and accepting of things he couldn't fathom, like closing a door. She took up her carbine, but before she left, she had to touch his arm and give him that look that saw him for what she thought he was, and he had to look away. She patted his arm firmly and walked along the wall to her post, one slight stumble as she went.

He thought about leaving, going into the city. He thought about finding a whore. Just to plumb that final pit of himself he had stayed out of so far. Thought about how good it would feel to fuck the hatred right out of himself again, even knowing it would seep back. Brothels in the Irish district seemed appropriately decrepit. Saw himself waking up wasted on some stained ticking mattress in the heat of that city. 

He didn’t get that far. He got jumped in an alley and fought his way out of it, four grown men, and then sat down against a building to get his head straight, all the echoing rambling of the drunk and the destitute in the shadows and the flickering gas lanterns giving the street a hellish atmosphere. 

“Sir, alms for those who need it.” A woman’s voice above him. 

“My money ain’t mine to give, lady,” he said without looking up, his arms propped out on his knees. 

“No, for you, sir.”

He glanced up to see a nun holding out a dollar to him.

“Oh, I ain’t…” He waved her away. “I ain’t in need,” he said. The man down the sidewalk a ways, lying on his bed of newspaper, was singing a tuneless, wordless song, sweeping his arm heavily to conduct the air.

“Forgive me, you seem to need something,” she said, a little humor in her voice, which was the only reason he didn’t snap at her to get away. When he looked up again, she indicated her own face where bruises darkened his. 

He pushed against the wall to stand up, his joints stiff, his knee especially where one of the thugs had fallen into him. “Well whatever I need, Sister, it ain’t cured with a dollar.”

“Nothing is,” she said, still humor in her voice, her eyes that looked up at him without the slight fear he saw in most strangers. She stood at least a foot shorter than him, and walked alongside him; she didn’t seem to have any particular direction in mind. Anyway it didn’t feel right, leaving her in that place by herself. She lay the dollar piece in the hand of the singing drunk and smiled when he started to sing a song for her as she rejoined Arthur in the street.

At one point, he stepped wrong on the cobbles and his knee nearly gave out, and she walked him over to a bench under a dim street lamp and sat down beside him.

“You don’t need to, uh -” he said, and she fanned herself and dismissed him in kind. 

“I don’t need to do anything. But we can sit here a while.”

Him sitting next to a nun, and behind him the dark cathedral looming, its gardens a rare piece of tranquility in that dark city built for sinning. Dutch would give him grief for days if he saw it.

She introduced herself. Sister Calderón. He gave his real name, which he hadn’t used in months. Felt strange to say it. 

“Mister Morgan, what brings you into the city?”

He thought about his original reasons and stared out at the street ashamed as if she could read them on his face. “Bad business, Sister. You’re better off far away from me.” He rubbed the side of his knee and took out his cigarettes. When he offered her one, thinking she wouldn’t take it, she did, and he smirked over his own cigarette as he held out the match for hers.

“Oh you cannot be so bad, Mister Morgan.”

“With all due respect, Sister, you have no idea.” 

She seemed unconcerned about his long-barreled revolver between them, the one he’d gotten off the body of Flaco Hernandez, carved butt to barrel with skulls. 

“You wanna do some real good, go convert the folks on that street with all the mansions. Tell em to give more to the folks over here.”

“Oh they have no need for God.” She smoked, and he smiled wryly with her, and the moths spun under the streetlamp, their shadows large as crows passing over them.

“Why do you do it?”

She turned her open, curious face to him.

“Why do you try to save folks? Most of us is beyond savin.” He felt a grip in his chest. Made it hard to breathe for a moment.

“If saving is not the goal, does that help?”

He huffed, and smoked, and didn’t see her point.

“We are all sinners, Mister Morgan. And we are all worthy to sit next to each other. There is no condition.”

“I seen plenty of men ain’t fit to spit in front of you, Sister, all the evil they done. Me among them.”

“What is fit or unfit? To have the comfort of another and share the weight of the world for a time is the closest thing to sacred. If you see it that way, then pride is the obstruction. And we are all proud. If there is anything to be saved from, perhaps that is it.”

She had put a dollar in his hand as she got up, her small, soft, dry hand touching his, and told him to put it to good use before she walked off; he didn’t see where to. 

Once he found Georgia, he got out north of the city and set up camp, figuring to sleep until he could wake up without that hangover of shame. And in his sleep, the way she always seemed to when he was at his worst, Nell spoke into his ear.

Do that to me again.

He saw her in that dream, at night. By the river. They didn’t have to be so quiet but were quiet anyway. In the mossy bower of a willow. Her fingers in his hair. Her sweet mouth opening with his.

In the stifling heat of midmorning he woke to the ache of his knee now swollen, and limped as he packed up his things, drifting in the aftermath of sleep, the guilt heavy this time, more than usual.

He could hope for no such goodness in his life again, he knew that much. Bullets seemed to seek him out with more and more intention and better accuracy, stinging the bricks near his head, or close enough he could hear them buzzing past like insects. Sometime in July, outside Annesburg, he came upon the body of a small-time outlaw posed on display on an upturned cart, CRIMINAL painted on a sign hung around his neck. Dowels were hammered in to support the body under the armpits, and the curious filed past him, watched closely by the local sheriff to keep them from cutting tufts of hair or bits of fabric from his suit to keep as souvenirs. The outlaw, pale and posed, with his index finger tied by string to his opposite thumb to appear clasped, had nothing but a small caliber hole to the outside of his eyebrow to attest to the manner and cause of his death. No more than twenty-three. It was impossible not to make the comparison to his own age and consider his waning luck.

While Dutch stalled and angled around the mob in Saint Denis, where you could hardly loiter without attracting the attention of the omnipresent law, he searched for ways to keep earning, inching them closer to freedom, all of them falling back into old habits the longer they stayed there. What he had to show for his few successes, it seemed to make no difference. The growing threats he endured, the close calls, did not incline Dutch to greater urgency. Like all things there, they slowly settled into the muck of their lives, where a person survived by living in delusions and dreams, or unconcealed meanness, all aware of but unconcerned by the slide of time outside.

He pulls up on the reins, coming into the heat of the city, and the clopping of Georgia’s hooves careens off every stony surface. All softness conquered under a hardened crust. The captured trees. The overtaken ground. Brick walls making canyons in the swamp. He sits her slow trot and glares ahead to the echo of his horse’s steps, on the way to another meaningless score.

 


 

“Can I help you?” you had simply asked. All those months ago.

The man cried out in surprise, clutching his heart, losing one shoe in the muck and catching his balance with a look of total dejection all over him. He shone with sweat and was dressed to compete with peacocks for color and panache. 

He had a melodic whisper of a voice. “If you have somehow cultivated the ability to see one fragile petal in this entire odious overgrown swamp or snatch eggs from the mouths of reptiles, then you might be able to help me. Sadly, I think I am beyond succor.”

You held out the orchid in your hand, if only as a convenient article of cheer. You didn’t expect the reaction it wrought from him, which began with a quaver of his chin and then a relinquished sob as he left one shoe behind in the mud and hobbled coltishly through the shallows to get to you.

“A Queen’s.” He approached you with both impeccably groomed hands spread wide, contracting then at his realization of their newly filthy appearance, then reaching again in a soft receiving cradle to accept the waxen flower.

You laid it in his hands and he supported it as if he wanted to touch as few points of it as he possibly could while keeping it from plummeting to the mud. 

“Where did you find it? H-how?”

You had been walking for hours by that time. Blistering feet. You might say feeling sorry for yourself. Your fare ran out outside of Lagras, and the coach driver could not be persuaded or even threatened to bring you further. The asshole. You were hoping to make it to the city before nightfall, and at least to a saloon if you found nowhere to sleep. Then, in a pool of water and afternoon sun, it caught your sight. A demur hint of color beneath the spikes of a palmetto. A stately orchid somehow avoiding the spotlight. Like a deposed royal. Not to pin such a likeness to yourself, but it felt fitting to pick it and carry it with you. Either feeling bitter at the world for putting pretty things in front of you to destroy, or wanting to capture the last traces of hopeless beauty left in your path before they disappeared. 

“Can you find more, do you think?”

You had hardly opened your mouth to try to answer when he was limping beside you, one-shoed, to the road. “Imagine it from my point of view: Here you are, walking out of the murky depths of the jungle, filthy -” he eyed you up and down with a crooked eyebrow full of disdain but also companionable honesty, as he took your arm - “just when I am despairing of the world, and you offer me the one thing I have searched for at the mercy of the insects and the reptilian creatures of the swamp for fruitless hours.”

He walked you to his cart, drawn by a refined-looking pony, and you sagged with relief at the chance to rest. He snapped the reins without having stopped talking for more than a breath.

Orchidelirium, dear girl. It has swept the globe, and here, on the edge of the swamp in our fair city: the epicenter of its bounty. But if I am honest, and my dear I must be nothing but honest if I am to maintain a reputation as the most trustworthy outfitter to women of distinction, I must acknowledge my limitations. The swamp is no place for me.

“Please indulge me; I am not inclined toward judgment, but my tool is sharp-eyed assessment: Trousers. Shirt. Underpinnings to befit your sex, but all the trappings otherwise of a manly existence. Hands and a figure that have worked. Worn. Walking along a road miles from any stop.” 

“I haven’t exactly had a ch-”

He continued, undeterred. “No horse. No escort. Capable but unarmed, unprotected. Dear girl, I will not insult you with charity, but you have demonstrated that you can find what I have spent endless hours in search of. In short: If you have the ability, I have the capital.”

You caught less than half of what he said, your body realizing all it had been through in the last few days now that you sat on something with a cushion. By the time you arrived at the outskirts of the city, to his atelier and its steaming greenhouse, you had a job, two dollars for the orchid, directions to a boarding house off Courtenay Street, and an appointment the following day to have your measurements taken for oh, just a few things, to make you presentable to him, you reckoned. Five dollars to get something to eat in the meantime; you were told you looked pale. With the tint of your hair, downright deathly. As you stood in his atelier, you turned to your left, to the enormous gilded mirror, and the last time you had seen a reflection of yourself, it had been in Valentine, and that person was not the one staring back at you now. You turned away.

The matron of the ladies’ boarding house informed you of your luck; a girl had recently passed away, and weekly rent was $1.25, five cents for linens. She handed you a pile of folded sheets and led you up two flights of stairs to a narrow room with a small iron bed, a tall ceiling, and a coal hearth the size of a hat box. Two tall, narrow windows to the long balcony. No smoking, no drinking, no men. The women all smoked, regardless, merely standing with a hand behind their backs whenever the matron passed by.

Bloomers hung like signal flags across the courtyard. A dead fountain of emerald water stood in the middle, and the nymph atop it poured from a dry jug. Crates and baskets and broken chairs crowded against the walls like an extra measure of protection against all things outside this one secluded space. The many voices of women echoing there. Such an uncommon sound to you. Only women. High and low voices, and all notes of their enticing or disarming or dangerous inflections. Dressing robes and hair tied up in scarves and flirting with each other in their underthings, reading tarot, flipping through magazines. All the laces undone when there were no men to tie up for. They got the read of you as soon as you followed the matron down the hall past their many open doorways. Their side glances slid down you and back up. Someone to torment or teach or mother. You kept your head down and slipped into your room, already hearing their questions and snide remarks in the hallway. 

The windows framed a slender view of the steeple on one side of the balcony and a sliver of a cathouse on the other.  You perched on the sill of the open window for a smoke, and pulled his journal out from your shirt, where you had held it all that time, like precious smuggled cargo. The leather was warm from your body, supple from use, darkened and marked by his repeated touch and the surfaces it had rested on. A few stains of his blood left over from your hands. The pencil lay buried in the middle. Within its pages, it had shaded picture after picture of what would only resemble your brutal betrayal now, if you opened it again. You could not. Instead, you slipped it into a tear in the seam of the mattress and put the sheets on the bed.

You collapsed there in your bone-weary exhaustion, every throb of your heart like a hand grasping for hold, slipping, grasping. You gave in to sleep, hoping you might not wake and face yourself again.

But you did. You opened your eyes, drew breath as if you had lain underwater, and remembered where you were. You sat up and confronted your tiny bare room in the morning light, all hues of dirty white, scalloped ochre stains of wallpaper paste and water damage. The chipping white paint on the windows. The blinding hazy sky. 

At ten o’clock you arrived at the tailor’s and a thin tape-measure was unspooled to assess your every circumference and length, and bolts of color were held up to your face by a woman who could tell the difference between lavender and violet. When the tailor stood you on the stand and held the ruler up and chalked the line against your calves and began to pin the fabric up to your ankle height, you held your breath as the backs of his working fingers would graze your tendon and bone, such a dainty, careful, practical touch. You wanted to stand there for an hour. Just to be touched, not reviled, while he slipped pin after pin into place. And then your wrists. 

They put you in pretty stockings with pretty lace at your mid-thigh. Garters. Drawers. Chemise. A corset with twelve exquisitely tiny hooks to bind you in. A corset cover. Short petticoat, lace petticoat.  A couple of straight modern skirts and gauzy blouses in pastel colors. You declined and then firmly refused the hip pads, though they declared your figure too flat. Your feet were squeezed and hooked into pointy shoes that somehow managed to cause pain up your back. Through it all, Algernon zipped around the room visiting dress forms like a hummingbird, talking to the tailor and the ladies of the shop nonstop about this shantung and that toile, until he needed to sit down for a moment, for he hadn’t had anything to eat since luncheon yesterday at the contessa’s. 

Far too long after that, for your patience, you stood in your new tottery shoes on the pavers outside his atelier. Birds of Paradise fanned open ostentatiously in the ring around the fountain. He led you through the greenhouse and its dense population of dark green philodendron and white lilies. Asiatic lilies, calla lilies. 

“I do realize the theme could be called funereal,” he said as he processed ahead of you to the tap of his heeled shoes. “But my mode is the ephemeral and the transitory, and if there is one truth I have discovered at all, it is that for beauty and love to exist there must be death. The tension is the fire that forges art. The calm existence through racing time. The pleasure of having, exposed to the pain of losing. The strength to pass through.”

He glanced over his shoulder, and he must have seen the small twitch on your face of what was still too close to the surface for you to rest your thoughts on, and spun on his high heel to you.

“My dear, you have loved and lost,” he said, and he sighed and touched your arm so lightly it barely brought the fabric to your skin and tears to your eyes, which you quickly blinked away. “I would tell you I am sorry. In truth, I want to congratulate you. It is an attainment too few allow themselves the risk of.” He took your hand and led you to the tiny table, and then busied himself at a small stove to make tea. The ceiling fans clicked quietly overhead.

Meanwhile, you took a better look at the room where you would spend the next many months making tea for his wealthy, captious clients, sweeping up the scraps of his work, trimming plumes and orchids, keeping books, and listening to him wax on about the exquisite artistry in Chinese porcelain and jade figures, the unmatched grace of Italian furniture, the French art of pattern and contrast, and the differences between Spanish and Portuguese ornamentation you never do manage to learn. The concept of life as purgatory, purgation, purgative, and the constant cycle, the inhalation and exhalation, of experience and mistakes and redemption, and how it manifested unexpectedly in the landscapes of the Hudson River School. The power of numerology. His ridiculous and not at all applicable philosophies on love and loss he seemed intent on educating you about. He piled books in front of you to learn about the orchids he must have. 

It was a Saturday, that day soon after you arrived, when you found a spot of blood on those pretty white underthings, like a fallen petal, the delayed and aching proof of what was lost, the final furthest hope you had almost allowed to seed in your mind. Staying in bed only made you restless and let your mind wander to unattainable things, and you could not bear it for long. You changed into your old clothes and spent that day in the swamp gathering orchids that caught your attention like the splashes of a fish at the surface. You wove between trees, parted drapes of vines, and came upon an egret’s nest, hatched not long ago, the shells lying like pieces you had lost, parts of broken memories and song strains escaped, and left them there. As if in place of what you left behind, you uncovered orchids of such exotic shapes and expressions each one was a discovery, and you lay them in the basket carefully as specimens.

When you brought them back, he seemed only to see the orchids in your arms, not the muddy appearance of the bearer, and you thought he was merely engrossed in his busy arrangement of plumes in a hat, when he turned around. 

“Come here,” he said, clapping his hands lightly before him, his monocle flashing, and he directed you to stand several feet back from the mirror. He straightened your shoulders, watching you in the silvered glass intently, shifting your braid over your left shoulder. Blousing your shirt, ignoring the mud. Serious as he pinched a little color into your cheeks. He angled your chin upward a degree, studying the mirror as if he were adjusting a surveyor’s theodolite. When he turned around, you started to turn with him, but he swirled his hand at you to resume his careful positioning, and when he turned back, he fanned out his elbows as he slipped an acuna’s star orchid behind your right ear. He did it with such precise gentleness you wondered if he knew the source of what weighed on you. 

“She is there when you allow her,” he said, with an esoteric flourish, before he glided back to the hatform. You might have dismissed it as pretending at wisdom, were it not for the tears that sprang unavoidably to your eyes.

And in such ways, over the seasons you fell into what you might call a friendship, became his confidant, and he cried to you so often you took to carrying two handkerchiefs. You knew how to calm him with a single square of Belgian chocolate and few Chinese silk fanfuls of air. He convinced you to accept the daily donning of a lady’s wardrobe and even like it from time to time. You were there to talk him down off a chair the day one of the gator eggs actually hatched, and talked him out of killing himself the day his affections were refused, by telegram, by a socialite with a somewhat overly direct way with words, you conceded. You counted out your own pay at the end of the week. It was the first honest work you had had in your life, and you wouldn’t give it up for the world.

At night, in the boarding house, to the low crackle of gramophones and the laughter and singing of all the girls, you mostly kept to yourself. They seemed to accept you more once they saw you in normal clothes, and almost overnight your wardrobe grew with gifts of their castoffs. Stockings, skirts that no longer fit them. They taught you about the proper shape of eyebrows and how to care for delicate things. You taught them how to get the sharp end of a knife out even when they were shaking and in the dark, and where to stick it, if they had to.

Over the months your dreams began to take different shapes, in vivid colors and breathless scenes of escape but no longer falling. Sometimes familiar hands would find you, touch you in ways you had long not felt, and you would wake up on the edge of orgasm, sweating and unable to complete. Full of regret and resurrected pain.

The summer day you crossed paths with Trelawney, you froze on the sidewalk outside the cemetery. He stopped too, twenty feet away. For a long moment you regarded each other. Your mind raced, fearful of what he would tell of what he saw. His nod to you, before he walked away, seemed to say he saw you, he knew you, and that you were a stranger to him, all at once. It was a reassuring nod, and yet your nightmares that night were the worst they had been in all that time. 

Until that moment, you could pretend you were something different and build fantasies out of feathers and flowers. 

So much can happen in a year.

A woman can make her way out of the wilderness with nothing, and build herself a life.

She can fool herself for a certain amount of time.

And one day, when the door of the atelier opens, she will notice with a shock the cadence of the steps. The ching of spurs will prick her heart.

(You nearly drop your shears, but regrip them, should you need them.)

Algernon turns and greets him by an old alias with a flourish, swamps him with offerings. And after a single glance - one that bears a searing absence of recognition - he turns away. He might as well have stabbed you.

When he leaves, you let out the breath you held all that time.

Your hands tremble, and you ruin two Lady of the Nights trying to trim them.

Hours later, you leave, locking up in the seething cricketsong, those nights that never cool off from the day.

And you turn directly into him, solid as a brick wall. 

The familiar growl of his voice overwhelms you. “Don't you dare scream.”

“I’ve never screamed, you leaving bastard.”

“Get on the goddamn horse.”

 

 

 

Notes:

Obvious license taken with timeline and events. Some of us took our time stalling in chapter four playing everything we could here and picking a bunch of goddamn flowers and doing all the hunting requests and it was great.

Thank you for reading! 🖤

Chapter 13: The Scar

Summary:

He’s tied your wrists tight this time. Like other times, but left no way to get free now.

You sit in front of him in the saddle, up against the pommel, your pelvis bruised by it. Your skirt is bunched up, your pretty stockings smudged in grime from the fenders. 

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

He’s tied your wrists tight this time. Like other times, but left no way to get free now. 

You sit in front of him in the saddle, up against the pommel, your pelvis bruised by it. Your skirt is bunched up, your pretty stockings smudged in grime from the fenders. 

He shows you no care, certainly no affection, but his closeness to you is unsettling in its familiarity. His left arm around you keeping the reins. The traces of his smoke, his leather, his body that bring back the memories of things so deep they are entwined with the memory of pain. He sits coldly against you, no concern for your comfort, and still you feel the old intimacy in the rocking of his body in the saddle, and how he rides against your back with every change in gait. Over the distance he takes you along the dismal swamp road, you deride yourself for imagining anything other than his pure hatred for you if you ever saw him again. When the skies open and a punishing rain begins to pour, you figure that’s about fitting.

“What are you going to do?”

“I ain’t decided yet.”

Another rider comes toward you on the road ahead. Arthur tenses behind you with a warning not to do anything smart, and you do not show your wrists or any clue to your distress as the rider passes. If they intervened at all, they would be left dead on the road. He has his collar pulled up high and scrunches to keep out the rain, and makes no eye contact anyway.

“Where are you taking me?”

He only clicks to Georgia. 

When the road begins to flood and the rain has gusted so hard for the last few miles Georgia begins to protest, he swings her up a mostly hidden road, through a dark allee of trees bowing overhead, and up an overgrown path where a run-down orchard house stands empty. A stable. A wagon with a broken tongue. Dark windows, several boarded or shattered. 

He dismounts first to lead Georgia into the stable and secure her, and you duck under the beam of the open door as she enters. His voice is sharp. “Get down.” 

You do your best with your wrists tied, but you stumble as you slide down and slip a little in the mud. He does nothing to help you.

He shoves you ahead of him, across the yard to the steps of the porch, and after he shoots the lock, which makes you jump, even expecting the shot, he pushes you through the door to the dark interior. What was once a small but refined house by the river now rots and smells of mold and dust and decay. He prods you through the house, his revolver drawn, and you couldn’t say whether he holds it until he’s sure the house is clear, or if he intends to shoot you, but you keep checking behind you. 

“Go on.” He walks behind you with menacing patience, the space between each step filled with the pounding beats of your heart.

He kicks open the double doors ahead of you, and when you trip on the rug with your damn dainty city shoes you’ve never learned to walk in well, he doesn’t do anything to catch you and you stumble into a sitting room and nearly fall. 

As if he’s angry at you for your clumsiness, he yanks you upright by the arm and practically throws you toward a chair and walks past you to the window.

In all that time he’s changed. Hostile. Quieter. Hair kept short. Same week-old scruff, but the features of his face are sharper. A couple of new scars. New clothes, new boots. Like he’s been in the city, too, and you wonder how many times you could have walked each other’s paths. Those times you checked over your shoulder thinking you’d heard something you recognized. A cough. A step.

He holsters the revolver like he’s merely brushing off his hand, little consolation for as quick as he could have it out again, and it had always struck you as beautiful the way he seemed so careless with it when in fact he had complete and serious control, and you have wondered if it was on purpose he was that way, practiced and perfected like you, or if it was the unconscious grace of genius. Genius for all things requiring movement and timing and placement in the world, or the genius merely for killing.

He stands by the window watching the storm and the lightning that seems to explode within the storm clouds, revealing their massive marauding shapes stealing over you in the darkness and punishing the land. It lights his grim face.

You sit on the edge of the chair, soaked and cold. Could you get at his gun if you needed to? Could you use it if you needed to?

“All that time, you said nothin,” he says, still facing out.

You try to stretch the wet rope around your wrists without letting on. 

“You tell the Pinkertons about the camp? Is that how they found us?”

“Pinkertons found the camp?”

He narrows his eyes at you with such hate. “Now ain’t the time for keepin up your act.”

“I would never rat. Arthur.”

“Could’ve fooled me. You did fool me.”

“I never had anything to do with Pinkertons. I never tried to fool you. Please believe me.” The last of your words are drowned out by thunder.

He leans against the inset of the window with his arms crossed, still watching the sky. “They knew you. That asshole Milton sent your regards.”

“And you believed him? They play games; that’s what they do. They know Colm, so they know about me.”

He shrugs like you could tell him the color of his own eyes and he wouldn’t believe you.

“Everything you heard, Arthur - I was trying to get you out of there.”

He looks down with a bitter huff, and back at you, and there is hurt in his eyes, beneath the anger.

“They said I ain’t the first - what the hell was this to you?”

“You’d believe those jackasses over me?”

“They got no cause to lie.”

You blink in disbelief. “The day you found me - you found me - I was running. Colm said he’d cut my throat if they brought me back. There’s a price on my head for stabbing a Pinkerton that was there.”

"Oh so you did know a Pinkerton -"

"And I killed him."

He faces out the window, as if the technicalities prove his point.

“Could’ve told me any of that at any time, but you didn’t. Got an excuse for that too?”

“I thought you’d hate me!” You stomp on the floor. And the reasons sound hollow as you speak them. “It was supposed to be temporary, with us. And then it wasn’t.” 

He stands at the window and scrapes his finger across the broken edge of glass. The rain outside pounds the roof like a great accident, breaking over you, not dispersed. 

“What are you planning to do? Kill me?”

His lip curls in disgust. 

“I ought to take you to Dutch.” He starts to step toward you, then steps back to the window, then turns to you. “I ought to send you back to Colm. Let him finish the job.”

“You’re not that cruel.”

At the hearth he takes out a cigarette, and stands there with his elbow on the mantle, staring as if he’s contemplating the last time told by the dead clock standing there. 

“Would you untie me?”

“No.” He strikes a match, not looking at you, and tips his head to light his smoke, waves out the match.

“I’m not going to run, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“The hell else would I be thinkin.”

“Arthur,” you say, softness in your voice, and slowly stand. Hearing his name from you, he blinks long, takes off his hat, wipes his forehead on his arm. He gives a sigh with enough gruffness yet to show you he will tie you back up and leave you there to mummify with the furniture if the mood so much as strikes, and comes over to cut the rope.

When he slices it away, you rub your wrists and wait until he gets his knife sheathed before you slap him. 

“Jackass. Leave me stranded in the mountains?”

He blinks in quick fury, then smacks your cheek, little more than a flick of his hand, but it stings. “I ought to again. Get you back to your gang, huh?”

“Feel pretty smug about that, don’t you.” You’re holding your cheek, hot with anger. 

“Should I feel some other way? O’Driscoll?”  

“I’m not! He took -”

“But you’re his goddamn trigger.”

“Oh go to hell.”

“I've been there all this time, sweetheart.” He spikes down the cigarette with a hateful squint.

“Threaten to kill me? Send me to Colm?” Rage blazes in you, and when he reaches to grab your arm, you punch him, cracking your knuckles on his hard jaw, and the shock on his face when he turns back to you is an expression you’ve never seen. When you swing at him again he grabs your wrist.

You boot him in the knee with the sharp heel of your goddamn city shoe, possibly the one time they’ve ever been useful, and he halfway buckles with a look like you’ve just struck him with fangs as you move to shove him. 

He catches your arm, head rearing back at the strength he didn’t expect, and then he rams his fist into your stomach. It drops you to your knees. You clutch your waist, eyes watering. 

Now he’s hunched over with an irritated growl but holding out his hand to help you up, which only enrages you more, and when you get up you slam your shoulder into his chest and knock him back off balance. He crashes to the floor and you kick his ribs with your pointy shoe. He curls up like a crawfish with a groan. 

The moment you turn to run, he hooks your ankle with his boot, and you’re swept up and crack your temple on the corner of the coffee table as you go down. The room flashes white. You lie there blinded, deafened by pain, and roll onto your side.

He’s sitting against the wall grunting with the ache of each breath, holding his side, and seems satisfied you’re hurting too. You’re still clutching your head, and your face feels wet and warm where it touches the floor.

When you crawl up to a hand and he gets a look at you, the air changes as if the pouring rain has ceased. Now he’s kneeling beside you, propping your head up to get a look at you, the meanness extinguished from his face. Only alarm, now, as he holds you. 

“Fuck,” he whispers. “Shit…ah dammit.” He glances around for something to stanch the bleeding, pats his own pockets. There’s nothing clean in that whole place. His hands search you, your waist, the pockets of your skirt, and find your folded handkerchief, a ridiculously ornate gift from Algernon, and he clamps it to your head, his other hand holding the back of your neck. He’s trying to peer in your eyes, and you’re not sure you can look back at him without feeling something you haven’t wanted to feel ever again. He turns your head, squeezing your jaw to get you to face him, and when he looks at you no different from the first time you saw him, you shove him off you and drag yourself up to stand.

You’re too dizzy to get more than a couple of steps, and then he’s catching you by the waist as you fall to your knees and struggle out of his grasp, cradling your head as you sink to the rug. “Stay the fuck away!”

You lie there on your back panting through nausea and pain and the spinning world, and all at once the realization overwhelms you, how it’s all so devastatingly obvious, the ironies and inevitabilities and consequences, the spirals you always turn, all the warnings you should have seen, and after everything, finally here at the end of what you can take, you find yourself smirking sadly at the cracked plaster of the ceiling. “You know, I used to think you were stuck.” You close your eyes in pain. “And that I was the one who could help you out.”

You leavin today?

If the weather is right.

“And now I see you were just smart. Staying in until it kills you. Accepting there’s no way out for the ones like us.”

It’s only you, Red. Only ever you.

“Because it’s so much worse,” you whisper, throat aching, tears starting to stream, “to think you’re free for even a minute, and have something precious of your own before it’s taken from you. It will always drag you back.”

Your voice is small as your sobs come harder, and you can feel him crouched near you, hear him breathing. "I almost thought we’d get away, and made you believe it too. I was so stupid, and I’m sorry.” You curl on your side and weep for him, for what you lost, and if you could be left alone in darkness to dissolve in your tears and blood it would be less painful than feeling him in the room with you now. 

And his hand on you. He kneels at your back, one hand on your arm. The other hand scoops under your neck with the gentleness of lifting an infant. You’re too drained to resist him, and the black spots in your vision spread like splashes of ink. 

He leans you against his chest as he presses the handkerchief to your head. You push his hand away, fighting to get up again, and he’s holding you tighter and letting you bleed all over him, his voice low like he’s calming a horse, telling you to hold still. 

He wipes your tears away with his thumb. His hand on your head feels serious, and when he lifts it, he is matter-of-fact in checking the wound. 

“It ain’t stoppin.”

You try to sit up, unsteady, and he props you up.

“I’m fine.”

“You are not fine.” 

“It’s just a cut,” you say, as a new trickle drips heavily down your face, and he ignores you like he’s never been less fooled by your bullshit as he helps you up to stand, and hooks his arm under your knees and lifts you.

In one of the other rooms, he finds a wool blanket slightly better than the other musty disintegrating textiles in the place, and wraps it over your head and back like a cloak. He rides with you in his arms. You fall asleep against him for a time, his chest and arms rocking with Georgia’s gait, but soon you’re back in the stinking wet air of the city, and he’s helping you down, and you’re blinking in a bright light as the doctor sews a seam, and Arthur sits in a chair by the wall. His head in his hands, or you dreamt it.

When you wake, the rain outside falls from such a dark sky it might as well be night if it isn’t.

You’re in a bed. In an infirmary, judging by the clean smell, the tray on the table beside your bed. A woman’s footsteps come near, and a young nurse checks you over with a kind, detached expression on her face. Her footsteps fade away, and then a heavier set of steps approaches from across the room. Slower. Even hesitant. Arthur pulls a chair over and sits down beside your bed, rotating his hat slowly in his hands, looking like he hasn’t slept in days, although he appears to have trimmed his beard down, had his hair cut. A clean shirt. How fine he looks, though older, tired, you realize with a pang of missing, as if he must already be leaving again, if he’s sitting there like he’s preparing himself. The world has weighed on him and calls him back. He clears his throat.

“They said you’ll be alright. Probably won’t feel too good for a few days.”

“Thank you,” is all you can manage to say. His cheek twitches with remorse. 

“Yeah. Well. I’m to blame for it.” He sniffs, looks down at his hat. 

Your tears are still close, and you wipe them away as they fall. 

He reaches for your hand, and although you recoil slightly as he takes it, you let him. The ceiling of the infirmary is a featureless white. Like the whole of your blank existence now, for you never pictured this moment before you, nor any moment beyond it. Neither has he, by the look of him, his worrying thumb on your hand.

“I don’t know what to…if -” you start.

“C’mon,” he says, though it takes him another moment to let go of your hand. “I’ll take you home.”

He leaves while the nurse helps you back into your clothes, and in a blur of instructions and amber-colored bottles handed over, you’re led out of the infirmary, walking close behind him. So close your arms could hold you against him, your cheek pressed to that shoulder, and never release. But that was another time. The notion makes your chest hurt. 

He steps out in the rain ahead of you in the fading evening light and holds his coat up over you both, and you walk under that small shelter that smells of rain and leather and him, and you feel unsteady again. With a deafening crack of thunder, the rain begins to drive down, bouncing from the cobbles, and you both hurry for the nearest shelter, a carriageway between buildings, and stand there in the loud echo of the storm, panting, soaked. 

He’s looking across at you right now like he doesn’t know how he got to this place in his life and can’t answer for it, and needs you to be the one to cut him free or cut him down.

“You, uh -” he starts to say, and sniffs, hooks his thumbs on his vest pockets. He’s not wearing his guns and seems a little lost without them. “You been livin here in the city very long?”

“About a year.”

That great span of time on both your minds. You lean against the wall and hold your arms across your waist. 

“It’s got you lookin…nice.” He indicates your clothes, which are mudstained, wet, your lavender skirt ripped in a couple of places now along the seam, and your blouse browned in the garish pattern of your blood down the front. You’re a little disappointed to have your pretty things ruined.

“Are you making fun?”

“What? No.” As if he hadn’t noticed them wrecked and now finds himself backtreading to figure out where he went wrong.

“I can get home just fine, you know.”

“Oh I don’t doubt it.”

“If I let you accompany me, are you going to turn up later and kill me?”

He rubs his eyes. “Christ I regret that.” Thunder echoes loud in the carriageway.  

“You were in pain. I guess you were out of your mind.”

“I’m sorry for threatenin you, Nell.”

“You left me in the mountains to die.”

He grimaces for a moment, but then looks up sternly. “It weren’t exactly clear what the hell you were gonna do.”

“I was the one with a gun in my face.” 

“Yeah, well I was the one with a bullet in me.”

You face off for a moment in the hollow echo of rain, and you watch his anger unmake. His mouth skews in remorse, as if he’s being punished just to look at you.

“I wish I'd told you,” you mumble. This exchange, right now, that you’ve played out in your mind more than a few times, well, you can’t quite remember what you wanted to say. “I tried to.”

“Oh you did, did you.”

“That shootout at the river.”

“Picked a hell of a moment.”

“There was no good moment.” You glance out at the archway to the street. “I thought if we got out it wouldn’t matter.”

He scuffs his boot on the cobblestones, glances up at you. “Never quite how it works, is it?”

“No.” Your voice echoes in the tunnel of the carriageway longer than you expected. The lamps in the street glow watery on the cobbles and spill into the carriageway on a puddle like brass. 

He draws two cigarettes out of his pack, and you step across the way to him, and lean forward when he holds out the match to you. The heat of it on your face, the glow, feels like something offered. He lights his own as you step back.

“We never really did know each other. Not in the way people do,” you say.

He tips his head, dubious. “Thought I knew you pretty well. In some ways.”

"What’s my favorite color?"

“Green.”

“Blue.”

“That stuff don't matter.”

“What do we know that matters?”

He thinks for a moment, glancing at you a couple of times as if he would say something, and swallows. “Well what else should I know about you, for my own safety?” He blows smoke to the side. “You President McKinley’s niece?”

You smile sarcastically. “No. How about yourself? No family somewhere?”

An almost imperceptible expression crosses his face as he holds the cigarette at his lips. “No.”

In later weeks you will think about this moment in this place, and the conditions of all small spaces, small moments, cups and closets, only able to hold so much. How it wasn’t a lie he told but a truth withheld, far too large for a carriageway in the rain.

“You, uh,” he says, clearing his throat. “Got a feller you keep company with?”

Your stomach flutters wildly, though somehow even if it weren’t dark, you realize you wouldn’t mind him seeing you blush. “No.” And hesitate to ask, “You got someone?”

He shakes his head, pitches down his cigarette, and seems to suppress a smile.

The rain has stopped, for now, and he straightens up from the wall and holds out his hand to usher you to lead. It isn’t far to the boarding house, so that by the time you get close, you are just starting to fall into close step with each other. The backs of your hands brush a couple of times, a coincidence of touch you tell yourself not to think very hard about when your fingers don’t catch or hold.

As you stand in the courtyard, it begins to rain again and he holds the coat up over you. 

“Never pictured you in a boarding house.”

“Just ladies. Has its charms.”

“I wouldn’t know to imagine.”

You can’t help but be amused at his pretended decorum, and at the same time you find yourself wondering if he really is so discreet in mind. “I’d have you inside to dry off,” you say, “but men aren’t…”

“I’m fine, just over…” He flicks his hand in a westward direction. The rain pours harder as he says it.

Several girls have ventured all the way out the door by this time, forgetting the rain. One catches herself on the doorframe, out of breath, still in her dressing gown. One in a silk robe lights a pretense of a smoke and watches with her arm across her middle, anchoring her levering arm as she smokes and waits. Another two have come out onto the balcony above.

“Thank you again, sir,” you say loudly, for their benefit. “For your assistance.”

He seems to have a hard time deciding what to do under the light of their expectant, crowded attention, and lets you keep the coat over your head as he steps away.

“They’re all watching,” you whisper.

He clears his throat. “Miss.” He nods formally, and when he glances up at you under the brim of his hat, that old roguish flash is in his eye for a moment, but it deepens to something genuine and world-wise. “I don’t believe I caught your name.”

You step forward with your hand out. His gaze is on only you as he takes it, and his hand is cold in the rain and holds yours tight.

It takes you a second to find your voice. “Scarlett Elinor Riordan.”

“Arthur Morgan.”

A hint of a smile presses up into his cheek, and he glances away, down, back at you. “It’s been a pleasure, Miss Riordan.” He’s still holding your hand.

“A pleasure, Mister Morgan.”

His eyes shine with something on his mind. “If it ain’t too forward, I would call on you again sometime.” You watch your hands letting go. As if you dropped something.

“I’d like that.”

With a final glance, he touches his brim to you. A silver ribbon of rain falls from it. 

The girls watch him leave, and he's not even out of the courtyard before their questions start. You push through them, feeling out of sorts as you make your way upstairs to your room, and once you can shut your door and turn on the little lamp, you lean against the wall, holding his coat. You hang it on the back of the chair. Step back. Wonder what it would be like to walk into your room and find him sitting there just like that, his back to you. Could your heart take it. And what would you do then.

The wind blows against him walking. The few people on the street huddle from the rain and, keeping their heads down, collide with his shoulders as they scurry past him, and the water in the gutters streams backward. A large team of horses takes up the street with their cargo, and the walkway lies strewn with furniture being moved, and when a gust whisks his hat off and he turns to chase it, he keeps going in the direction he came from because even a damn fool don’t need many more signs to know what is obvious is true.

The skeptical girl still smoking under the balcony with the silk robe raises her eyebrows at him in an expression of approving surprise and points up to the second floor. When he looks around for the way up she pulls on his sleeve and nods her head at the ladder at the far corner of the courtyard, puts her finger to her lips, and then leans back against the building, smoking, watching the rain, pretending to ignore his thanks.

The iron is slick in the rain, his boots clank quietly on the rungs, and the eyes of women on the balconies and in the windows seem a test to endure - will he do as he damn well ought or shrink away to be so seen. He avoids looking too long in each window as he passes, only what he needs to see, rooms of red and green and silk and clutter, and then he stops in the pale warm cast of her plain room, and she stands there in gauze bandage and bloodied clothes against the wall by the door, in the moments before she sees him such a picture of beauty there was never a sight he’s found more lovely or more likely spoiled by the likes of him. He doesn’t want to see her startled. 

He hates the thought of her looking at him that way ever again.

So he lights a match, though he wastes three in the rain before one catches. It flares for one brilliant moment and dies.

She looks up. Her fearless face on him. She comes to the window, pulls the tall casements open, and steps back. 

He shows his hands as if to account for merely himself. “I couldn’t…”

Their eyes meet with the same long year of buried hurt in them and he can’t find words, to see her in front of him now. 

“How did you -?”

“One of the…” He gestures down.

The rain falls through the ironwork above.

“Nell, I -” he can’t seem to catch his breath, and feels a fool, standing there without a thought in mind, not so much as a word primed. 

She waits, and he will regret it to his dying day to let the moment pass.

“I couldn’t leave you again.”

Her puzzled smile. "We would've seen -"

"I know."

She watches then, smile fading, as if she sees right through him, as if she could be stern toward him, and still within all rights to be furious at him. 

“Come inside.”

He steps over the sill.

He takes off his hat.

You wait against the wall and he stands just inside, soaked, turning his brim, glancing around at your room before he gazes back at you.

“Turns out I do know you, Nell Riordan,” he ventures, as he sets his hat on the table, holding it there in thought, clears his throat, and looks up, resolute. “You are stubborn, ornery, and you pull left when you shoot.” 

You gape at him, galled.

“Impulsive. Lookin for a quarrel.” 

“I do not pull left.”

“Look at you, can’t even help it.” 

“Well you're a thoughtless mean old outlaw who shoots off his mouth better than he -”

“You like provin me right?” He raises his chin. 

“Oh you think you're pretty clever.” 

“I reckon you had to be all that, livin around bad men, and him." His voice is hoarse all of a sudden. "And I've been thinkin about it, and I can’t account for how you come up like that, and turned out to be such a good, and kind, and noble person.”  

“See? You don’t know shit," you say, although your heart isn't in it.

“Spirited. Unselfish.” He glances at his boots, and up at you in earnest. “Goddamn sweet sometimes.”

“But I'm O’Driscoll’s gun." 

“Seem to recall you quit.” He steps toward you.

“Still I was.”

“Don’t matter.” He smiles halfway at a glimmer from the past.

“Dutch won’t allow it.”

“Don’t matter.” Serious now. He stops in front of you.

“You know the worst parts of me.” 

He stands close, both of you with shaking breath, hands clenching, unclenching, as if you have never done this before. Chests rising and falling. He glances down into the narrow space between you, then looks up with sudden vehemence in his eyes. “I want all of you. If you would have a thoughtless mean old fool like me.” 

He waits.

"Have me then."

His hand cradles you by the jaw as he steps you up against the wall and kisses you. His lips on yours confess his want, his need. You have to grasp his neck, overcome by the strength of this feeling, weak for it. His urgent kisses move along your jaw, to your ear, down the tendon of your neck.  He can’t hold back a soft pleading sound at your mouth on his throat, and his hands pull you tight against him. Each breath forces your chests into one another. When he breaks away from you, his forehead to yours, he breathes hard and kisses you again. 

All that you forgot, all that’s left to discover; your eyes see each other as if it’s all clear for the first time.

Breath.

A whisper.

Skin along skin. 

When she breathes in the rhythm of their movement, he wants to be air. The taste of her neck reminds him of what he’s done to her - the bitter remnant of alcohol used to clean her skin. The sigh that comes when he tastes her, though, the sound of her fast exhalation, is a discovery he saves in mind with the care of a naturalist. As if he’s never heard anything so full of life.

Her hair still smells of the antiseptic and iodine, and the gauze is wrapped in such a way it resembles a headdress, slung at an angle, soft in the light, yet underneath, the scent of her hair and her skin, the spot behind her ear as he kisses it, is what he has missed all that time. She still smudges honeysuckle petals there. Down her neck. He reaches her collar and begins to push each button through its careful slit, each one an arrival, an approach to what he wants more than his next waking day. Buttons and eyelets everywhere. Ties pulled loose like package strings. Layers of fabric shed like a figure unwrapped. He gets one look at her pretty stockings rising to midthigh and leaves them on. 

And though he seems to lose breath to glimpse the shadow between your legs behind the thin veil of your chemise, and kisses the crest of your pelvis and the side of your hip, he waits.

His hands slide up the boning of your corset. Like a tinkerer, still kneeling, he finds the hooks and how they fasten, and, testing it once, he then grasps it, and glances up at you as he pushes the sides together and unhooks them all at once, easily cracking it away from you like a cast, the rainbreeze cooling you with a rush. Your fingers spread in his hair and he buries his face in your stomach, in the light fabric that glows where it hangs loose from your sides and thighs he grasps and holds tight, looking up at you now. 

You point to the spot above your navel and he kisses you there through the cloth, closing his eyes, and you point to a spot higher. He kisses you there. His hands come up under your chemise, rising up the backs of your thighs. He has to get up from his knees when you point between your breasts, and his hands grip your ass, lifting you into him. You lose your balance, clutching his shirt. Making his way up your chest, he works the chemise higher little by little, and when his lips meet your throat, your jaw, your chin, your mouth, his hands slip up your sides and lift your arms, sheeting the fabric up and over your head. He pins it there in a bunched grip of your wrists and white fabric in one hand, pressing you against the wall, kissing you captive, and the other hand finally curving under your breast and lifting gently. When his mouth leaves yours, you are breathless watching him lightly brush his lips on your skin down to your breast, as his tongue flicks your nipple with the lightness of a breeze shirring the surface of water, and runs the blades of his teeth over it so soft it peaks before he sucks you there, then your other breast, and your chest heaves with your rising need. The firmness of his grip on the flesh of your thighs, your ass, makes your neck weak. 

The white underdress falls in a sidewinding ripple in a gust from the window when she pulls her arms down and pushes him back to unbutton his soaked vest and shirt. She peels it down with his suspenders over his shoulders, fingers pausing over the scar on his left shoulder, the mirror image of hers. He kisses her before any shade of guilt can dampen her zeal, and her hands run over his back, and when he is forced to let go of her to get out of his sleeves he fights his clinging wet shirt and union suit, wrenching the sleeves inside-out behind him and letting it hang off his waist, his mouth returning to her breast, her sternum, her skin anywhere he can touch her but waiting for her to let him go further. 

He sinks down, kneeling with knees wide, looking up, catching his air. 

Kiss me here. She points to the place below her navel, and he leans forward and obeys, such a sweet tender spot he should kiss her there every day if he could be so lucky, and she points again lower and his touch is firmer this time, and he kneads her beautiful hips. He nudges his chin against her mound as he looks up, nearly mindless with lust, on the edge of madness at her scent and the sight of her greeneyed blinking trepidation. Kiss me there, she says, and her voice trembles. 

The first touch of his lips on you makes you gasp for him, then his whole starving mouth, his face an expression of adoring anguish. He lifts your leg up over his shoulder, and spreading you with his fingers he takes you more fully, sucking sweetly at your slit, siplike kisses of your clit at first, then urging with his chin between fuller sucks on your clit, your lips, the total possession of your body with his tongue in your cunt, and his hand traveling up the cleft of your ass, loving all of you with his strong hands, not missing a thing, holding you tightly, squeezing the softer flesh of your ass cheek. Your slick comes fast, and he slowly slips a finger in and you stretch up uncontrollably. He curves his finger inside you with pressure that makes your eyes shutter closed, and then releases, slips out, and again, first with a steady slowness but increasing as he draws out your high. When your hips push toward him, he kisses your abdomen again and you roll up feeling light and dizzy as he slides two fingers inside you. Your body flushes hot, your spine curling you forward as you come closer to your release, until he tempts your hips forward with his fingers inside and runs his hand up your stomach and breastbone, and you spread against the wall with a moan.

He stands up and holds you, his fingers sliding out, and you grasp his shoulders as he wipes his mouth and kisses you. “Nell, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“How’s your head?” He gets you to look him in the eyes. “I don’t have to go on.”

“I’m alright, really.” You’re impatient for more, despite the dull pounding you feel in your temple as the medicines wear off, and he looks at you skeptically until you grab his face and kiss him again. His body bears against you, his cock against the crook of your hip and you groan to feel him hard. You’re so wet for him, your slick starts to trail down your inner thigh and you close your legs. You reach down to grasp him, hold the shape of him, so thick he makes you blush, and the sound that comes from his mouth at your ear is so starved your body arches into him and for a moment you can’t let go. When you undo the first button of his fly he seems to melt over you slightly with a low sound full of need for your touch. You walk backward toward the bed pulling him by the waistband as you undo the rest. He tries to kiss you but you push his trousers down over his hips, rounding them over his ass, prying out his rockhard cock, and down the coarsehaired muscles of his leg and he kicks his boots and clothes off the rest of the way. You wrap your hand around his shaft and he pants with your first long stroke, absolutely breathless at your touch, like it’s almost too much. 

But when you run your other hand over his hip then, and feel the contour of the scar there, round, and turn to see the brand they burned into him, you gasp. Healed, indistinct but no doubt the brand of the ranch. He sees you react, and a fit of regret crosses his face at such a harsh interruption. He cups your cheek and your throat clenches.

I’m sorry, you whisper, but he shakes his head and backs you up on the bed and lays you down. 

It's past. He bridges over you and lowers himself to graze his nose alongside yours, his brow on yours, the weight of his body slowly increasing and moving on you with such arousing intention and the natural progress of yourselves aligning you cannot think of buried things.

On that small iron bed in your narrow lamplit room, he studies your face like he can’t believe all he missed, eyes gleaming, blinking wide with unexpected emotion.

What is it, you ask, combing his hair back with your fingers, and sighing at the feel of his hand cradling your neck, his thumb grazing your breast, his hips starting to urge into you, his cock rigid and wet in your ready slit.

He can’t seem to speak just then, and presses his lips to yours. You hold him, he buries his face in your shoulder, and reaches down to press the head of his cock into the slick of your cunt, his clenched jaw falling open as he fucks into you, filling you in that first aching stretch, and both of you unable to hold back a helpless moan, rising with the pain and reawakening as he takes you.

There is only need and its fulfillment. Nothing held back, everything bared. The plummeting surrender to whatever you will encounter now. The terrifying promise, the danger, come what may. Yourselves fully given, every thrust a driven spike. You break and he breaks, and you hold each other through the hard flinching of your bodies, your strong spasm, the heat flooding through you as he comes, the grip of his hands, no softness in the agony of release. You lie with each other, drained and skin shining in the heartpounding wane.

When he’s come down, he moves himself off to your side and kisses you so sweetly your hands are captured in the air, you can’t do anything but give in to his touch and the slow pull of his hand on your leg up over his, the sweat of your bodies chilled by the breeze from outside. 

That night you sleep in each other’s arms, in the sound of the rain and the solemn frail protection of the lamplight against all the raging darkness without.






Notes:

Song Long Forgotten - Ye Vagabonds A good fucking song. Or good song for fucking. One of those. In any case, it set the beat for the love scene here 🖤

Chapter 14: The Room

Summary:


Your narrow room is a debris field of clothes and boots and an overturned chair. A satchel and its contents spilling out. His clothes hang on a wire by the coal hearth to dry, though still damp no doubt; nothing ever seems to dry in this climate.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

In your sunbright, tall-ceilinged room, on your small bed with rumpled sheets, you wake with a piercing headache in the light. The bandages constrict your pounding head as tight as stays and you start to unwrap them when the man sleeping against the wall trying not to take up the entire bed wakes and starts to pull your hands away.

“Hey there hold on -”

“It’s too damn tight.”

He pries your hand up and holds it. “Well don’t tear everything out again. Don’t want to have to go back.”

He helps you to sit up and gingerly unfurls the bandages around your head and scrutinizes the doctor’s handiwork as if he has an opinion about the skill.

“Gonna have a good old scar now.” His brow gathers in a furrow of guilt at the sight of the four-inch-long cut along your hairline, down your temple, and the bruises spreading from it. He plants your finger on the end of the bandage as he rolls it back around with painstaking lightness, looser this time. From the look of concentration on his face, he could just as well be fixing one of Algernon’s foolheaded hats on some fancy woman’s head.

Your narrow room is a debris field of clothes and boots and an overturned chair. A satchel and its contents spilling out. His clothes hang on a wire by the coal hearth to dry, though still damp no doubt; nothing ever seems to dry in this climate.

He shifts as he adjusts the bandage, tugging the edges down in some places, and when he moves, the sheet falls off his hip and the ring of the ivory scar there.

You circle your finger around its smooth raised curves. The arc over the D. The whole thing in a circle. Some would say the letter O.

“They did that to you...” Your voice hardly a murmur.

He looks down at it, and a tightness rises in his face, and he blinks and it is gone. “So they did. Turn your head, O’Driscoll.”

He props himself up and ties the gauze behind your ear, sweeps the hair up off your neck, and lies down again. One foot hangs well off the end of the bed, and you lie down tight against him, your neck resting on his arm.

“How’d you get caught up with that lot, anyway.” He wonders it more than asks. His hand settles on your hip, and he presses his lips behind your ear. “Don’t seem the type.”

“A whole mess.”

His chest rises and falls against your back, slow, calm, and he seems distracted as he kisses your neck. “Wanna tell me about it?”

“My mother ran a place near the valley, he’d come by, time to time. Took a liking to her.”

For a moment, his chest stops moving.

“How’d that turn into you runnin with Colm,” he asks, then teases your earlobe with his teeth, until he notices how your breath comes quicker than you can hide from him. He runs his hand up your stomach to the slope under your ribs.

“Heart’s beatin like a rabbit’s.”

You touch his brand scar again. “In a way, this is what he does. He owns. He doesn’t let things go. Unless he gets rid of them himself.”

He’s quiet for a while, and seems to search your skin with his hands for evidence of a scar he had somehow missed all the times before. “He own you?”

Without looking at him, you can tell him. How you shot Colm’s man right in front of him and Gus, so close that his head sprayed all of you. Warm as bathwater. A skinny girl in her blood-stained nightgown running barefoot, shouting into the winter night. (Take me with you! That dark thing that pumped survival through your veins when all you wanted was to curl up in her lifeless arms.) Gus standing in the snow, his head a twisting weathervane between you and Colm walking away, before he turned. Colm always made it plain he felt owed for the burden of you after that. Over the last year, in the separation of time and distance, it had occurred to you that he had made you useful to him and taken his payment that way. Angry as you were, so angry in those early days. Trainable. Unexpected. A weapon. And his.

“First kill at ten years old,” he mutters, and his hand holds your hand, palm to palm, fingers curling intently through yours.

You glance back, wondering if it’s disgust you hear in his voice, but he’s looking out into your room, caught in a thought, with a sigh that knows the world.

“When was yours?”

“Hell, nineteen. Think I went and got drunk for a week afterward.” He kisses your shoulder.

“Greenhorn.”

He rolls onto you, happy to crush you while he snags his pack of cigarettes from the floor, lights one, and shares it with you.

“First close call?” he asks, blowing his smoke upward.

“Fifteen, first job. You?”

“Jesus christ, Nell. Eighteen.”

“What was it?”

“Bullet went through my shirt. You?”

“Good one. That scar on the side of my head, a graze.”

“I wondered.” He parts your hair to find it, and combs his fingers through, carefully untangling the ends.

And you know he’s been grazed seventeen times from the marks on his skin, and shot twice, once in his hip, and once through the shoulder, and stabbed twice, once in the thigh, once in the side. And he knows you’ve been shot once and nicked eight times. If you have had one advantage as a woman, it’s that a good man’s gun will hesitate to shoot at you or fail to aim its best, at least at first.

He’s tracing the scar on the side of your neck with a slight remembering smile.

“Did you tell Dutch?” you ask, scorching your lips on the last nub of the cigarette.

“No.” He pinches it carefully when you pass it to him.

“Why didn’t you?”

He pretends to think, stretching to look up at the water-stained wall as an excuse to roll over on top of you again, and stamps the cigarette out in the tray on the floor. As he rounds back up, he nips your right breast, lightly cups his hand under your left, detecting your heartbeat again. “Not sure. Wasn’t really thinkin much of anything back then.”

“Will you?”

He swipes his thumb over your tingling lips. “I reckon it ain’t my secret to tell.”

He draws a slow, attentive line from your chin to the notch of your throat, over the plate of your breastbone, down to your navel, and then lower, over the soft skin of your belly where his entire warm hand spreads on you, your dark auburn pubic hair he finds somehow pretty, and then slides his middle finger gently into your slit, seeing the way your breath suspends at the first touch to the side of your clit. He gathers a bead of spit on his fingers and slowly begins to rub a ring there, and grazing your rising ribs, your breasts, with his nose and mouth. In the pearly morning light, he presses his lips up your neck, the blade of your jaw, your lips meet and part, his tongue sliding into your mouth as his fingers slide into you, then he seals his kiss as he takes you deeper, and with his steady hand and his low voice in your ear he brings you to a quiet, sublime climax.

Between stretches of dozing through the day, as the light warms and changes shape in the room, you live together in that small space as if he has always been there. You open your eyes to see him sitting in his trousers, cross-legged on the floor and trying to scrub the blood stain out of the front of your blouse. He’s set a paper bag of things on your dresser from the market down the street. Fresh peaches and bread and pastry. A glass of water with a few drops of the laudanum tonic stands fresh by your bedside when you wake.

He’s already been discovered by the rest of the girls; they seem to know he’s there by the change of air pressure in the building, and have given him hot water for coffee when he asks, and brought little parcels of chocolate and fruit for the chance to get a look at him standing in his trousers with his back to them, and linger at the door and gape at you, unable to make sense of it.

Another time, he’s straddling the window sill, smoking, his journal open on his thigh though you can’t make out the page.

You’d given it back to him the night before, pulled it out from within the mattress, now stiff after a year, and both of you looked at it between you on the bed like a dud cluster of dynamite, the brown stain of his blood dried into the leather. Everything within. The ragged edge of the page torn out.

“I gotta ask how you knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Where Dutch hid the money.”

“I didn’t.” You squinted at him. “I made it up.” 

He squinted back, straightened his head. “It’s still in Blackwater?”

“If they didn’t find it some other way.”

“How’d you -” He half glared, his mind stuck like a wagon in mud, and rubbed his eyes hard. “What about them bonds?”

“I stole them when I ran away from Six Point - that’s all they had from it.”

You stared at each other.

“This whole time you thought I gave it away -”

He leaned out of range. “I was a little sore about it, yes. And that you'd gone through my effects.” He thumped the journal.

You sat back too. And when he huffed, and then started to laugh, you pulled the sheet up higher over yourself and did not find it quite as funny.

He jostled the mattress to loosen you up. “Oh cmon - that money was always ungettable.”

“You thought I gave it -” 

“Wouldn’t’ve mattered anyhow.”

“You thought I was -”

In a slow and commanding interruption, he covered your mouth and dragged you under him, and with an expression so fiery it turned your heart cold, he leaned down close.  “Thought I’d been fuckin thievin little troublemaker, Scarlett O’Driscoll.” 

You glared for keeps then.

“Oh did I touch a nerve, Miss O’Driscoll?”

You writhed until you got your mouth half free from his hand, and he let you speak. “I mean this: Do not call me that again,” you warned, while he nodded with a solemn frown, not taking you seriously in the slightest.

“Dammit Arth-”

With his hand clamped back over your mouth and your stifled curse, he uttered your name into your neck, and your shoulder, and pressed his lips to your scar and took his hand away. And he smirked down at your chest for real this time, and glanced up, eyes more disarming than his guns could ever be.

“Turns out I had you right from the start, Red.”

Thoroughly disarming. Not that you could have argued him. 

When you cooled down and let him kiss you back into a soft mood, he lay with you in the crook of his arm and held up the journal and leafed through those first pages, and recalled a few things to you from the time just before Blackwater, when the gang seemed happier somehow. Always shy of having enough, but happier.

You found the entry he wrote a couple of days after he rescued you, and read it aloud in marvel. Not that a woman can’t shoot, I have never seen skill like that. In anyone. Man or woman. He fumbled for a cigarette and his ears were bright red as you told him that you’ve never seen anyone blush like that, man or woman.

Then you had drifted off, with him asleep beside you, reading about a woman named Black Belle, and studying his respectful sketch of her, thinking it was curious to detect his feelings in the tenor of his sketching, even in subjects that were plain.

In the day, he breaks the news to you about Sean. You find yourself slipping your hand into his as he tells you how he still sometimes wakes to the sickening memory of the boy’s face the moment the bullet hit him. He can’t even be sure he saw it for real, but in his mind’s eye it is as vivid as if he were holding him by the shoulders when it happened. He tells you about Jack. That awful mess. The man John became, in rescuing his son. He clears his throat a few times in relating it.

When he makes love to you, he takes you slow. As if he needs everything to last, to savor every gasp and muffled whimper, the sight of you taking him, the smell of your hair, the taste of you, your mouth and cunt, and gives himself back to you withholding nothing. You won’t know how much he suffered the last year, until you hear from others, weeks later, about how he came back from West Elizabeth close to death, recovered slow, and took on jobs that should have killed him or left him to rot in Sisika. How he barely ate. He works himself in and out of you like he is making up for lost touch and needs to feel every inch of you against his body as you come, as he comes and his spend glistens on your skin like his mark on you, or fills you with his heat and he seems to bury himself in you as you lie with him. When you wash from the basin he sits with his back to the wall as if he is memorizing your shapes and motions, the sunset light reflecting on your skin, the wet streaming copper of your hair.

When he sleeps, it is not the deep sleep you know. He jolts awake, and his body never seems to fully settle, a tension trapped in his muscles and joints that never rests. He passes it off as nothing, and holds you tighter.

Now he sits at the head of your bed with you leaning back against his stomach and cleans your cut as instructed by the doctor, more careful than he needs to be, and you swat his hand away so you can do it yourself, and he pins your hands down with playful firmness as he re-concentrates his effort.

“You make a good nurse,” you tease.

“Why thank you.” He raises his chin high to see better and dabs the cotton along the cut.

It seems, while he’s got you pinned, he finds it in himself to ask something needling his mind. “That true, what they said? You were married?”

You flinch at the sting of carbolic, and the word.

“For a week, I was.” You watch him trying to seem casual as he fusses over your wound. “He got killed.”

He scrapes dried blood away and glances down at you, and back at his work. You wonder if he will ask what happened, and how you can tell him what you have spent that time trying to forget.

Yet he asks, “Was he good to you?” As if he knows something about old pain, the way bearers of sacred flame walk more carefully.

“Yeah. He was.”

“Then I’m sorry.”

“We were young and stupid.” You clench one side of your teeth as a piece of the wall holds your stare, stained rose and yellow in the sunset light, a crack running through the plaster.

“I guess I didn’t know a whole side of you.”

“I didn’t let you.”

When you look at him above you, you notice a hint of a bruise under the scruff on his jaw to the left, and touch it. “Was that me?”

He picks up your right hand, the knuckles scraped from the contact with his stubble, and kisses them. “Not a bad hook.”

“You neither.”

He winces in guilt and lifts the sheet to check your stomach where he punched you, although your corset spared you. Still, he kisses you under your ribs and almost spills the bottle of carbolic.

His ribs on his left side bear the mark of your shoe, a dark bruise the size and color of a plum, and he tries to act like he isn’t sore there as he puts the bottle on the floor; you turn on your side to face him, your leg between his, and slide yourself lower and kiss him there. When he can’t hide the little contraction of his side, you frown and kiss him again.

But he won’t let you take him with your mouth. As soon as you sink down and prod him with your chin, he glances at you and his eyes go round.

“Sweetheart, I can’t let you -”

“Why not?”

His mouth skews.

“Do I look that bad?”

“Bein honest, yes.”

You purse your lips.

“At least I can’t look at what I did and expect to feel good.”

“Well, maybe…” you say, sliding out from under the sheet, standing to the side of the bed while you push him to lie flat before you step one leg over him and shift to face his feet, “I look away.”

Good lord you can hear his mind in turmoil until the moment you sit on his stomach.

“Sweetheart…” he huffs.

“What, you don’t like this?”

“I want to look at you -”

You roll your hips to give him a fuller view.

There’s a thunk as his head hits the bedframe and he grunts in muffled pain.

“Shhh.”

Before you, his legs are tense, feet stuck and to some degree shackled through the bars at the foot of the bed, his length twinging as he gets hard. You relish the view; you are used to finding him hard and ready for you like a package you have to unwrap, or you purely love the splendid sight of him nude and hanging at ease, but here, you scratch your fingers up the hair of his thighs and watch his balls tighten, accompanied by a heavier breath behind you. You run the backs of your nails down to his knees, the contours of his muscles taut and jumping. He tries to reach around you in an impulse to adjust himself and you move his hand away. All he can do is touch you, and his fingers sometimes dig into the soft skin of your ass in blind reaction to what you’re doing to him. Rounding up your curves to your waist, up your sides, his thumbs sliding down to the dimples of your back, massaging lower. You give him another roll.

You can feel the low rumble of his moan up through your core, and the tight breath that comes from constricting him ever so slightly. Scratching harder up his inner thighs, you coax up his massive erection like you’re casting a spell before you so much as lay a hand on him. You bend forward and plant a kiss by each knee, then higher, brushing your breasts over his cock as you do, taking your time. His hands squeeze you, but he’s given up control to you by now.

When you finally do sweep your hands with increasing pressure closer and closer, his chest swells under you. You skirt around your destination and feel the slightest sink of letdown between your legs. As a concession, you fan your left fingers under his heavy balls and lightly cup them finger by finger until they fill your hand. You stream your right-hand fingers toward his base and wrap them as much as you can the opposite way around his fully erect cock, in every sense an ax handle.

He puffs behind you, says something you can’t quite make out.

“What was that?” You slide your hand up with the lightness of moth wings.

“Oh fuck swee -” But his chest expands under you with his slow soundless inhalation as if you have captured his entire body and for a moment his soul in your hand now descending.

“So you like it after all?” you say as you move your hand up to his rim, drawing a long exhale from him, caressing the veins that branch around him, taut and thick. You can practically hear his teeth clenching. They match his clenching feet, toes curled and white-knuckled, joints cracking.

When you stroke down again and also contract your left hand around his balls, he grips your thighs. His thumbs work under your seat, so you roll on him again, and they run along the lines of your legs joining your pelvis. You lift up when he pushes, long enough for him to graze you there appreciatively before seating him again and forcing a gratified grunt.

“Well I like it,” you murmur as you stroke up the perfect, enticing contour of him, and this time you round the rim to the head as a pearl drop rises. You feel your own slick begin to come, and he hums to feel it on his stomach. With your thumb, you gloss his precum over the head. His hips rise up, wanting more. His feet flex, the bones in them fanned.

You stroke down, deeper in your pressure now, and up again. His hips respond more, his breath tightening, and he gets harder still as you bend down and anoint him with your spit and begin to slide it over his deeply flushed cock.

He seems to get a hold of his senses long enough to reach over your leg to the front of you. It’s an awkward angle to try to touch you, but bless him for trying. Each decisive stroke down his length seems to cause his fingers to claw up slightly.

“Honey, let me - just let m-”

You twist over him, working his cock with your right hand while you grind slow on his stomach, and you clamp your left hand over his mouth. By his expression, he is on the verge of tearing up in appreciation. Or suffocating, but when you let up pressure on his mouth he firmly shakes his head, and you clamp down harder.

“You can’t make a sound. They hear everything. Everything,” you whisper, inducing a creak of the bed frame.

For a few long glorious seconds he endures his beautiful predicament before he wrests his mouth from under your hand. “Nell -” he gasps. His feet jerk up and his shins clang the rail of the bed. He jumps under you from the pain.

“Tell me.”

“F- ah -” he can hardly keep it a whisper. “Please.”

“Oh, please what.”

The vein in his forehead bulges.

And here is what you know. If he wants to, he can sit up with one arm around your waist and hoist you wherever he wants you. He could lift you up right now and stake you on his cock inch by inch until you beg for his whole length. He could pull you up to his mouth and devour you. But he loves the sight of you now, the way his hands cup your ass and thumbs run up the sides of your spine, loves the sweep of your hair and the perceptive pressure of your dominant gunhand on his cock.

So he lets you have your way. You can still surprise him, though. When every muscle in his legs is drawing up, you unstraddle him and kneel the other way between them, jouncing the bed as you do.

“Now you’ll let me.”

You throw the pillow at his face and part your lips over his cockhead down his length, stretching as well as you can as you pull in your cheeks and give him a deep suck into you, and he fully groans. He whips the pillow away to watch you, and his chest pumps with his unstoppable rise. When you give him only the very lightest graze of your teeth, he lets out a wrecked open-mouthed grunt, his hips strain up, thrusting his cock into you, and he comes heavily into your throat, each hard pulse rushing under your lips. You can’t swallow him all at once. It spills from the corner of your mouth and you choke a little, pulling off him with a quick dribble of spend down your chin. You lap the rest off his shaft and oversensitive head as he comes down, and lick your lips, catching your breath. He sits and scrapes his seed up from the underside of your chin with his finger, up to your lips, and you bite his finger down to the knuckle and suck it off.

You would do it for the look he gives you alone. Like he loves you, is appalled by you, is in some ways scared of you, and is unalterably, unfathomably hot for you. Sweat sticks his hair to his forehead. He falls back onto the mattress and gropes the floor for his cigarettes.

"My girl I don’t know what to do with you."

"I bet you’ll think of something." You go to the wash basin and clean yourself up, rinse and hand him the rag.

He takes it with an exhausted smile up at the ceiling, coughs lightly from the smoke. “Could spend all day thinkin of somethin.”

“All day?” As you sit beside him on the bed and lean on him and scratch your nails in his chest hair, he gives you a drag off his cigarette, and takes one himself.

“All goddamn day.”

Your stomach flutters with where this seems to be going, but then you’re startled by the sound of one of the girls in the hall asking another one where her brush went. The walls are paper thin. There’s no possible way they didn’t hear everything just now. In all likelihood, they stood in the hall with their greedy ears cupped to the walls.

But you forget about that with his hand moving on your thigh.

He’s up before sunrise and straddles the windowsill to smoke and sketch by lamplight. His hand is unpracticed, and it’s frustrating the way his eye and hand don’t reconcile to make the shape of her foot true to life. He’s got the nape of her neck, and the basin of her waist, and the bone of her wrist that hangs over the mattress above her head, but the sole of her foot peeking under the sheet he can’t get right, as if he hasn’t looked carefully enough but cannot figure what else there is to see. So he smokes and puts on his shirt despite the clinging heat as he watches out the window into the courtyard, where in the dim light one woman is now reeling in the laundry from the line, and another two women stand smoking and occasionally glancing up in his direction and laughing to each other. When he lifts a polite hand with his cigarette in acknowledgement, it seems that was somehow too familiar a greeting and they snort with laughter and scurry away, and he stabs out his smoke and retreats inside, feeling conspicuous and too warm.

Anyhow, she’s waking now. Stretching, her face in pain. Unbelievable, what happened. He feels sick about it, even knowing it wasn’t meant; the few seconds he had sat there feeling viciously justified will haunt him. Everything about the last few days strikes him in unsettling ways, but one. He will never leave her again. But other problems arise from that.

He sits on the floor beside the bed and pulls the dropper out of the little vial of laudanum. Hates to see her in pain. He puts a few drops in a glass of water for her.

“I’d rather not.”

He leans on that thin ticking mattress, eye to eye with her. “It’ll just dull it a while.” He sets it on the windowsill where it throws a waver of light onto the wall behind him.

“Makes me dull too.” She brushes her fingertip down his nose.

“If there’s one thing you ain't never been…”

And then she stretches slow and starts to get out of bed, stepping over him, and pulls out a fresh underdress from the drawer.

“What are you gettin up for?”

“I have to go to the shop. Algernon must be wondering.”

“Like hell you do.”

“I only have to sit there.”

“Wish you’d stay back. Another day at least.”

“I don’t want him to worry.”

She must see his skepticism through his silence, because she gets defensive then, her serious expression made severe by the bandages and bruises, and he has to hold his hands up and stand back while she digs through her clothes and finds something to wear, and he catches himself staring, entranced by the process of her dressing.

But she is still sore from the fall, and has to sit on the chair to ease on her stockings, and he helps her with the hooks of her corset, thinking as she allows him to help with her other things that it’s a sign she needs more rest. She’ll never be argued with, and puts her hat on while looking him straight in the eye.

He stands and finishes buttoning his shirt and shoulders his suspenders. Looks around for his vest, which he finds under the bed, and his satchel, and while she leaves through the door, he heads out to the balcony and over to the ladder, and on the way gives a hurried greeting to the girls talking to each other out their windows and falling silent when he passes by.

He meets her out on the sidewalk and she holds him by the elbow. They walk like people do, out in the open, and he feels a certain pride having her on his arm. It’s not a long walk to the atelier from there, crossing a couple of the busy streets in the morning crowds, the streetcar clanging, horses and carriages and the donkey cart delivering milk. Few of the fine-dressed folk are out; mostly maids and errand-runners and delivery boys and shop workers. A pale man in a doorway, hat covering his face. When he glances back to get a better look, the man is gone, like all the other times that leave him feeling crazy, heart racing. His hand hovering by his absent gun. She notices, glances around, their instincts the same, but finds nothing in view.

“What is it?” she asks, and he doesn’t want to bother her with the madness he sometimes sees. He shakes his head. She regrips his arm, and they walk along a wrought iron fence with constellations of flowers blooming, and he can pull himself back to what’s real.

“What will you do all day?” she asks, as if he won’t just be thinking of her as she picks one tiny starry blossom and rubs it behind her ear.

“I figure, head back to Shady Belle. Take care of a few things.” He plucks one, smells it, and puts it in his satchel.

She looks at him that way, focused, grave, such that her ears even seem to pull back catlike, when she’s worried and can’t do anything about it. He takes her by the waist and brings her close to him, little caring about the people around. God that look. He tries to sneak a peck on the lips between people passing by them and the brims of their hats push up and make it ungainly.

“Don’t work yourself too hard.”

Her fingers detach from his one by one.

He gets an eagle-eyed stare from Algernon through the glass as he watches her go inside. It’s an accurate sum-figuring glance, from her in her bandages to him also bruised, and Arthur backs up with a formal touch of his brim to her.

When he gets back to camp, Dutch is in a mood. As soon as he sees him riding in, from his perch on the balcony, he heads inside and apparently without any intention of coming downstairs.

It’s Jack who greets him first, playing behind the trenchlike barriers with battalions of acorns and stickmen, but hasn’t seen Hosea. He leaves the boy, setting up his troops in precise formation. Poor lonesome kid. He thinks about taking him out one more time before he leaves, maybe hunting this time. Old enough to learn to shoot a .22 anyway if he holds it for him.

Around the corner of the house on the porch, Hosea blinks at him in the light and gives him a pat on the arm as he pulls over a chair and sits beside him.

“You look like a man who got away with the score,” Hosea says, watching ahead.

“Guess you might say that’s it.” He finds himself smiling at his hands, loosely clasped between his knees, his elbows propped on his thighs.

Hosea starts to speak but has to spend a minute clearing his lungs, batting his chest.

“Soundin worse.”

“I’ll be fine.” Hosea coughs closed-mouthed a final few times, shaking his head, and finally pats Arthur’s knee to keep his attention. “I was going to ask if it was her,” he says, eyeing him as he wipes his mouth with his handkerchief, “but I’d be an idiot to think it was anything else by the look of you.”

He smirks as he lights a smoke. “I look that far gone?”

“If I were a religious man, I’d say back from the dead.”

“Well, trust you to be honest at least.”

“Given any thought to what you’ll do next?

The yard is mostly empty, only Strauss sitting at his desk, Tilly doing the washing, Mary-Beth sewing. He speaks down into the space between them. “Tryin to tread carefully there.”

“How carefully?” Hosea leans back with his boot up on his knee. Seems to understand not to look conspiratorial. “A man can be too careful.”

“Surprised you’d say that, of all people.”

Hosea shrugs, folds his arms across his chest. “Speaking as someone who got out once.”

“Well, no offense,” he whispers now. “It’s gettin drawn back in I’m tryin to avoid.”

“And that’s where I was careless.”

Around the corner, the front doors open and Dutch bellows for Hosea.

He puts his hand on Arthur’s knee as he pushes himself up, and they both walk around to the front, where Dutch paces on the porch in irritation at the state of things. Micah slinks over from the fire, standing on the ground a couple of feet below Dutch.

“Where the hell you been, Arthur?”

“Followin up on a couple leads I got at that party last week.”

“Arthur’s got a job shinin shoes,” Micah smirks.

“That would earn better than whatever horseshit you got goin on.”

“That’s enough, both of you. You tellin me you’re out on Trelawney’s job?”

“No, I’m in on that, he’s just takin his sweet time.”

“Well, I guess we’ll see.” Dutch waves him and Hosea inside.

“I guess we shall.” He wipes the sweat out of his eyes and ignores Micah trying to stare him down, well let the little bastard think he’s somethin when it’s obvious he ain’t. The only man who acts like he’s got somethin to prove usually ain’t got much to back it up. He follows Dutch inside as Micah opens his mouth to say whatever idiocy has come to mind, and it dies on the vine without an audience anyway.

Dutch walks ahead of them up the stairs, deliberately slow, so that Arthur has to stay three steps behind him and wait halfway when he stops and turns his head without looking back.

“Got anything to show for all your time gone?”

He wants to say Nothin you see value in, but scratches his jaw. “Not much yet, but it’ll earn out.”

“It had better. This business with Bronte is going nowhere and the world will close in before we know it. I need every man doing his part.”

“Doin everything we can, Dutch.”

What Dutch really wants is an audience to see him trying so hard to protect their fates, and it’s surprising how obvious it is now. While he stands at the window with the weight of the world on him talking nonsense about Tahiti, and Hosea shares an exasperated glance while his back is turned, Arthur leans against the door frame and listens to all the ways no one is working and no one is earning and goddamn all these mouths to feed. When he’s listened long enough, he carves himself off the door frame and heads quietly to his room.

There’s a letter waiting for him, but he sees the handwriting that stops him walking, then walks past it, one more goddamn thing. He trims his beard with extra care, washes, changes his clothes, and sits on that creaky bed in a room little different from Nell’s. In his trunk, that ingot is all that remains of what he used to have. He slips it in his satchel, and then simply keeps packing, throwing his saddle pack on the bed and tossing in his shaving kit, clothes, a few photos, his winter gear he’ll need eventually. The thought that this could be the last time, or next to last time he has a chance to take what he needs, settles in him like the feeling he gets before a good job. Stillness, awareness, strange sense of ease. A willingness to let the unimportant things go and move on instinct. He straps on his gun belt and feels better still. He pockets the letter as he leaves the room.

Dutch hears him leaving and emerges from the sitting room as he gets to the stairs and keeps going.

“That was a quick turnaround.” Something in his eyes lately searches everything for faults and wrong intentions.

“Like I said, got some leads. May take me north for a while.”

Hosea steps into the hall. “He’s got a good one, Dutch; leave him be and tell me you can at least find Tahiti on a map before you get us all moving there.”

He keeps walking and catches a grim nod from Hosea rising out of view.

With his pack slung on Georgia, he gives her a little extra time at her feed and shakes out a smoke.

“What’s your business then, Morgan?” Micah stands lurking by the water’s edge and turns to watch him checking her tack.

“None of yours.”

“Must be somethin interesting you found, all that time you’re spendin away.”

“You got a reason to talk to me?”

Micah sputters as if he’s made a wild accusation. “Just bein friendly. Thought you’d want to know I heard of some O’Driscolls in the area. Maybe you want to watch your back.”

He doesn’t let on to the twitch he feels in his gut to hear it, thinking back to the glimpse he caught that morning of the pale man in the doorway. Micah’s greasy face is as unreadable as ever, always playing, always shifting. As if he lies about everything to disguise the lies that matter.

“I’ll send your regards. Still tryin to make ‘peace’ there are you?”

“Still bitter I see.”

“No, Micah. Why would I be bitter.”

He puts the harness on Apollo with a long pat down his neck, tethers him to Georgia’s saddle, and mounts up as Micah slinks away.

Late fall, as soon as he could ride, he had taken Charles back to Big Valley and got his goddamn horses back. They broke them out of that run-down paddock easily in the middle of the night, both ragged and thin. He checked them over carefully out in the snow-covered meadow, and discovering Trula had an abscess in her foot he would need to put her down for, he took out his bolt-action. Then from a rocky overlook he picked the big one off, O’Hearn, from a hundred yards as he stood on watch, and another, and watched them all panic in the yard before he got a third and slipped away. The pale one wasn’t to be seen.

While Charles went ahead with Apollo, he said his thanks to his suffering girl, got her comfortable down on the ground, fed her a handful of sugar cubes and talked to her awhile, and in the silent snowfall gave her peace.

He had taken his time coming back from that.

Now at the market in the city he offloads the ingot for a decent price, then heads to the stables and gets Apollo outfitted with a fine saddle he thinks she’ll like, tooled with wings on the fenders. Has him braided and brushed until he shines.

He waits by the fence outside Algernon’s and watches her emerge in the early evening. No matter how he remembers her, the picture of her leaves him humbled to have thought he could keep everything about her in mind. When she smiles at him, he can only shake his head. When she takes his hand it seems both of them are struck by this sense, like a round whistling by, a heartbeat missed.

“What is it?”

“Missed you all day.”

She scowls when she blushes.

“C’mon,” he says, “let’s go for a walk.” He tosses his head toward the road out back.

“I’m famished. Algernon doesn’t like the smell of food in the shop.”

He stops himself from offering an opinion on that subject. “Well it’s on the way and we’ll get dinner.”

“This leads to the swamps.”

“Round about, we’ll -”

“I know my way around here, Arthur.”

Jesus christ if she would just… “Nell I want to show you somethin.” He takes off his hat and pushes his hair back. “Before it gets dark. Won’t take long.”

She consents with a sigh and walks past when he gestures for her to go ahead of him.

He takes her arm under his and asks how she’s feeling and she shrugs which means she’s not well at all, and he’ll ask her later to give herself more time but not when she’s disagreeable. At least she’s holding his arm tighter and not entirely despising the walk. In spite of the constant carrion buzz of insects, the slow river there is almost pretty somehow, willows hanging over the water, a peachy hue in the air, the manycolored reflections on the still water. A couple of early fireflies wink and disappear.

And when she sees what’s up ahead, he doesn’t know what sight puts the knot in his chest, Apollo’s ears switching toward her, his forelegs gone straight with excitement as he pulls on his tether, or her gasp and shocked clutch on his arm before she picks up her skirt and flat-out runs across the footbridge to him. She can’t stop petting his face, holding her forehead to his, checking him over, rubbing his neck, talking to him softly. Apollo lips her sleeve and juts his head over her shoulder, scooping her closer.

“How did you get him?” Tears in her eyes.

He clears his throat and untethers Georgia on the other side of the road. “Went back later. Charles and I.”

She throws her arms around his shoulders, knocking his hat off, hugs him tight, doesn’t let go, like she knows there was a cost, not even knowing what it was; she simply understands its weight.

He sets her down, picks up his hat and dusts it off on his leg. “Well you want to ride him or not?”

Along the edge of the marshland north of the city, he can hardly keep up with her, riding the way she does, like she makes herself weightless on Apollo’s back and lets him charge, and he runs like a wild pony yet follows her lightest touch like he’s showing off his devotion. When she throws back a glance to him and smiles with all the light of her fire, he thinks she might always find a way to stun him as long as he lives.

You cool the horses down and let them drink before heading back to the stables, and at the hotel sit down for a real dinner, and more than one glass of whiskey. It’s late, in the lively debauchery of the city at night, when you walk back to the boarding house. The brash notes of a trumpet echo in the streets, muffled piano music fading into arguments and laughter and the clanging streetcar. He can hardly keep his hand from slipping down to your ass even while strolling on the sidewalk. Before the courtyard, you separate, and you go in through the front door, and by the time you get to your room he’s already stepping in through the window.

You know, ordinary people, they go courting, you whisper, your voice shaking as he jolts you with every hook of your corset and runs his teeth up the side of your neck.

That so, he breathes in your ear, kissing you there now like it’s as delicate as an opening bud and easing your chemise up over your head, as if he were brushing a cobweb away.

Yes. You gasp with the fast grip he takes of you then, as he spins you around against your small rattling dresser, and in your mirror you see the gleam of perspiration on his face, and still an urgent tenderness in his eyes, a breathless swallow. He undoes his fly one-handed and nudges your ankles with his boot, and when he guides his cock against your entrance, hot and live, and finds your clit with his other hand like he owns you, it takes everything in your power not to sob aloud. You push yourself onto him before he’s ready and he seizes your hips to drive himself deep, stumbling into you. His look of surprise in the mirror only makes you wilder for him, and you slide him out of you, relishing the mad face of want on him for whatever he thinks you’re planning as you shove him to the floor.

We’ve gone about it contrary to the usual way, you pant, with his hand pressed against your mouth as he hushes you, though the shhh is forced out through his teeth in broken hisses as you ride him, but then you’re biting his thumb and he can’t take his sharp and sweaty stare off of you. His hips buck up into you, and he leaves a wet streak of your saliva across your cheek when he whips his hand away to snatch your hips and hold you tight enough to fuck you faster.

What’s the usual…way- He’s clumsily pulling you off him, twisting you and shoving you down on your hands and knees and yanking you back onto him with such force you go weak and start to collapse with the strong spring of your release, and he hauls you up tight to his chest just to spread you out and feel your whole body come, circling your clit until you stream a little bit between your legs as you let go. He muffles his own grunt in the side of your neck, holding still for a shuddering breath before he gives in to a few hard thrusts and then he jerks against you, kneels back with you sitting on his straining lap, feeling his flood within you, that lovely mess you make of each other that leaves you full and quiet and heaving.

You lie together on the rug slightly drunk, slightly dizzy, and his chest rises slow under your cheek. In the hallway, whispers like rustling paper rush past the door with a small stampede of steps. Outside, the trumpet player has stopped practicing and the bell of the cathedral rings twice. A splashing sound is followed by the disgusted shout of a man. Whistles, running footsteps. Catcalls and catfights. The streetcar clangs as it does every half hour on the corner.

“Long walks? Is that what people do?” you ask.

“Seems that way.”

“I’d rather go riding.”

“We’ll do that then.”

“There’s a theater show I’d like to see.”

“I’ll take you.”

He leads you up and to the bed, gets his boots off, and lies on the floor to stretch out, but holds your hand when you reach for him, and doesn’t let go even when he’s fast asleep.

In the night, he comes back into your room, having made his way down the loud gauntlet of crowded doorways twice, to the privy and back, and closes the door wiping his hand down his face. He lights a smoke and has to open the window but sits on the floor as if he needs to stay out of sight, and keeps glancing up at that buckling ceiling, so full of waterbrowned cracks it resembles a map of the territory.

“Let’s find another place first.”

 

 

Notes:

I would like to thank the tiniest dorm room I've ever lived in for the inspo. It was smaller than this one but had 14' ceilings for some reason, and I loved it. 🖤

Chapter 15: The Queen's Orchid

Summary:

“You’d think a feller like him would like picking his own flowers,” he calls over.

You are almost up to the tops of your boots in swamp mud, which is not mud and not water but the stickiest substance on earth. It will suck you deeper if you stand in it too long. Sunlight streams through the humid haze, and the tops of the cypress cut through it like fingers straining gold. The feeling of a sanctuary. Cathedral light in the air. Mud beneath your feet. High and low meeting at the tender raw surface of a healing wound.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

“You’d think a feller like him would like picking his own flowers,” he calls over.

You are almost up to the tops of your boots in swamp mud, which is not mud and not water but the stickiest substance on earth. It will suck you deeper if you stand in it too long. Sunlight streams through the humid haze, and the tops of the cypress cut through it like fingers straining gold. The feeling of a sanctuary. Cathedral light in the air. Mud beneath your feet. High and low meeting at the tender raw surface of a healing wound. 

Arthur wades out further in the water, wondering what in hell he’s doing out there as he swats a mosquito on his forearm. Algernon wants orchids, most of all the Queen’s Orchid. Elusive and rare. Almost impossible to find unless you know where to look, and less and less worth the trouble in Arthur’s mind.

You have spent hours in the atelier reading about them while Algernon buzzed around a hatform. The mythos behind them. The varieties dried for tea or aphrodisiacs. Algernon waxing poetic about flowers being inherently sensual, and orchids unusually exotic, and him exploiting the orchidelirium among the upper classes, their restrained titillation, their endless ability to commission gaudy things as long as they are one-of-a-kind. Inevitably, your boredom turned to interest. Who could help but become fascinated with such a paradoxical plant, after all. Fragile but tough. Beautiful but growing out of swamps. Affixed to the trunks of dead trees or the tenuous mud underfoot. Colors so bright that artists despaired to paint them. And utterly, totally erotic.

“I’m surprised you don’t,” you say. 

He slaps the side of his neck as he turns around.

“Considering what they stand for.” You slowly step out of the mud, toward the trunk of a dead tree. “The labellum, the lip, as it develops, rotates into the nether position,” you recite, running a finger over your lower lip and raising your gaze to him, “called resupination, which means ‘curved back with the face lifted’ and is the attitude most ideal for pollination.”

From the slight rounding of his eyes and the flush that rises up his neck, you’d think he’s never seen his spend glistening on a woman’s lips, which you know for a fact he has, two nights before.

“You learn a lot there, workin for him?” 

“Oh all sorts of things,” you say, dangerously.

His smile reveals his teeth on one side and he glances at the mud. 

“For instance,” you say, thinking dramatically, “orchids - well, all flowers - have everything to do with sex. That’s all they exist for. To look pretty, attract, spread pollen.” Around the trunk of the dead tree, you find one, young and green and ceraceous. You nudge under the sepal and touch the protruding anther and its pollen marks your finger.  You taste it. Bitter. Pungent. Botanical.

“And damn hard to find.” He is sweeping the underbrush with his boot expecting and finding nothing.

“Look up.” 

He raises his head to see you standing with the vanilla flower just over your head where it is fixed to the bark. You curve away from it, holding the trunk as you swing around.

He steps closer and fixates on the notion of such a flower stuck to an old tree, squinting as if realizing a plain and curious truth. 

“There’s a name for that, fixing to something,” you say.

“Some more Latin or other?”

“Mounted.” You grin at him around the other side.

He snorts and looks away. Out on the road not far, two carriages pass by. You watch them register on his face like he’s watching bounty hunters round a corner, same as he tends to watch all of your surroundings now.

Airily, you examine your fingernails. “Some are known to pollinate themselves, if they have to.”

“Woman.” His head tilted, he swipes his hand up at the crossroads not fifty yards away. But the sight of you against the tree starting to touch yourself stuns any other words from his mouth. Your hand drifts up the seam of your crotch to the waist of your trousers and you watch his mind go blank as you slip your hand under and begin to circle your clit while holding his gaze. Your other hand clutches your breast in the way his hand does. The scent from the flower is not as cloying as vanilla eaten. It is abundantly floral. Sweet, but fresh. Ethereal and mild, and now indelibly coupled in your senses with the time an outlaw watched you finger yourself on the edge of the swamp. The face on him. 

A little flutter of pleasure begins deep, the pang that flits through your sides. That first strange gift of a sensation that comes from pleasure of only one kind. It makes you flush, and Arthur, watching you, clears his throat and hooks his thumbs on his gun belt. He puts a hand below to slow his own rise, which excites another flutter in you, stronger, and the first sluice of your slick wets your cunt. Calyx. The word from the page inside the book flashes in your mind beside the lush sepals of a sea-green cymbidium

He takes a step toward you but stops, as if thinking better of it, or taking time to preserve the image of a wild flower in his mind before he picks it.

The way you look at him then, as you slip a finger inside yourself, makes him run a hand hard down his capitulating face, and again your sides seize up. Pistil. Stamen. He unbuckles the gun belt and drapes it over the pommel of Georgia’s saddle. 

“What else about them.”

The demand in his voice makes you roll your fingertips harder. “Some years they might not flower at all.”

“Crime of nature.”

Your stomach tightens and your hand stops and you hold back the sigh that is coming. He walks to you and cups your cheek in his hand, and as he kisses you, you feel his rising breath. Your body instinctively presses into him.

“Seems a shame to pick ‘em,” he says. It would almost sound threatening, but the need in the depth of his voice gives him away. He slowly bites the edge of your ear, and the tip of his tongue grazes the outer whorl of you there, and you hear the lightest movement of his mouth. Tasting your senses.

“I guess it’s hard to - help yourself,” you say, though it’s broken as he sucks a light mark on your neck arcing sidelong and his hands busily unhook your fly. 

“Just takin a pretty young thing.” He hikes up your leg and pulls off your boot. You are already undoing his buttons and slip your hand in to grasp his shaft. When you do, his hot breath into your neck seems to spread you open to him, you are slick and impatient for him by now, and you lift his cock fully out. You give him a brazen stroke, met by his soft exhalation. When he pushes against you, your back rises on the trunk. “Attached to some old tree.” He runs his hand over your ass and down your thigh, drawing your pants leg down and off your foot. Slides his hand up under your naked leg again, up to the juncture of your thigh and your dewy cunt, and feeling your wetness can’t hold off any longer. He holds your knee and kisses you deeply as he enters you, and you yield to him feeling wild.

The bark of the tree digs into your back as he thrusts you up against it. Somewhere nearby, the creaking wheels of a coach rattle down the road to the intensifying gasps of two people against a tree. A heron flies overhead as if to draw their attention to you. You hold Arthur’s face as he kisses you feverishly, and feel wasted with the delirious momentum of his fucking.

You know by now the way his back stretches and the halting pace when he’s on his verge, and how he’ll wobble on his heels when you look at him and push him back and begin to kneel. You love his near-loss of control, the way his hands take hold of your head but his fingers stream delicately through your hair, and the restrained thrusting once your throat has opened to him, the way a slight choking sound seems to send him into guilty, hesitating bliss.

When you look up at him, in that steaming light, and right at this moment the contorted face, the soundless curse, and his spend shoots down your throat, and leaks from the corner of your mouth down your jaw and you blink hard to adjust to all of it, and you pull off and let the last pulses pool like nacre on your lips and drip to your chin, a realization germinates within you. A tiny curve of life pushing up from soil. You blink it away. He is cupping your cheek. His thumb swipes his seed off your chin. Before he can wipe it away, you suck it slowly off his thumb. His blue eyes take you apart as he testingly thumbs another line of it up your chin and lower lip and lightly presses it on your tongue, and you taste it like a sip of him. 

When he fastens himself again, then steps closer and pulls you up in that impossibly sweet air with all his concentration on you, that small emerging notion in you again necks upward, like it is about to break out and unfurl. You close your eyes with his touch, his fingers busy unbuttoning your shirt, opening you like tissue in a parcel, and flicking the straps of your chemise off your shoulders, easing down the light lace of the top, and then pressing up your breasts like a discovery of abundance before he can help himself and he tastes one flushed bud and then the other. You shiver at the softness of his tongue exploring them. The harder pressure when he sucks on them. With just enough restraint and urgency, his hand moves down your side, down between your legs, and draws your slick from you like his own personal spring. He slowly screws two fingers in and you stretch your neck, head tilting skyward like you have something to confess, and the vanilla flower cants overhead, a drip of captured sunlit dew hanging off its lower lip like nectar. Before you can reach up to touch it, he has brought you back to your brink and you have to hold the trunk for dear life. 

The pearly air in that swamp and the trees cutting through it, the heat, lush botany, the passing shadows of birds soaring over the umber mud. A confusion of beauty and corruption and the water reflecting it all. And having seen it now in you, everything that you could hide, Arthur only wants it more. He kneels down and lifts your naked leg over his shoulder and girds you, and glances up with a kiss on your inner thigh, and another, your legs shaking and weak, then entirely collects you with his capable fingers and mouth, until your release rises and he goddamn revels in the sight of your high escaping you in a broken, writhing wail. You bow over his head in a reeling spasm. He craves the grip of you coming, and the translucent slick on his fingers. Almost disappointed to wipe them in the grass.  

“An old tree, hm?” You hold yourself steady on him to get your leg back in your pants.

“Decrepit.” He picks an eyelash from your cheek.

“Sturdy.”

“Rotten.”

“Only the good parts.”

Beaten, he lifts his head toward the cypress tops.

“We’re closer to the road than I thought,” you say, finally looking around.

“They’ll just think it was one of them wild boars.”

You smack his chest.

“What, don’t like it when I make you squeal?” He bites at your neck with a snarl and laughs when you shriek and push him back. He kisses you in earnest then, and again it wells up in you, that burgeoning life. You squeeze your eyes hard shut to control the feeling, but it seems to have sprouted tendrils that begin to curl into him now too. You wonder if he feels it; undoubtedly he feels it. Or he feels it not at all. 

When he releases you with a final casual peck on your forehead, you just don’t know a thing. You hear Colm’s gritty voice so long ago hissing derisively, how stupid you were. How your father, whoever he was, must have been blind drunk the night he sired a girl.

Nothing new, hearing echoes of that, so why are you so melancholy, all of a sudden, in that drifty, unquiet place in the swamp? Between worlds, so long without a foot in either one, lately feeling blinded in the shimmering flare as they collide. 

He is wading toward a sun-dappled mound of mud gathered around a cypress trunk, flush with palmettos and vines. He steps out of the water, and crouches there, draws his knife, and carefully carves something from the ground. When he comes back to you, it’s with a knowing, somewhat self-satisfied smile as he presents a perfect Queen’s Orchid.

He holds it away when you reach for it, and then with unhurried care inserts the stalk into your hair behind your ear. 

“Is that like courtin,” he says, all smart, the ass.

“Keep trying.”

“Didn’t know you was so formal, milady.” He backs away with a serfish bow, and then ambles back toward the banks. “How many’d you say?”

You shrug, impishly. “As many as it takes.” 

The way he harvests them when he doesn’t know you’re watching is delicate, taking care to separate the flower with the method you show him. Chin up to get a good view. Stepping back, viewing it in his hands before he stows it carefully with the others. From the trees, from the ground. By the time the sun is going down, he’s finding them quick as a damned expert. But he leaves the last one for you. In a humble spot, hardly standing out of the water, and in the unlikeliest place where you would expect anything of beauty to be, you part the sharp palm leaves guarding it and uncover the last Queen. As regal as it is unassuming.

You have just cut it when a fly buzzes past your ear and you swat it away, and in doing so glance up at the next tree. With a shout, you slip backwards in the mud, and fall to your hands and knees when you try to run, and scramble up to your feet. 

A body hangs overhead.

You run to the road, and back up into Arthur as you both get a look at it, and with his arm putting you behind him he calls Georgia and Apollo in that low calm voice that means he is dead serious.

You both know not to say another thing, and silently he’s waiting for you to mount before swinging into the saddle and nudging Georgia to go. Apollo can feel your fear. He gets up quickly toward the road, away from the scene of a lazy afternoon in the swamp and the angle of the sinking sun and a body strangely pensive in the air.

Forgetting your mudcaked appearance the moment you show him the bundle of orchids, Algernon sets down his expanse of violet ribbon and rushes to you, delighted to see the fruits of the day’s labor, although he continues to maintain a distance from Arthur. 

“It was not at the expense of your health, I hope,” he says close to you, his magnified monacled eye blinking shutter-like at the bandages peeking out under your hat, and then somewhat murderously to the side, where Arthur is bent over squinting at a small painting in the corner. 

“The fresh air does wonders,” you tell him, and his hands pat your upper arms in a renewing flutter. When he locks the doors to work, he becomes a concentration of his energies and inspirations, the pincushion tied at his wrist, the measuring tape and ribbon and length of silk fabric slung around his neck like religious vestments, and his moods, his movements, his vocalizations all amplified.

“And I trust Tacitus has shouldered his fair share of the weight.” With another darting side-glance he flings imagined shards at Arthur for what he has convinced himself was a dastardly violence acted upon you.

“As ever; your instincts about his talents were correct.” You lift the cloth under the orchids where plumes of snowy white and lively pink lie uncrushed. You hate to shoot those balletic birds, and even Arthur, seeing you flinch when he first harvested the plume from an egret, is reluctant now to pick them out of the sky. But the money cannot be denied.

Tacitus, in his gun belt and muddy boots and hat, stooping under a hanging plant and absorbed by the array of small prints and pictures framed on the wall, would look laughably out of place if you didn’t suspect what he was doing. Studying the handiwork of masters. Marveling at mixed color. Perspective. Every time you return with him, he takes a minute to look at one in particular, a figure in white, white shawl tented ritualistically over her head, her hand holding the shawl flexed so unconsciously in a position splayed that he’s fascinated by. That hand, its strange focused shape with the little finger angled out like a cat’s tail for balance, he’s been trying to copy, and you’ve seen the page covered in twelve such hands, of varying success.

He hits his head on the hanging plant when Algernon calls his name and he turns, and catches his hat as it falls. It’s heron plumes this time he wants, on account of their sophisticated muted colors, and Tacitus accepts the list from him trying not to smile at Algernon’s warning stare. As well as night-scented orchids, you are instructed.

Rich for the day, you’re soon in the upstairs room at the Bastille, in a steaming bath. Muddy clothes in piles on the white tile. Boots somewhere. He steps in behind you. 

“So filthy, the soap is afraid of you.” He wipes a spot of mud from your neck as he eases himself down to sit, his legs bent under your arms.

“You are a regular wit today.”

He scoops water over your hair and combs mud out of the ends with his fingers, drizzles the fancy hotel soap into his palm, and begins to lather it into your hair. 

“What are you doing?” You try turning and he twists your head forward with one hand.

“You’re worse than Georgia, hold still.”

His fingertips on your scalp make your neck weak.

“You do this a lot, do you?”

“Might’ve seen it done. Once or twice.”

He scoops a dollop of lather out of your ear. His hands lave soap on your neck, shoulders, back, arms, breasts. Assured, unhurried hands. No touch you’ve felt from him yet like it, such that you’re unable to move for a moment. And underwater, his hand runs the slick bar of soap over the rest of you like he’s marking your borders and topography on a map in his mind. Coaxes one leg out of the water at a time to reach your feet, up your calves, scrunching your body against his as he does so. You flinch as his fingers poke between your toes and he squeezes you tighter, then gets you to lie in the water with your feet up on the rim, and you watch him upside down in your view, rinsing soap from the cirrus of your auburn hair, keeping his working fingers away from your stitches with the greatest of care. Again, the tiny lively stir in you from before, like feathery roots now, anchoring themselves to something firm. 

Upside down, while his mind seems miles away, any guardedness you’re used to seeing in his face is gone. Once, long ago, you would have become uncomfortable to see his toughness set aside, as if it would reveal what stupor and formless anger lay beyond most men’s facades, of the ones you had known. But Arthur, without it, stripped of it, forgetting of it, concentrating on this gentle task, is only more himself. In his way, he is just as sullied and scarred as you, just as defiant of the world when he’s had to be, just as guilty, just as stupid, and in all these simple actions he lays his bared self in your hands like there’s a future to save it for.

The magnitude of that notion takes your breath away and your feet lose their grip and you slip underwater. Bathwater floods up your nose and you sit up sputtering. A wave of water washes over the side of the tub.

He reaches for a towel, a little puzzled. “Okay there?”

Goddammit, you can’t really think. You cough and at least can hide your face in the towel for a second. A little blood soaks in from the cut on your head. 

You try to conjure up the old way. Where it was just the two of you and a regular habit of fucking. Drunk, hopped up from a heist, however it used to be. You can’t remember how it used to be, now, if that’s ever really how it was. All those future notions you could dismiss as mere fancy like an impossible, unreachable horizon of mountains suddenly rise around you now in the midst of them. You try to bury the feeling into the towel and toss it aside.

“Your turn, cowboy,” you say, standing up briskly, churning the water and stepping over his shoulder to get behind him, and of course he doesn’t make it easy for you and catches your leg there for a second, and when you wobble he holds you steady. Another wave goes over the lip of the tub. You slide behind him with your legs around his sides.

You’re glad to be concealed. You wonder if he can feel it through your fingers as you soap up his hair, behind his ears, all of him you’re seeing in a new way now. He’s saying something about how long it’s been since he’s had something like this, and you can’t even think of a word to say beyond a listening hum. The tendons of his neck rising tandem to his skull. His strong neck loosening in your hands.

You spread soap over his shoulders, the scar of the graze on his right shoulder. His broad back seems a little thinner. The lines of his shoulder blades more visible. He’s never been good at taking care of himself. Without realizing it, you’ve been running your hands searchingly over the marks of him. Outlines of his structure. Scars. The delineation of tanned skin at his neck fading to the lighter skin of his back. He jumps when you run your hands down his sides to his waist. 

He’s quiet now, his head bowing heavy as you knead his work-hard back. His ribs expand wide in a huge inhalation, and contract slowly, like a breath he has been waiting for ages to take. The muscles of his shoulders hunch round and hang loose. His arms that have held you every kind of way. Every rope and cord and knot and angle. He rests his elbows on your knees and his hands idly caress your calves. 

“I ain’t seen any green sashes in Saint Denis,” he says, faintly. 

Your hands find his neck again, stroking around to his throat, his Adam’s apple, his collar bones, the knot where one has been broken and badly set. The channel above it. The vibration of his throat when he speaks.

“You worried about em?”

“Haven’t seen them yet either.”

“What would they do?”

You have seen Glasgow smiles carved. Strips of skin flayed from backs. Colm had a preference for making a man watch someone dear to him killed, and would have people kidnapped in pairs. He walked away from a woman tortured - a whore, only - because she had let slip some detail or another to the wrong man. What they did to her before she died, you could not think of now without flinching.  It had not been quick. And you, you traitor, would not be spared. It would be worse for you.

You tell him none of that. 

“You’re worried,” he says.

“Me? No.”

“You’re holding your breath.”

You hate that he knows that. “You made me think about it.”

You pull him back and he leans his weight into you. Head under your chin, wet hair. His hands smooth over your arms crossed down over his chest and then hold them, and only the clear drip from the faucet breaks the quiet water you’re in. 

“Why don’t you move out from all them gossips in that fleatrap.”

“And live where, your tent?”

“We’re movin up in the world. Camped up in one of them rundown mansions in the swamp.” 

“That’s not much of an improvement.”

“Then we’ll stay here.”

“You get better at poker all of a sudden?”

“Compliments of the Bank of Rhodes.” 

Your heart skips and his hand tightens on your wrist as if he can feel it. 

“When was that?” you ask.

“What, you jealous?” He knows you’re not, and the teasing smoothness of his voice puts you on edge, as if he’s not taking it seriously enough. But he’s pressing the inside of your wrist to his lips now, doing it just to feel your pulse.

Most times, you’re able to put thoughts out of your mind of what a bullet can do. Who it can hit. A body robbed of life, one moment to the next. The one gunman’s truth is, the more times your bullets hit home, and the longer you go on, the more you have it coming. There have been times you’ve made peace with the notion of it for yourself, and come back feeling lucky, but all luck is tempered by fate. 

It could be the callused hide of the city, inured to daily death through all its decades of yellow fever outbreaks, all its ravaging fires, all its desperate runners and hustlers and working girls. A world that will move on without you, only strangers to recall you. Something about it just feels more certain now. 

“Can you stop for a while?”

“Sure. Until the next time.”

He sits up from you and turns around, a tight proposition in that tub that keeps splashing on the floor, and he guides your legs around his waist so you’re sitting on his thighs and he jostles you as he gets settled and he can look at you and see all the change in your mind you can’t undo. If he sees the tears that almost glassed your eyes, the suspension of worry in your clenched jaw, he’ll be burdened by it too.

He doesn’t ask what’s gotten into you, or why you’re suddenly quiet and bothered about a small-time bank robbery. His jaw sets just a little bit forward and his eyes search you like he’s counting the number of guns he has to contend with, and you swallow and try to recover by combing his wet hair back from his forehead with your fingers. He sees right through you. 

“We need money,” he says.

“Lotta good then, staying here all the time.”

“Different scale.”

“Let’s leave. Tonight. Or take the whole sum of the next score, and I’ll find you.”

He blinks long with a tired half-smile. “I can’t do that.” 

“You don’t need to help everyone.”

His eyes ask for your understanding, and you have to focus on the small naked island of your knee rising from the water, the undulating ring clinging at its shore. 

“Needs to be a clean break, Nell.”

“Then I’m coming with you, next time.”

His sigh deflates you too.

“Red, there’s no one I’d rath-”

“But.”

He can't deny what happened the last time he tried to make you stay. 

Now he has to look down, and his gaze lands on your shoulder as if he can stare through it to a different time, lingering, stalling. 

“But I couldn’t do my job, knowing you’re there.” 

“You have before,” you hear yourself saying, then dread seeing what is under this stone you’ve turned. Your words trail off. Leaving the air empty for further silence, or words that are too abstract to imagine, and now he’s clearing his throat, and you wish you could stop breathing so goddamn fast right now, your breasts rising into his chest. Maybe you could stop breathing entirely.

So you don’t really notice until you recall later how his fingers gripped you a little tighter, and how he swallowed.  His thumb smoothing the softness of your flank over and over. The pulse in his neck quickening. The water was too warm to betray blushing, but his ears were red, and you missed that detail too. But then he lifts his face to look at you, nudging your jaw with his knuckles to look at him. Irises iridescently blue today. Pupils wide. Lips pursing. He clears his throat again, and his voice is deep, quiet when he says,

“Goddammit.”

Admittedly, it’s the same word in your mind. In discomfort, you’re about to start chiding him, like the old days. Don’t tell me what to do, went the joke, but then he drops his forehead to your shoulder. 

“Can’t say what I goddamn mean to,” he says, halfway to himself, and then you realize he’s exhaling the same way he does when he’s about to shoot, and looks up.  

He cradles your jaw now, thumb stroking your cheek. You’re drawn to kiss his palm, as if to hide. Somehow it makes you feel unbearably sad; by the look in his eyes, he feels the same.

“If something happened. I couldn’t live with that.” His head meets yours.

“How do you think I’d feel, something happening to you? Don’t tell me it’s different; it’s not.”

“Please, Nell.” His voice is clenched. “Things in the end, that's where they go wrong.”

“I want to be together.”

“Well I want a life together, and it ain’t happenin if you’re dead.”

You catch him picturing it, the worry in his face. But his mind comes back to you the moment his hand drifts over your belly and waits there. Soft, in the water. Intent, his hold.

“And what happens when it changes.” When his eyes meet yours, what is this sad piercing germination? 

You don’t notice how you’re breathing until he pulls your lower back to bring you into him and that pang shoots up your entire center unstoppably. He pinches your quivering chin. 

“What is it?” He pulls you close by your chin to kiss him.

You try to blink away tears, but the water on your cheeks lets them stream.

“It’s hard,” you can only whisper. “Thinking of that.”

He holds you, arms around you, and you rest your chin on his shoulder and he waits in your silence like he’s patiently watching long shadows pass into dusk. 

“Can you try? Imagine us ahead of all this?”

“And when it all goes wrong again?”

“If it all goes wrong? We lose everything again?” He scratches his jaw, his arms squeezing you tighter before he rests his chin on the crook of your neck. “If we got nothin else, we got this.”

He lives knowing something will happen, whatever it is, but the sense begins to trouble you that he doesn’t see himself beyond it. Not in all of it anyway. And whether he was trying to prepare you then, pretending for the time being all was well, or not aware of his own assumptions of his life, you never will know.

You help each other from the cooling bath and dry off and fall asleep on that fine bed, lying together nested. He brings your hand back to kiss your knuckles and you’re asleep before the last one.

The city haze off the river puts everything a little out of focus, like some place in a dream world, imitating reality but unreal. People and carts and city birds pass close enough to break clear for a moment, like passing revelations, and fade again into the golden fog. And he feels a fucking idiot, walking from one hotel to the other, and has to stop to buy a paper and an apple just to break the line between them, and leans at the street corner across from the bank while he eats the apple, hating what parts of his old life have crept into mind with the arrival of one damn letter. A chapter he’d thought closed. And does anything stay buried or is a person doomed to encounter his old wounds every time something good comes along.

She has made herself open to him, at obvious cost, not only the cut to her head, but in every way giving up protection from being fully known. And still he won’t do the same. A cad, he is, if he cannot, and the truth is he cannot begin to figure out how a person might simply start to tell another about the worst days of their life, and he stands by the hotel realizing he’s done this all in the wrong order, and is about to turn back when his name is called from above.

There’s no enlivening inside him the way he used to feel at the sound of Mary's voice. That, alone, is enough to show him what has changed, and what has not. As he waits for her to come down, he repeats what he’s planned to say.

But before he can get a word out, she’s asking him the old favors. He had always been more of a supply to extract from than a partner to her, and here it is, ever the same as the worst parts of people always are. Realizing that, as she takes his hands, begging his help, is the strangest consolation, and he plucks her hands off of his. Perhaps he is less of a fool than he thought, settling old questions. Tying off a line. As he walks away from another one of her halting, guilt-inducing unfulfillable dreams spoken aloud, he lights a cigarette and feels lighter than he has in days. Perhaps a man can become better, and in the end he proves her wrong, besides. A man can change. Even him.

While Trelawney has him at the tailor’s getting measured and fit for another damn suit, he’s calm and clear of mind. No time to let your head go. He has a shave and a haircut and arrives at the boat ready to lead the job, though without his guns, an irritating detail Trelawney had decided not to let him know up front.

Another job, another complication no one expected. It always goes well until it doesn’t. As they swim away, bullets charging into the water around them, he’s reminded, like an idiot, how it’s not just in the end where things fall apart.

By the time he gets back to Shady Belle with Javier and Strauss it’s nigh on two in the morning. He’s still soaked, his cigarettes soaked, and annoyed at all the distance traveled just to keep up pretenses. He focuses on the pack of cigarettes up in his room he can’t wait to get to, and he’s at the top of the stairs when Dutch’s door opens.

He tosses his head to follow him to the sitting room, and leads him there and stands at the window nearest the lockbox, facing out, clearly watching sideways as Arthur marks the amount in the ledger and sets a block of three thousand dollars in the box with all the intent and dare of placing a charge of black powder. And just like that, Dutch’s attention morphs from the muck of his contempt into shine-eyed interest.

“Well well, Trelawney’s job seems to have paid off indeed.”

“Like to think so.”

“Did you get keelhauled in the process?” Dutch laughs as he hands him a cigar and lights his own, and Arthur takes this proffered treat as a sign of goodwill and starts to slip it in his damp pocket.

“Damn well could’ve been.” 

Then Dutch lights a new match and holds it out, his face illuminated in flame and generosity, and as he bites the paper off and takes the light, he puts himself at his mercy for a half-hour or more, longer certainly if Dutch does a lot of talking, and Dutch sees him working out the time in his head, but there was never any choice.

“Oh let yourself celebrate a little, Arthur. Get so serious sometimes. I appreciate all the effort, son, but you can sit yourself down and relax once in a while.”

“Just doin what I can.” He lifts the cigar at him, and in a sudden realization of his own exhaustion he has to sit on the dusty sofa, and he sinks down deep as its old springs give out.

“Another score or two like this and our stretch of running and scraping by is behind us.” Dutch sits on the arm of the sofa. 

“So what then, Tahiti?”

“Tahiti, Australia - a convict colony suits us just as well.”

“You might feel right at home there," he jokes mildly.

Dutch doesn't smile. “I hope you would as well, by my side.” He clamps his shoulder with a weight so eerily familiar to other times in his life he feels as if his mind is being read by a stage clairvoyant. 

“These forces closing in, Arthur. I think I can tell you, sometimes I feel the weight of responsibility like it’s mine alone to carry.” He rubs his eye and smiles ruefully at the ember of his cigar. “All we want is a better life outside their reach. How can something so simple be so impossible.”

He had learned early to sit and listen while Dutch arranged his mind aloud. 

“The same as any man journeying west in this country wants. Yet we are their representative targets.”

He nods heavily and coughs as the smoke builds around them.

“We were desperate, Arthur. The powerful will always punish desperation.”

He thinks of Nell in their room alone, imagines himself there.

“And feeling desperate now, son, I feel I have to get your reassurance, you’ll be with me in the end.”

And if the silence that follows the baring of Dutch’s soul lasts too long, if he does not, out of pure reflex, take this delicate gift with the necessary understanding of its gravity, he is not only a sudden enemy; he might as well have cut it out of him in the first place.

“Of course, Dutch.” He smokes and lifts his hands like his mind must have been on some deranged fixation or other. “Tahiti. Sounds wonderful.” He watches Dutch’s expression searching him until his smile catches up. 

“Thank you, son.”

The room is as cloudy as the murky fog of the river bank in the morning. Almost a paste in the air. 

“Funny how a man remembers who he is and where he is from, upon coming to a new place.” Dutch lifts his cigar with a flicker of wondering disbelief as if he’s just seen a curtain lifted, uncovering the hidden workings of the mechanism of life, and knocks him on the arm.

As their cigars burn into nubs, he hears how Hosea is becoming more of a bother, questioning and putting up a fuss where he hadn’t used to. How Miss O’Shea, sleeping just in the next room, does nothing but suck up his energy and his time. To sit there through it silently then is to agree somehow. By the end he only wants to get back, and he can finally depart to his room, gather a few more things, and sneak out of his own goddamn room by the balcony, climbing down.

It’s almost three. Even so, Kieran is up to get Georgia for him, greeting him in passing with that mousy hunkered walk of his, and it strikes him as uncommonly tender, all of a sudden, how the boy greets Georgia with a knowing scratch. So for once, perhaps to extend a pleasantness he could never expect unconditionally from Dutch, he thanks him, swats him genially on the shoulder, and the kid startles as if he had just reached out to punch him, uttering a reflexive apology.

“You’re what?” Arthur pats his pockets for his smokes.

“I’m, uh, sorry, Mister Morgan.”

“You didn’t do anything.” He clamps one in his lips. “I meant thanks for tendin to her so well.” He strikes a match on his boot.

Kieran laughs as if he’s in pain, and Arthur nods as he checks the saddle, not much else he can think to say to him, until a notion stops him and he turns around. “Was you always up at that mining town or did you stay at any of the other O’Driscoll camps?”

Kieran steps back. “Mostly just there, sir.”

“Don’t call me that - you were never at, uh, Hangin Dog Ranch, none of that?”

“No sir - Mister Mor-”

“Arthur.”

“Yes si- Arthur. I mean no."

He nods, and claps him again on the upper arm as he makes to get his boot in the stirrup, and this time the kid doesn’t jump out of his skin but straightens up. 

“I knew about her though. Arthur sir.”

He turns, and checks around quickly. “You what?” Hoarseness betrays him.

“If that’s what you mean, askin about Hangin Dog.”

“What do I mean, Kieran?”

Kieran shrinks up beside Georgia. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry I ain’t said -”

“You hush, boy. You don’t know a goddamn thing.”

Between them, that arm’s reach of a distance, he stares at him in warning, and Kieran stands his humble ground, somehow working up enough balls to open his goddamn mouth again.

“She’s alive, ain’t she.”

“She ain’t none of your business.”

“I wouldn’t say nothin, I swear.”

“Goddamn right, you best not.” He glares at him, and again reaches for the saddle horn, but turns back. “Say nothin to who?”

“Nobody.” Kieran looks at him with meaning, even a little bold. This kid who knows horses knows about what goes unsaid. 

“That don’t tell me what you already let slip.”

“I ain’t said one word about any of it.”

He eyes him. “Best keep it that way.” The slimy little freak nods as if he’s making a grave promise.

“I hope she’s well,” he says softly as Arthur swings up into the saddle.

“I don’t know what you’re talkin about.” And the kid knows he’s lying because he sees when Georgia has so much as stumbled just by glancing at her, and Arthur walks her away from him feeling so unsettled he nearly turns back with a mind to take him behind the wall and get him to spill all he knows. But that - he ain’t that anymore.

He is tired after all he comes back from, and sometimes sleeps quite hard and wakes up slow, even to the indolent circles you draw around his shoulder blades. As you wake beside him now, his face is mostly buried in the pillow, and he doesn’t stir to feel your lips on his elbow, his arm, his shoulder. You move under the sheet to lie face-down on his back, and feel each breath swell under you and sink, and kiss each vertebra down and feel the muscles of his waking back slowly stretch and bind and his hips press into the mattress. Your hips press just the same into the muscles of his ass and you spread yourself to cover him as well as you can, arm to arm, leg to leg. The sleepy roll of his laugh rumbles within him, and then he falls quiet again under the cover of you, and you curl a strand of his hair, newly cut, around your finger, inch your way up his back, press your lips to his shoulder. You would think him asleep but then his right hand slides down the mattress and gropes for your thigh. Then his grasp fades as a faint snore smothers into the pillow.

When he came back in the dark he had tried not to wake you and taken off his clothes in the moonlight and crawled into bed thinking you still asleep. His skin was damp and clammy, and he had come over to your side of the bed, arranging himself around you as if you wouldn’t immediately wake to the feel of his chest against your back, his legs against yours, his hand on your stomach, unconsciously rising to hold your breast. His hand smelling of cigars. Gunsmoke, you would swear, though it was faint. And as your chest tightened with a tide of anger you wondered if all animals got trapped in their cycles of instinct and habit, and was it pointless, even cruel, to break them free. You hadn't slept much after that, eventually resigning yourself to the dawnlight and the faint reassurance of his steady breath and beating heart. 

Gingerly, now, you move your knees to the mattress on either side of his waist, and push yourself up to sit on his ass that tightens under you, and press your thumbs into the cordlike muscles on either side of his spine. The pressure isn’t hard, but when you reach a tender spot his whole body jumps, and you quickly apologize, rubbing more lightly with your palms. His back is a picture of work. Slabs of muscle knotted hard. He groans with the feel of your hands at the midpoint of his back, and you put more of your weight on him there until you’re lying on him again, and his hands lazily reach back and squeeze your seat. 

“You’re working yourself too hard,” you say into his neck, the fresh-shorn bristles, before you kiss him there.

You think he might have fallen back asleep, but he starts to stir again beneath you, like a stone figure coming to life. Heavy, unrestored by centuries of rest. He starts to turn over and catches you with one arm as you fall behind him. You wrap your arms and legs around his and hold him tight, and his eyes are still closed as he smiles. 

“Give me all your money,” you growl in his ear before you nip his earlobe.

“Or what?”

“Find out, tough guy.”

“Afraid I got nothin on me.” He feebly paws at his chest and hip.

“I can see that.”

“Well that’s embarrassin for you.”

“I see you got something for me I won’t mind having,” you say as you slide your hand down his front.

“You got a dirty mind there, woman,” he strains through a huge yawn and palms his watering eyes.

“You don’t know the half of it.” You give him a big rut and he chuckles, resisting you tamely and letting you clamber on top of him as he shifts onto his back. He stretches in place, and before you can reach behind you to feel his arousal, he’s asleep again. Head sunk into the feather pillow, one wrist angled over his chest, hand hanging limp and with a new bullet graze across the back of it like a burn. Another light snore. You carefully slide down to his side and drag the sheet back up over both of you, and watch his slow breathing with your hand on his stomach. 

“‘M sorry,” he mumbles after some time, pinching the bridge of his nose as he tries to wake himself up.

“When did you get back?”

He stretches his neck to look at the clock. “Couple hours ago.”

“Where’d you go, your hair all cut, smelling like the river?”

He lazily throws his arms around you and pulls you in so tight he gets a grunt out of you. “Riverboat.”

“You fall in?”

“Came out drippin in cash.” He reaches far over to the bedside table and lifts his hat to show you the stack of bills underneath and a fancy engraved watch, its chain dangling over the side. Then he lugs you back up onto his chest. “So, rich girl, would you have a bed like this?”

You wrinkle your nose at the velvet gold-tasseled drapery over the bed, and play along. “It’s nice to have a bed and clean sheets.” 

“What, a royal chamber ain’t good enough for you?”

You give him a haughty wiggle of your head. “I was promised a bed carved in wildflowers.” And kiss him on the plane of his sternum.

He snorts and pushes his chin down to look at you. “You remembered that?”

“Can’t decide on poppies or wisteria or all kinds.”

“You better decide soon.”

You edge yourself up farther. “Soon?”

He combs the hair out of your face. “Yeah. Would you like that?”

“What’s changed?”

He frowns, dismissive of any reason in particular as he gazes up at the tasseled overhang, but for a second his eyes fixate, a shadow of worry passing in the distance of his sight.

“And where will we go?”

Maybe Mexico, he thinks out loud to the ceiling, his fingers brushing lightly along your back as he lies there, his left hand behind his head. Or Canada. He’s heard of places on the west coast of Canada that have brought men to tears. Perhaps you will try that. 

“Soon as I get past this stickup,” he says, swatting your ass.

“You must not’ve heard of me if you think you’re getting away.”

“Should I be scared?” 

“You ought to be.”

“I’m shakin in my boots,” he says, muffled by your lips.

And after, you doze together in that fancy bed, you resting your forehead between his shoulders, when the thought returns and wakes you fully with a jolt. Holding him tighter, you try to blink the image away that won’t leave you. Of the hanging body, sure. But you’ve seen plenty of dead men. 

That was not what terrified you most.

A figure had come walking toward you from around the hanging tree.

 

 

 

Notes:

Here's the print Arthur was checking out at Algernon's atelier, because I love JSS

Chapter 16: The Ghost Orchid

Summary:

There is an old story, always the same story, and it begins this way.

With two lovers.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

There is an old story, always the same story, and it begins this way.

With two lovers. 

Theirs is a rare love, unfading with time. They promise themselves to each other, and spend all waking moments together, equals. They ask little else of life, for they have no need. In the evening they sit together in the light of the hearth and listen to each other describing the inanities of their day. There is nothing more important to them than what their beloved thinks and feels and says. 

As if such purity is an intolerable mutation in the ways of the world, a letter arrives, or a town crier. An announcement in a house of worship. A notice nailed to a courthouse door. All able-bodied men must report to serve a ruler whose pride or whims or failures have led to war. 

He cannot bear to leave his love but is no coward; he cannot sit by and watch his brethren killed. It will be over soon, anyway, or so he reasons. He will come back to her. Their tearful, private farewell is as passionate as their first joining. He promises to return. And she to wait. He dons his uniform, this knight, this soldier, and shoulders his bow, his rifle, and after a final kiss to last them, he leaves.

In letters, they dispatch their deepest souls. Fly across those morbid battle lines. She believes steadfastly that he will return. He fights only to get back to her. 

And a year or two later, as the story goes, when war has left nothing untouched, cutting trenches in the farmland like furrows sown with grief, it is a stormy night, a raging storm, when the knock on the door wakes her. 

He stands before her, his boots worn near to nothing, his uniform in tatters, his beard long, his cheeks thin, but he is home. His eyes are dull with sorrow, and as she throws her arms around his cold neck he seems bewildered by her tearful kisses, and holds her as if he is beyond sense.

In the rain, she does not see the letter, sunk in the mud, or it was lost at sea, or was never sent, lost in another’s bloodstained pocket, to inform her of her true love’s death. Speared to a tree by bayonet or sword, or hanged from rafters, or left to leak his blood in the soil. 

She lives her remaining days serving him food he does not seem to eat. Holding him as he seems not to sleep. Attending him with wordless patience. Their love produces no children, all sweetness brief and scattered. Perhaps she knows, in her soul, it is only his ghost she sees. Perhaps she is so griefstruck she does not. In town, they speak in hushed tones to tell her woeful tale, and when one day a traveler or curious child finds her dead in her cabin, two plates left out on the table, two chairs set by the cold hearth, they will tell this story to scare and entertain. There is no cautioning moral to the tale, unless it is not to love too deeply in a cruel world. It will collect its merciless tax one way or another.

But, it is said, by old wives and poor poets, that those who have been touched by such grief might find, in the places of greatest sorrow, a sight as rare as the love that precedes it: an orchid, pale and wispy as a spirit suspended between worlds. Little consolation it is for what was lost, only an acknowledgment from the meal of the earth that it lived, and was lovely, for a time.

The stench of crude oil has not left him since he parted ways with the kid, Eagle-something. His jacket, his shirt, his hat. As if the black sludge that pooled in those shining obsidian fields above ground has begun to infect everything around it. Something the kid said stuck with him, didn’t quite make sense at the time. That it reminded him of settlers.

He had seen one time at a saloon a man with a cancer, a black and weeping ulcer spreading on his face, who prodded it as a kind of parlor trick - painless, it was - and stuck his finger out the hole of his own cheek to the recoiling disgust of the ranch hands and rough men around him. Festering and rotting before their eyes. Smelled of putrid meat. 

He hadn’t thought of him in years, but that demented grin stretched wide in his memory when he saw the oil.

Now he smells of that sludge like it has begun to rot him too. He wipes his nose, eyes watering as he gets to the bridge at dawn and the fog of the city, his sights set on a bath and that bed and that woman, the hope of seeing her eyes wake to him, how they brighten, and a slow morning fuck before he sleeps for an entire day. To feel her getting weak and heavy as she comes on his cock, god, that helpless expression he loves. And his mind is on that when he passes a pale figure in black standing in a carriageway and the hair on the back of his neck rises.

He reins Georgia around with his hand on his holster, and a cold sweat flashes over him. He slides down from her as he gets to the carriageway. A heel on the other side slips away. With his gun drawn he sprints after him, his heart racing, the tunnel of the carriageway seeming to close in before he emerges on the other side, into an empty courtyard. 

The arm drops around his neck like a massive rope, and he’s yanked backward off his feet and the point of a knife or the burn of an iron stings his side, and then like a gut-dropping strike of lightning, he’s alone, heaving, sitting against the wall, soaked in sweat. A washerwoman shuffles past with her basket and a dismissive glance, and her steps fade on the paving stones, her steps fade on the paving stones, her steps fade.  

He has to use the wall to get up, and he peers around the corner into the carriageway before leaving, muscles jumping at any sound. He can’t even get his boot up to the stirrup, and leads Georgia the rest of the way to the hotel, glancing over his shoulder and half-flinching at each recessed doorway as if the man will surface in every shadow. 

The saloon is nearly empty, most of the lights turned down, just a tired girl dozing in the corner, a couple of red-eyed men at the poker table, and Robert wiping down the bar. He greets him but has no stomach for the coffee set out, nor making conversation, and trudges up the carpeted steps to their room. 

He doubts he can sleep for a week, his skin still crawling, and yet he finds himself blinking awake in the bath as she’s getting in with him and the water rises.

“You keep coming back to me like this, I might have to get a dog for company.”

Her thighs straddling him underwater are like catfish. Taut. Strong. Slick. 

“Where’d you go, grease all over you?” She kisses a clean spot on his forehead, and soaps up a washcloth and commences to scrub the tarry residue from his temples, his neck.

“Cornwall’s refinery.”

That was the job?”

“Got a little more excitin than expected.”

A whole wordless conversation arises between them: severe, it’s-over-now, warning, shrugging-agreement-but, and finally she lets it pass with a tired sigh and smile. She swipes suds off his cheek.

He closes his eyes to her hands on his chest, breathes deep when her right hand slides down to his cock and the head pulses as he fills and starts to grow hard in her grip, her fingers lightly squeezing, undulating. He gets a glimpse of her gazing intent on his face before his eyes roll back at her first downward stroke. With his neck propped on the rim of the tub, he feels her slowly jack him, a cool wafer of soap in her palm making her hand gorgeously slippery on his tightening shaft, sliding on one spot she knows drives him mad for her, the pad of her thumb underwater as soft as her clever tongue, until he is so hard the mounting urgency to push inside her is almost unbearable, but the bath is the wrong place for it, and he starts to open his eyes to suggest they move.

A giant mouth gapes wide and black in his mind to swallow his face and he jumps. She sits back on his legs as he blinks in shock, her hand off his cock, saying she’s sorry, guilt and worry creasing the corners of her eyes.

“No, it’s alri -” He’s already lost half his hard-on, and runs a wet hand down his face, a little out of breath.

“Did I hurt you?”

“No, I…let’s go in there.” He towels off and follows her still shining wet onto the bed, crawling up over her and tasting the slightest tang of soap on her body, trying to concentrate on the private fortunate pleasure of her nipple gathering firm between his lips, but that face won’t leave his sight, turning to him, taunting him, eyes of soulless evil, smile of indifference to his fate. He squeezes his eyes shut, presses his palm in the socket until he sees color bleed into the black. 

“What’s the matter?”

Christ. He can’t get hard. He shakes his head and drops his forehead to her breastbone, her fingers in his hair. “Got a lot on my mind, maybe.”

That blue ache recedes into his hips.

“You haven’t slept in days.”

“Can’t seem to.”

“Run into any trouble?”

He would think another man crazy, to hear talk of the phantom in the carriageway. He shakes his head.

She pulls his arms up to her. “Come up here.”

It’s awkward, letting her take care of him like this, fluffing the pillow, straightening the covers, lying beside him with her fingers spreading out on his chest and lightly clawing in, but he can’t sleep now, something switched on he can’t explain, restlessness like vibration in the steel of railroad tracks, the train still out of hearing. 

At least after some stretch of time, with her asleep at his side, her leg over his leg, her arm over his chest, breathing slow, he can begin to relax and try to get his own dick off his mind. He could even doze, despite the exhausted muscle twitches he gets after a night like that, and he’s drifting in that darkening pool of near-sleep when some asshole beats on the door and both of them jolt awake.

“Morgan! You in there?”

God help him, he will strangle the rasp straight out of Marston’s goddamn throat.

She runs to the bathroom like fleeting joy and shuts herself inside, and he hears her cuss as he wraps the sheet around his waist and trips toward the door. He opens it a crack.

“What do you want.”

“Look at you. ” Marston pushes the door open but can’t get past him. “Thought I’d just find you losin at cards. Still got a few surprises left.”

“How the hell did you find me?”

“Georgia’s outside, you idiot.”

He tries to block him but almost loses his grip on the sheet and when he snatches at it Marston slips past him. 

“Get the fuck out, John -”

Marston is holding up Nell’s shoe as he turns, looking around at her clothes strewn, as if he could somehow imagine the scene of their undoing. How her skirt came to be hanging off the lamp. When he picks up her chemise top dangling by its strap from the handle of the door to the balcony, Arthur plucks it out of his hand.

“You wanna explain that?” Marston asks it like he’s owed.

“No. Get out.”

“Dutch needs to talk.”

“He with you?”

Marston narrows his eyes, watches him with motionless interest. “Outside. But ain’t you nervous all of a sudden.”

“I’ll meet you downstairs, just -”

“She still in there? Didn’t think you’d pay for a whole night, you cheap -” He steps toward the bathroom door and Arthur gets to him in one stride and claps him broadside on the ear.

“Ow, jesus, Morgan!” 

“Learn a little goddamn respect.”

“Talk to me about respect? You been whorin up in a palace while the rest of us is scrapin by -”

“You want a cuff on your other ear? Make your point and get out.”

“He’s waitin in the alley, so get down there. Fuck.” He holds his ear as he slinks past him back to the door.

By the time he’s found his clothes still reeking of burning oil, and cooled Nell down from being thought a whore, and assured her he’d only ever been with two as a stupid younger man - the comment was just John being an ass - and come downstairs feeling almost sick with exhaustion, Marston is captive, staring gape-mouthed at Lilian, who is back in her den and three drinks deep by the sound of it. Earlier than usual. She talks at John generally, the way she talks to no one particularly, and Arthur bends his brim at her. She always shuts up just for a moment when he does, for what reason he can’t figure. Or it’s Nell she often gapes at, he realizes, whether it’s for her men’s clothes or her prettiness, but it’s hard to tell because Lilian’s eyes don’t point in league after her third.

He finds Dutch and Lenny in the alley, Dutch pacing excited like chaos quivering at the rim, about to overspill in a city prone to flooding with it, waiting in all its recesses and tunnels and untrue angles leading astray. Lenny nods at Arthur like it’s the old days, as if they share that foolish spark before a job. And it’s Tahiti and trolleys on Dutch’s mind, and Lenny going along with it, poor kid, all eagerness taken advantage of.

“With or without you,” Dutch is saying, as he catches the last bit of his muttering. The words Dutch knows will always get them to follow. 

He rubs his watering eyes, fighting himself to wake up, and almost forgets to check his cylinders before putting up his mask. 

“I still haven’t seen any of Colm’s boys in the city,” you finally said some days ago, calling out his insinuations as he walked with you. You had left the theater show after half an hour, both of you bored near to tears at the Shakespeare about a mad king in words so scrambled it was a foreign language to you, and now strolled in the pleasant afternoon in foul moods.

“Too late when you do,” he said, paternally enough that you released his hand and strode past him and he dropped his arms. “Carry protection at least.”

“I always carry protection.”

“Like what, that little letter opener you got in there?” He caught up to you and tugged on your satchel.

“I have a derringer.” You didn’t, but you said it just to get under his skin, and glancing at him you caught a full face of scorn.

You swung your hand out at the street. “What good do you think a gun will do here? You’d have five cops on you two seconds after firing a single shot.”

He spun away in frustration and back. “Do it for me,” he said, insistent enough that you were annoyed before you noticed the concern in his voice.

“Fine. I’ll get something.”

“When.”

“Later.”

“Red.” 

“I’m staying away from all that. Trying to.”

"The other day you were beggin to come with me on the next job."

"Wasn't begging, and that was different."

"Oh was it."

"I'm trying to live straight, Arthur."

He stepped toward you and took you lovingly by the shoulders, and bending at the knees for a moment to peer at you under your hat brim, his eyes full of understanding, contrition, even sweetness, he gave in and nodded down at his chest. “It’s damn admirable, you puttin all that behind.” He even smiled for a moment, and leaned in, about to kiss you on the cheek.

“Thank you for see-”

“But I ain’t askin you to hold up a stage,” he snarled lightly in your ear, backing up then with an uncompromising lift of his eyebrows. 

From the way he stood on the sidewalk and refused to let you move past him, stepping side to side in your way, you had to back down. After that, his mood improved considerably, and he picked up your arm and wove it under his, plopping your limp hand on his forearm and seeming to enjoy dragging you along. Eventually you had found it impossible to stay annoyed, considering his preferred way of courting appeared to be to stroll with you to Chinatown to get you outfitted with a weapon he was jealous of. And being honest with yourself, it was a damn sight better than the theater. You were asking about another Cattleman - dependable, familiar, affordable - when he leaned on the counter and started chatting with the owner like they knew each other. The lady needs something better - quite the shot, you see. Just try it - the Schofield, like his - heavier, sure, but worth the extra weight in firepower. Some drawbacks, but its accuracy compensated for them. You couldn’t deny the feel of it, the obvious balance and craftsmanship. Then Arthur would hear no argument on ordering all improvements to it, and even a goddamn blue mother-of-pearl inlay to the pearl grip and silver-inlaid engraving you would have been embarrassed by, had he not been so enamored. You put your foot down about a belt and chose the plain one, which was also the only one that fit small enough. 

Two days later, when your new piece was ready, you had spent a whole morning and ten dollars in ammunition in the marshlands northeast of the city, marveling at your new equipment and feeling dreadfully out of practice. He had thrown cans and fallen fruit and sticks for hours, until your hands were almost numb and he was rolling his sore shoulder. 

You had to admit you were easily provoked by that time, when he made a passing comment like a real wiseass. 

“Better take that back,” you stammered, your legs wrapped around his waist as your back slammed against the side of an old shed, barely out of view of the road. “Eighty percent at least.” He stifled your dispute with a hard kiss, his right hand under you working his gunbelt off and his fly open.

“I just think you do better when it counts, killer.” Then he groaned into your shoulder with that tight penetration, bearing into you as you panted in near-pain until he reached you deep, and then your body gave in and you sagged back, holding his neck, feeling loaded with every hard ram up the shed wall. And you were starting to say something half-innocent about him needing more practice than you did when he kissed your throat. Oh you think so? he said with a light grunt as you squeezed him with your thighs.

But you were speechless as he increased his pace and rode you harder on the wall, and just hearing the broken sound in his breath the moment he lost control swept you with him, your hips shoving up as you started to come and you weakened with the last driving waves of his body into yours. He crushed you against the wall and grimaced, his head tipping up in that hard stretch of reflex and release; you clung to him until the rigors passed and your wits returned. The feel of his thick wet cock sliding out of you, long and slick with cum, his slight oversensitive wince, was a sensation so purely lewd and pleasurable it pulled a sigh from you, and you wanted more already. 

But you would have to wait. He buttoned up and checked Georgia over, and buckled on some half-chaps for the ride up to the Heartlands, a name you heard differently now, recalling that sweeter time in a separate life. Now an errand for the son of a chief. Arthur had dismissed it as one more job, but as you dusted off the front of his shirt, you felt that pit in your stomach.

“You don’t have to get involved.”

“It’s the first job I felt right about in a long time.”

“So is it for you or for them?”

A harsh look hardened his face for a moment. Indignant. “It ain’t selfish.”

“Just…” You looked down. His gunbelt was buckled one notch higher from where it was worn in. “Keep your mind on what we’re trying to do.”

“That’s never off my mind.” He kissed your forehead and held you tight for a while before mounting up. 

He had come back from that so drained he seemed to pass out more than fall asleep, and you thought at least it wasn’t Dutch he had worn himself out for, the same moment John Marston knocked on the door.

So when he’s been gone less than half an hour and you hear the gunfire several blocks away, you drop the skirt in your hands and get your trousers instead, flecked in dry mud, and buckle on that heavy belt, and with your heart pounding you race downstairs.

John is at the window, shutters partway closed, checking the street, while Lilian keeps rattling on and Robert locks the front door.

“Sir, you best stay away from them windows,” he warns John. “Miss Scarlett,” he says, passing you on his way back to the bar, where he pours another drink for Lilian and discreetly sips his own.

At your name, John spins around, and gapes at you. “The hell are you doing here?” And you watch him piece it together in disbelief.

“Why aren’t you out there with him?” you hiss at him.

“I didn’t know it was going to turn into-”

You grab him by the sleeve and haul him ahead of you past the bar, where Robert nods again and lets you find your way to the back door. Lilian is in the middle of lamenting the prudishness of Americans and falls silent as you shimmy in front of her. 

When you start to head down the alley toward the gunfire, he grabs your wrist and pulls you back. “You stupid or somethin?” He lets go when he sees your blazing stare but doesn’t back off. “Look where you’re goin at least.” A few police run past the alley, and they’re already putting up barricades on the streets of the poor neighborhoods, and you try not to look suspicious as you follow John back toward the horses. You’re getting up on Georgia when the dull explosion to the northwest snaps your heads in that direction.

Paroxysms of chaos follow. You hear the suspicions flying wild - where will the next one be, was it an accident or was it Raiders - although the police always suspect the poor and hard-living. The two of you recognize dynamite when you hear it and cautiously head toward the direction it came from, past a cop sitting on the ground holding his head while another leans over him, a dead cop sprawled over the curb several feet away, and you hear one of them cursing the goddamned thieves that got over the bridge. 

Calmly, you turn and head out north of the city, just as they are blocking the street, and as long as you do not appear to flee they don’t take much interest, beyond giving John a more thorough glance than you. Far outside town, John slows Old Boy and leans on the horn, and glances at you with his hanging head like he’s got two problems to deal with now.

“Where would they go?”

He scratches his jaw, avoiding his scars. “That road branches. I reckon I could check camp while you head up toward that shantytown to the north.” He digs out a cigarette and lights it, and doesn’t offer one to you, and you ride with him westward for a while toward the split. He’s silent, but you can see his thoughts accumulating as he glances at you, hostility in his sideways glare.

You sigh. “You got something you want to say to me?”

He hoots with some surprise, as if he’s glad for the chance to speak his mind. “Maybe. You got any other secrets you ain’t shared, O’Driscoll?”

“There it is.”

He rolls his eyes with a huff.

“Are you gonna threaten me too? Like Micah?”

He fully turns with an insulted glare. “Just bein careful, and you’d do the same.”

“Not sure what you think you know.”

“A couple of us knew it was O’Driscolls that got him, and you were involved.” He watches the road up ahead as he speaks. “It’s generous to suppose it ain’t what it looks like. So, I’m tellin you right now, one hint of trouble and none of us would bat an eye.” 

“Tell you what. After we find him, you can take your best shot.”

Before you can see his reaction, you click to Georgia to get up, and near the crossroads you come upon the aftermath of the explosion, blood stains and splinters, a hat lost in the dust, but nothing more to go on. With a final glare back at John, you turn right up toward the bayou and the swamp so thick with cypress and vines it yawns cavelike over the disappearing road.

He tries to stay out of sight, limping close enough to the brush that he can get cover if he has to. His neck aches from the crash of that damn trolley, the whiskers on the left side of his face singed a bit from the dynamite as they drove through the flame. Can’t see worth a damn in this fog, that constant heavy haze. 

The sight of Dutch staggering on the road when they stopped repeats like a stutter in his mind. He doesn’t want to think about it but sees that stumble again and again. All the years he’s known him, he’s never seen him that way. Something about it feeble, not just sore or injured, something unhinged. And now the memory strikes him, Dutch’s talk of the bank as he rode away with Lenny, and he feels sick. Like his wrists are tied, tethered to the back of a train about to crawl forward.

It has been hours since he saw a sign. Or another rider. He walks on the roadside picking up any mostly dry sticks he can find, making a small bundle under his arm. When something buzzes past his ear he flinches away and drops the sticks, watching as only a dragonfly flits ahead. His heart pounds harder when he glimpses a white face eclipsed by a tree, but it is nothing. Goddamn seein things. It puts him in a rotten state.

When he has a decent bundle, and finds a place far enough from water, he reckons, to be less in danger of other creatures, he makes a little smoky fire to try to keep the mosquitoes at bay and lays his coat over a log and reclines against it. If he can get an hour of rest only, he’ll be able to move on. And sleep takes him over before he can think of it.

That sickening swing. He’s upside-down. That fucking pale face next to his, those putrid yellow teeth, and the thwack of the whip licking around his flank. He jolts with pain. He’s worth the same dead as alive. Let him run. Somehow they always let him go, releasing him not to freedom but to be hunted like a fox, and in those dreams he doesn’t know he’s hunted, and doesn’t run, stands bewildered, shin-deep in a mountain lake of blue wildflowers. 

This time, in the distance stands a little boy. Fishing, although there’s no water. He wades through the flowers toward the boy. A gentle kid. Always was. Lean-boned like his mama. Small for his age. Features that made him think of a baby raccoon, ears he would have to grow into. Big blue eyes that would stun him lost for thought. And the boy stands fishing, flying a line with no lure, but at first doesn’t hear Arthur’s suggestion to put one on.

Here let me do it; the knot’s tricky.

The boy turns, stands before him as Arthur kneels and concentrates on this tiny task, threading the filament through the loop of the lure, twisting, making the second loop, licking the line, tightening it. In his periphery, the checkered shirt on the boy’s little chest he could cover with his hand, suspenders pinned short to stay up. 

The boy’s hands lightly hold his cheeks. Fingers unconsciously tender and searching.

A huge spring of sadness rises in him, his throat aching, breath suddenly choked as he looks up at the boy, and he can never form the words of his failed apology when he sees that lost little face. I couldn’t - if I’d - Tried to join y-

The boy gazes into his eyes, and for one pure moment the boy’s face blooms with recognition, simple joy enough to make his heart burst, before his eyes widen, going black with terror, and the boy clasps his face and screams at him in his own voice RUN!

He jerks awake, and in reflex twists away from the blade as it hacks into his coat on the log where he just lay. For a second he gasps at the dim blue shine of the blade and the painted hand yanking on the handle, and shoots the man holding it, and then another one now silently sprinting toward him. Clicks and hisses all around in the trees. No time to decide anything but to run, and in the distance glows a single smudge of light in the fog. He runs toward it with the dumb trust of a beast in the middle of a stampede as an arrow zings past his face. 

When you hear the Schofield, you immediately turn Georgia toward it. Another shot, up the road. You ride hard and shout his name, and before long you see him vaulting over a fallen tree, sprinting parallel to you some twenty yards away, and you call for him again, slowing Georgia and firing behind him for cover. On the other side, you catch sight of John riding closer, just as the breeze from an arrow tugs at the hair behind your neck.

Arthur reaches you and you're ready the moment he grabs your forearm and swings up behind you. Georgia gets up without being asked. The three of you race up the road, John veering in beside you and pointing to a shack up ahead near the river.  

You are the only ones making any sound, your horses’ hooves, your calls to each other, as if you are fleeing from your own fears slinging silent arrows and knives behind you, or what might pass for rustling leaves, restless squirrels in the brush, hallucinations so insidious you can’t tell where any of them are in the foggy dusk. To your left, you glimpse one of them, marked in white paint, sprinting soundlessly to catch you. You fire and don’t see what you hit. When you get to the shack, you dismount so fast you stumble forward onto your hands, and Arthur slides off and smacks Georgia to flee. He grabs you by your sleeve and drags you up the stairs as John comes up behind you, turning around to fire before running inside. 

Once Arthur throws you in and John slides by, he slams the door and rears back as the point of an ax blade hacks through the wood. He and John shove a bookshelf in front of the door while you check the back door and start to haul a table up against it, and then crouch against the wall beside the window and watch one of them prowl past on the porch. 

Arthur crawls over beside you, fear in his eyes as he reaches behind your head and out of your braid he calmly pulls an arrow. He hands it to you while he feels your neck for any wound, and you roll the arrow shaft in your palms amazed at the size of it, the lightness, running a finger over the turkey feather fletching, forcing yourself not to think about the size of the hole it didn’t bore through you. 

He dumps out his satchel, and you yours, and you pool your ammunition and start to reload. You pull out a cigarette and light it for him, he holds it for you to draw from, and he hands you his sawed-off and a box of slugs. While his hands are busy you slip rounds into the loops of his belt. 

Footfalls on the porch scrape and thud. You crouch silent in the dying light of the room, the three of you signaling each other, clueless about what to do. John rakes his hands back and forth in his hair like he is about to lose his mind. You touch Arthur’s arm and find he is soaked in sweat and still out of breath. He faces out to the middle of the room, listening.

You jump with the deadened boom of an ax on the door. Another. John whips around with a repulsed shiver as if he is about to murder anything that gets near him.

“Let’s fuckin end this, Morgan,” John hisses, stepping toward him, but Arthur holds up a hand. Listens.

The scream of a horse from the road. Arthur bolts straight to his feet. He shares a fast and serious look with John, and heads for the ladder to the loft. When you try to follow, he turns to object, and seeing you now, he can’t argue, but lord he wants to, the flash in his eyes. Then he steps aside and waves you up first.

“Morgan, the fuck are you doin?”

“You want out of here, don’t you? Cover us and hold this place.” He waves his revolver back toward the window where one of them has just passed.

You step gingerly out the loft window onto the roof, and the ceiling creaks under your quiet moving weight. When Arthur has a good position on the opposite corner, he checks that you’re ready, and you watch as three of them walk upright toward the shack, so intent on violence they spare no thought for their own lives. With a nod, you both open fire, taking careful aim to put them down as they appear from the fog, these murderous silent apparitions who make no sound in death.

John fires now, too, and below you a blast from inside sends one of the painted men staggering back and falling over the railing, sheeting blood from his throat so dark it runs black down his chest and he chokes on his own blood, a quiet gargle before he lies still.

“God fuckin dammit!” you hear John raging by himself in disgust. “Fuckin goddamn crazy swamp bastards!” 

Arthur gives a quiet whistle at you and jumps down onto the porch. You run across and do the same, and he goes around the opposite side of the shack. You send both barrels of the sawed-off at a large ragged man with a machete, and the gunsmoke and the fog crowd in as you reload so that you cannot see much more than ten feet in front of you. You walk along the porch expecting an arrow or an ax to bury itself in the wall. In you. The calm is more unsettling than reassuring, although you hear no clicks anymore, nothing whooshing in the air, no rattling, croaking calls.

You talk low to make yourself known to John when you get to the open window, and he lets you inside and pushes a dresser back into place. 

He’s still wild-eyed, and looks at you strangely. “He ain’t with you?”

Another scream of a horse cuts shrill in the air. You shake your head and move closer to the window but all you can see is fog.

“Better not be Georgia, I heard what they do,” he says across the window as he reloads, straining to get his voice calm. “It’ll be a goddamn massacre.”

You spot another one running across the yard and you fire, and he falls forward with his own momentum, head digging into the mud. “Well they have it coming.” You scan for any sign of Arthur, or gunfire, or the horses, and there’s thunder in the air, and then the rain begins to sheet down.

“He’d find a way to set the whole damn swamp on fire. Even in pourin rain he would find a way to bring hell to em.”

“Better not be her then.”

“Just get me the hell out of here, I have fuckin had it.” He shivers like his skin crawls. 

Two loud bangs on the door drive you both back on your heels, no voice to accompany them, and you and John venture toward it, John aiming at the door while he helps you push aside the shelf, backing up again.

Arthur stands soaked, blood streaming down one side of his face. You run to him and drag him inside; he’s so dazed he stumbles over the threshold and doesn’t protest when you knock his hat off and search his head and face for the source of the blood and find none. You tell him to kneel and he lowers stiffly to his knees, and still you find nothing, not so much as a graze on him, and his hands clutch your thighs so tight at first you wobble off balance and hold onto his head. 

“Say something,” you demand, and when he doesn’t, and he’s cold and panting, you slip down to your knees too, push up his jaw, look him straight in the eyes. “Goddammit, say something.”

For all you’ve seen over the last hours, you would believe just about anything at this moment, even an old story haunting you. What you see in his eyes, all the fear and relief and blinking adjustment to reality, his hands still gripping you as if in total disbelief, tells you something different. Of a horror you couldn’t see, beyond the one you could.

“Okay there?” he breathes, trying to smile, and waves over at John too, gulping that it’s fine, they’re gone far as he can see. John reaches down to help you to your feet first, then Arthur, and he claps you meatily on the back before trudging ahead of you outside where Georgia and Old Boy are waiting in the rain.

You ride away from that place, alert but bolder now. Though he insists on riding in back and keeps his gun drawn. He directs you north on the road until you come to an isolated part of the marsh and a strange boat anchored in calm water. He slides down with a groan and pulls up a long plank, letting it fall onto the gunnel of the boat and testing it with his weight. 

He holds out his hand to you. “Found it the other day. Come on.”

When he follows you onto the deck, he pulls up the plank, and uses the spar pole to push the boat out farther from shore, and then shows you to the door, which both of you have to duck through. He leans inside the doorframe and lights a lantern while you stand in the small room, the small flame revealing its phonograph, its old brass bed, its shelves and tidy fittings, and all you can do is stare at him there in the doorway and think of him not an hour ago in the same position.

“What is it?” He shakes his head with a confused smile. “You don’t like it?”

“No, it’s nice.”

“It ain’t our old palace,” he concedes, stretching his neck with a crack, and notices you seeming stuck in your thoughts. He comes toward you with tired eyes intent on you. “Say it.”

Reluctantly, you tell him about the story you know, and he listens, his brow rising enough to push his hat up.

“You thought I might be dead?”

Hearing him say it that way, you feel sheepish, but it’s still raw enough in your mind to sting. Especially when he starts to laugh.

“I’m sorry if I don’t find it funny.” You fold your arms. 

“It’s a little bit funny.”

You wipe your nose and try to make yourself busy and set your satchel on the tabletop.

He runs his hand up the frame of the door as he forces his smile away, and still can’t help himself. “What do I have to do to convince you?” And when you walk past him he reaches out to jab your side where you’re ticklish and you swat his hand away, but it’s hard to stay upset when he looks at you like that, and truth be told right at that moment with any touch at all.

You glance around, still frowning. “Eat something.”

With a small shrug, he picks a peach out of his satchel, turns it around in his hand, and watches you over the top as he takes a bite, and chews it with a pucker. “Ain’t a very good peach.” He pitches the rest out into the water, and then steps outside and spits over the side and comes back.

“Show me you aren’t hurt.”

He glances down at his chest, feels himself for any holes, and gamely sheds his vest, unstraps his suspenders, unbuttons his shirt and pulls it untucked, tosses it aside. He stands there bare-chested, in one piece, and turns around for you in the lamplight. 

And while you can’t stay too serious as he obeys your commands, he can’t stay unserious very long, seeing you affected like that, and sits on the bed and takes your hand, pulling you to stand between his legs, and suddenly he stares blank-eyed at some thought and his hands are tight on yours. 

“What is it?” you ask.

He clears his throat, and recovers a half smile and swipes the tip of your nose with his thumb. “Could a ghost touch you?”

You lay your hands down on his shoulders, each finger falling to rest on his warm skin. His chest rises and sinks. He rests his forehead on your chin, his hands on your waist. 

“If he can, maybe it doesn’t matter what he is. But you are flesh and blood and mine.”

Lying in the bed with her he stares at the low ceiling and can’t close his eyes for fear of that white face, but he must have closed them, because he opens them in the pale dawn with the feel of her hand gliding down the underside of his cock. Sweet christ, it’s a reassurance he didn’t know he needed, to feel himself getting hard, some proof of his own life, and she glances up as if she knew. And then she strokes up to the head, pushing herself up, her face to his face, and he melts with her mouth opening to his, the sweet slip of her tongue. 

And who could question the feel of lips on skin, or thigh scraping thigh, the strong roll of back and hip, the uncontrollable spread of ribs, the sharp gasp? She would know it was him by the familiar grip of his hands, the taste of him, all the ways they had learned each other in ways no others could know. And in her arms, the imploring flow of their bodies together into the fearless fall, he reckons she’s right, it don’t matter. Old wives’ tales be damned. 

He leaves her, sleeping, for one last errand, puts out the gangplank, and gets up on Georgia for the ride back to Shady Belle, the sun just a sliver on the eastern edge of that flat part of the world. He takes another way there, over the sandy flats, and in the rising light reaches the lowland shores, islands in the shallow mist.

It’s strange, the light in the morning, honeyed, gleaming and thick. All around, the black water lies still, bright duckweed swirling in paisley patterns in the wake of a fish’s fin. 

On the far end of the island, barely taller than the oleander stalks, the boy stands at the water.

Arthur takes long steps through the boggy weeds down the middle of the island rise, watching for the usual creatures, but the morning is peaceful, and nothing lies in wait. Even the insects stay out of the air. 

“Stay away from the edge there,” he says to the boy. 

The boy’s small feet inch back from the mud. 

With a nauseating flash of sweat, his pulse suddenly races and he checks all around him for whatever sharpened threat might fly his way, and even as he longs to look at the boy’s face, he hesitates. When the boy turns to glance up at him, he steels himself at first, but those blue eyes, squinting in the bright morning light, do not dilate in terror.

He crouches next to the boy.

“Anything bitin?”

The boy shakes his head and hands him the rod, and Arthur flicks a short cast into a murkier pool and jigs it slightly but becomes distracted by the boy, who is leaning on him now, his small cool hand toying at his collar, exploring the roughness of his beard, fingers crawling behind his ear as if he is his alone to hang on. He remains crouched, transfixed, as if he will scare the child off if he so much as breathes. The boy’s head tilts against his temple, his small body weighing on his shoulder, both arms slung around his neck, a familiarity so pure he closes his eyes with the crushing ache that comes on. He raises his hand, an instinct to touch the boy’s face, but stops himself for fear of ruining this thing he hasn’t known in years. To have one more moment when he was too stupid to cherish it back then. And when the weight lightens he knows he could expect nothing different than the hell of losing all things sweet and innocent anytime he gets too close. He touches his neck where the boy’s hand was and now even the memory of that is lost.

When he stands, the blood rushes to his head and he puts a hand out to a tree. There at eye level, white and spiderlike reaching out from the vines, a single ghost orchid seems to crawl in the faintest breeze. 

He reaches for it, but cannot bring himself to take it. As if some other one would be more worthy than him. But in stopping, he looks around, and steps back with a growing sense of wonderment. On tree after tree on that quiet island, this rarest of flower seems to hover. Everywhere. A host of them in this place where he stands, as if in welcome. Each one he picks, he stows with utmost care, having some inkling about them being made of more than flower and stem.

When he makes his way back across to Shady Belle, he can hear Dutch speechifying all the way from the hitching posts. The reverie fades quick as a breeze.

No fresh hay has been set out for the horses yet that morning, and only Lenny is around, in the gazebo, honing knives. 

“Hey Lenny, Kieran around?” 

“Ain’t seen him.” 

He hauls over two bales himself, growing irritated, and strides across the yard asking if anyone has seen the O’Driscoll. No one has, him nor Micah. Ain’t asked about goddamn Micah. He heads inside and up to his room to take the things he came for, while in the next room Dutch is railing against governments and mobsters, all manner of corruption and the grim necessity of war when all else has failed, and he can almost hear Hosea’s silent endurance. He shuts his door. In the bottom of his trunk, he finds the lure when it pricks his finger. The rest of it all, pictures, books, clippings of a different time, he leaves behind. The lure he places in his satchel, and he stands and folds up his map and takes that too. 

“Arthur!”

Dutch blocks the stairwell spanning the wall and the post with his arms, smelling sharply of sweat and pomade and cigars, his clothes wrinkled from sleeping in them, a burn on the side of his hand deep and angry, and here he stands demanding to know if Arthur saw this coming, this base betrayal, this dangerous game.

“He was never loyal to us, Dutch, and it ain’t a game - we just got to steppin on toes.”

“His toes were never in question, Arthur, and now this joker king who appears to be in the pocket of every man of power in the whole goddamn city won’t stop with a mere flick on our nose. I know his kind, son. He will toy with his prey before he kills it; he won’t let it scurry away. He will not stop until we are drawn, quartered, and piked, and our time is running out.”

“How’d you get him goin?” he asks Hosea as Dutch stalks back out toward the balcony.

Hosea shrugs with a shake of his head, and Dutch sees it, his eyes bugging out as he comes back in a rage now including the two of them among his persecutors, and for the next hour they are captive to his fuming tirade, and all Arthur can think about is orchids wilting and shriveling in his satchel. Fragile cargo delicately gathered. And only the slightest obstruction to ruin them, make them pointless. And imagines himself in earlier years ever caring about a few damn wilting flowers.

He agrees to some plan just to get away, and Hosea’s voice peals in his ears, you’ll damn us all, and the last pained and tired glance he gave him as he motioned for Arthur to get out before Dutch got worked up for another round stays with him as he rides out.

And Kieran, still gone. 

The door of the atelier is unlocked. He steps inside, where the giant gilt mirror reminds him of his rough appearance, muck and blood and green stains from the swamp, a damn mess. He swipes a smudge from his cheekbone, lord he wonders how she can tolerate him, before he stands the orchids up in one of the French teacups, not badly bruised, not bad. 

“Tacitus.” Algernon’s hushed sibilance hisses from behind the counter.

He turns and regards him huddled in the corner, his angular shoulders shaking. Algernon waves him down out of sight.

“I’ve had a visit.” His one magnified eye flickers closed, open. 

“Not the contessa I hope.” He feigns interest, as is their way, but Algernon shakes his head, serious.

“Some unpleasant gentlemen, I’m afraid,” he whispers. “I fear for our mutual friend.” Up close he can see he’s been roughed up a bit and a smudge of blood brightens his lower lip.

Algernon’s porcelain hand draws out a folded paper, a recognizable shade of yellow, and Arthur kneels behind the counter with him as he opens it, expecting to see his own poster and working out how he’ll explain it. You’re a smart man, Algernon. You think all them antiques was gotten by the book? 

Her image looks out at him. An old prison photograph by the pose of it. She appears no more than twenty. Annoyed. Defiant. Glaring at the camera dead-on. He almost laughs to see her that way, that expression he’s seen for himself a few times by now, but for the words printed above. Sighted in Saint Denis. Murder of federal agent. $2000 Dead or Alive. He folds it again and tucks it in his satchel as he plans to take a man’s life. Once he finds that weaselly goddamn rat.

“You tell anyone about this?”

He expects fear, and instead gets a flash of an eagle’s stare through that monocle. “My currency is discretion. You and I both understand there is a reason behind everything that woman does, and I would trust it more than any paper threateningly flapped in my face. Now,” he says, paddling his hands at him and hobbling to his feet and holding onto the countertop until he gets his equilibrium and propping his hand in the indentation of his corset, “you will need funds if she is to remain safely underground until you have made other arrangements, and if I may send a courier with comforts to a discreet address, please simply write down the name.” Pokes his finger on the red marble with every word.

When he opens the register and scoops up a handful of bills right in front of him, Arthur has to look around, farcical as it is.

Algernon hands it to him, and then holds tight to one side of the stack as he takes it and gets his eye, steady as the stare of any boss he’s ever dealt with. “I trust your care for her is more than passing.”

He isn’t sure how polite people answer that and clears his throat and Algernon nods impatiently, gyring his hand as if he understands.

“And you have a plan.”

“Workin on one.”

“I have connections in Shanghai and Kolkata, Rhodesia and Sao Paulo. It will take time to arrange, of course, but perhaps -”

“If needed, I’ll make it known.”

“Very well.” He releases the stack of bills, a hundred dollars or more, and retreats to the door in the back of his parlor, but turns, his dignified head rising, and he can even appear earnest, in a corset, a monocle, a mustache thin as a stripe of ink. “Reassure her I hold her in highest esteem and hope we’ll meet again. Please, Tacitus.” He reaches out his slender hand and his grip is dry and firmer than he ever thought it would be.

“I will.”

Notes:

Okay, if you spend enough nighttime hours hanging out in the swamp, you absolutely will scream bloody murder, alone, in your house at one point or another. Arthur died many, many deaths in the service of this chapter, and my nerves are just about shot. I do appreciate how he comes back to life with a fresh beard trim, but wow did we lose a whole lot of money paying the ferryman's toll this time around.


So things are getting serious, like they do. If you're looking for some lighter snapshots of these two and missed any links in earlier notes, check out Acts, which is made up of various side-smut scenes that may have also transpired, without the angst. I keep adding to it, with no plans to stop, and I'm open to requests on tumblr if there's anything you'd like to see, either related to RB or separate. But I also hope you'll want to follow through the end - the last chapter I'm working on (here in March 2024) is a whole thing, and I'm so excited to share that it's damn-near intolerable to keep it to myself.

Chapter 17: The Crossroads

Summary:

“At a crossroads, you can always turn right, ain’t that the saying?”

Notes:

c/w: Oblique references to suicidal ideation/attempt

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Those last days of hidden life. Secluded on that bend in the river, when all you had was each other and two tickets on a steamship departing in ten days.

He would stay in bed with you late into the morning, and his body stretched into yours as you woke and he woke, limbs starting to tangle, his hips starting to need you, as you lay with your back to his coarse chest, his hand broad and strong as it planed down your stomach, lower, sliding between your legs and and for a moment cupping you possessively, sliding further, positioning his cock in the V of his fingers at your slit, his soft grunt on the back of your neck as his hips pushed up and he entered you, the curse disappearing on his breath. Wanting all of you for himself. Grappling to hold onto each other, his arm bent up bracing your forehead, his other fingers rolling your clit, you grasping his ass behind you and riding the surge of his muscles as he fucked you, his hand spreading your thigh up to open your hips, moving you the way he needed you, letting him plunge into you.

That old bed, god help it. Its tarnished brass frame and rusted springs, the mattress old and dusty and soft. But you loved it when he was in it and out cold on top of the covers, and you could come to him and the weight of your knee on the mattress was what woke him blinking like he was pulled back from another world. His hand rose up the back of your thigh when you knelt there, smoothed over the round of your hip as he breathed in deep and pulled you close, as if you had been the figure in his dream he now recognized.

In the pattern of days and nights you learned what it meant to be domesticated together. How he could spend ten minutes lazily cleaning his teeth while he read one-handed on the deck with his feet crossed up on the gunnel. How he liked to watch you cook and ask you about Gus who taught you, and chop what you told him to, and scrub the dishes while you dried them. The time he spent sketching in the evening light outside and let you lean on his shoulders and watch him. 

How he could catch your wrist as you walked by and haul you into him, quick enough to take your breath away but controlled, so that you felt not only his strength but the strength he withheld, this imitation of violence further proof of his gentleness toward you.

You could almost forget the purpose of your seclusion. He could not. 

In the evening, after the mosquitoes had died down for the night, you would climb up to the deck and lie there smoking and looking at the stars, listening to the fish rise. All sounds came up divulged from the swamp, the rumble of gators almost too low to hear, but seeming to arise like a whisper in the column of your neck. The shivering hoots of the barred owl who hunted from the bald cypress across the river, and when it took off sometimes you sensed it overhead like a passing unease before you saw its mottled wings spread wide. 

So when he asked about your wanted poster, and what you had been arrested for, it felt natural in that place to speak of buried things, and perhaps to do the asking, things below the surface, just out of feeling, until uncovered by the stroke of an oar or a storm wind.

That girl had stood defiant in the women’s jail in Denver on a charge of shooting one man dead and wounding two at a brothel, staying silent and hostile in the corner, until Frank Livesey could be fetched. She, a dead-eye shot at twenty-one. She, a heartless killer. A furious drunk. A loveless fuck. Aiming murderous eyes at the camera. No shame for being there. That girl didn’t think of tomorrow; at times men were nervous to back her because although she was a sharp shot she could be heedless of what flew back at her, had no thought of seeking cover.  

In the carriage, Frank stayed quiet as long as he could, and stared out the window and not at you.

“What did Colm say?”

“I’m not supposed to get involved, Miss Scarlett.” 

“Well you’re involved.”

His checkered knees peaked tall between you, his body too large for most chairs, doorways, carriages, and desks. Frank sat back on the seat with his hat off, slouching so his head wouldn’t hit the ceiling with every bump.

“He’s angry of course. Reputations and all.”

“That sonofabitch beat her half to death. What do you think I was gonna do?”

“There’s apparently some dispute about that. You think he’ll see it your way? The law didn’t.”

“So don’t take me back.”

“That would be getting involved.”

“Taking no side is taking his side, Frank.”

His big chest forced out a big sigh and he knew you were right but maintained his pretense of neutrality, that is, until you jumped from the carriage before the bridge and broke your collarbone and scrambled down underneath the bridge, and in the darkness he crouched on that incline while you crouched up under the trusses and through gritted teeth stood your ground, cussing at him the whole time like you were a wounded animal cornered there, which in every sense you were, until he got you to come out to sit beside him and look out at the gorge and tell him why you’d been reckless about your person. Gone in where you would be recognized, half drunk, shot that man up in front of his friends - yes he knew what he’d done to that girl, but you didn’t have to get involved - and dropped your gun in the middle of the floor before you turned around and walked out.

When you had to admit your arm had started to throb he got you into the carriage with the promise that you would not have to go back that night. 

At a hotel, the doctor set the break and bound your arm, and then you sat in the private room at the restaurant there and Frank cut your steak and potatoes and you ordered ice cream. He let you finish his, and even seemed to enjoy the unexpected evening of minding you. Upstairs, you couldn’t be trusted to have your own room, so he built a berm between you on the bed and slept in his clothes on top of the covers while you slumped on the other side in a haze of laudanum. You had never had such a fine night. And wouldn’t again, until these most recent days.

The furious girl in that photo had no idea what lay ahead of her, already scarred by the things she had seen, not knowing how innocent she really was.

“How many times was you arrested?”

“Three maybe. You?”

He rolled his head side to side, thinking. “All sorts of times.” And he stared up at the sky, quiet for a while. “Were you in that way often?”

“What way?”

A cluster of spoonbills was scared up from the banks by some unseen threat; their froggish squawks gave them away. “Reckless about your person.”

“Couple times,” you murmured. “You?”

He frowned at the ember of his smoke before taking a final drag, and shook his head. And by way of capping his hand over your knee and sitting up with a groan suggested you move inside.

That poster lay on the table still. It seemed to make him cautious to the point of being overbearing at times, and once you even argued about whether it was safe for you to go riding. You had won that argument, but it tested his tolerance for any other risk, and one in particular that left you feeling low, wondering what step back you had taken and when. The first time he pulled out of you, and gripped himself as he came on your hip, you thought it might be something he simply wanted to see again, the sheen of his release on your skin, the evidence of pleasure pulsing from him there. Perhaps it was satisfying to him. Perhaps his preference.

Another time, you watched his face, the internal clench as he withdrew and came hard on your stomach, but before you could say anything he was kissing you with quiet passion at the same time he quelled any disappointment with his hand. Admittedly you had both been less careful of late, and so you tried not to think he had changed toward you, but you caught yourself thinking about it. He was right to, of course, but it reminded you of certain threats still in your midst, and there were miles to go before they were past, and that final unbridled freedom.

It was far from perfect, that ramshackle boat, that short time of your lives deferred. The ceiling leaked, you discovered the first night, and you kept buckets around, and patched it with pitch and an old tarp. The floorboards had weathered and gave you both splinters every time you walked barefoot so you took to wearing boots and at times little else in that heat. 

Not perfect, to stay behind in that confinement when he went out, though you spent those many hours hanging mosquito netting around the bed and finding wildflowers you would hang from the rafters, and lie back in that fragrant den wondering what normal folk did to make their dwellings fine. 

Not perfect, because he still worked for Dutch despite your protests, and went out one night into the swamps and came back smelling of gunpowder and blood, and he stayed up late smoking on the deck, and the next day couldn’t stay still, looking at the tickets several times, leaning in the doorway watching out at the shore. 

But in the other ways, you could say it was something like perfect. 

From the deck in the lavender evening, the nasal sound of the gramophone reached across the water and the glow within the cabin cast shining scales on the surface of it, and despite the heat and the insects and the threat over your heads, you could forget for a moment you were anything but two people who allowed themselves to drift somewhere beyond survival and memory.

He woke beside you in the early light and drew you out of sleep with slow, warm kisses on your breasts and between them. A kind of daily custom grew out of that time, the morning want, and he would reach for you while his eyes were still closed and gather you to him, knowing you would be there, and you knowing he would reach for you. 

And then the day you grasped the back of his neck, keeping him close, and continued to wave hard against him. He could have been on the verge of tears when his expression asked if you were sure, and you pulled him closer, his panting chest, his pained face, and you kissed him. Let go in me. And he surrendered himself with you in that mad embrace, and you felt the fullness of his spend spilling within you as you watched his face, bittersweetness in the strung-out expression of his release. As if saying such permission out loud spoke the future into being, by some miracle making real what you could hardly imagine for yourselves until then.

 


 

In the early morning haze off the river, you wade the lively shallows, giving gators wide berth, and feel the hum of the marsh as if it’s rippling in your blood, the collective heavy lift of herons, the springing toads, plodding turtles, winding snakes, the air all around you a dance of dragonflies, mosquitoes, and moths. 

You have a notion to leave a cluster of Acuna’s Stars tied in ribbon to the door of Algernon’s atelier before you leave, and you’re even sentimental collecting them, recalling the day you first saw him. What strange and simple purpose he gave you. Nothing extraordinary. You could think low of it, in the old habit of considering yourself; when it came down to it, it was nothing more than gathering a few flowers to adorn the hats of rich ladies. But he had gently made you see, little by little over time, that you helped a man do what he could not, and were a companion to him besides. It had been worth more to him than the money he paid you - that accounting he refused to do - worth beauty and grace and the work it took to find them. Under his keen eye, and the constancy of his oblique and fluttery reminding, he’d coaxed you to admit it too. So now you find them, and you pick them, feeling grateful for such a friend.

You finish placing the last one in your satchel, and in the heat of late morning feel a little dizzy for a moment.

“I’ll have to borrow that pretty lookin iron.” 

You stiffen at Micah's long, smoky drawl as one arm bars across your chest and pins you back, digging into your breasts and he inhales close to your ear.

When your hand touches your gun, so does his. He shoves it deep into the holster and holds it there, jerking your hip down, crushing your hand.

“Losin your touch near the city, ain’t you.” There is hash and tobacco on his chuckling breath, there is meat, there is the distinctive stale sweetness of last night’s bourbon.

He lets you go with a light shove, hands away from his sides as you take a couple of splashing steps away, and when you start to draw he waves a scolding finger.

“Now that ain’t necessary. I am just a harmless passer-through, reminiscin on old times.”

“How you been, Micah?” You take your hand off, and glance around. 

“Finer than frog’s hair, don’t they say down here?”

“I’ll agree that you’re slippery.”

He lights a cigarette, a bored flatness in his expression and his voice. “I almost forgot how much I liked you, Nellie.”

“What’s your game?”

“No game, Nellie girl. No game. Saw an interesting poster in town, though. Looked just like you. Imagine my surprise then, runnin across you here wandering off the road.”

“I’m not surprised to find you here among your kind.”

The blond drapes of his mustache spread in a greasy smile.  “And here I was, thinkin you’d gone back to yours all this time.” His deep chuckle is even dirtier than you remembered it.

You glance at the road, hoping for some trace of Arthur, but only a train approaches.

“That might start a pretty interesting rumor, Nell. Or Scarlett. If the others saw it.”

“I can guarantee you it’d be wrong, Micah.”

“See that’s the thing about you, Nell, Scarlett, Red,” he sneers. “You make yourself a chameleon just to prove men wrong in their perceptions.”

“I don’t need any proof for that.”

He shakes his cigarette at you thoughtfully. “You’ll wanna be careful, here on out.”

“Will I?”

He keeps walking a long arc around you, and you pivot to stay one flick of your wrist to safety.

“Didn’t I say once, if you was hidin something, what might happen?” 

“Oh I’m scared. What are you going to do? Tell on me?”

“Might. Might not. Might just not know where to find you when I’m asked. Two thousand dollars. That’s a pretty payday.”

“Can’t say the same for yours. What is it, a hundred?”

He chuckles again, though you’re not sure if he’s insulted or playing along. “Bounty high as yours, there’s always a deal bein made. Folk might wonder what you’d bargain for to keep your neck unstretched.”

“There won’t be any bargain, Micah. I’ll be long gone. So you can sleep easy soon.”

“That so? And old Arthur with you?”

In the heat you feel weak, and the sunrays waver in your sight. You can't think of a reply without risk, a lie or otherwise, and stand your ground, and swallow. He takes your silence with another dirty grin, mounts his horse, and rides on the marsh road west. 

 


 

The gunfire at Shady Belle comes from all directions and lasts an unknown time, disguising minutes as hours in those moments when the air fills with flying death. Dozens of rounds at a time, a near-constant barrage. The first round had zipped hot past his ear, and he’s been furious ever since, even after witnessing Missus Adler butcher three O’Driscolls right in front of him. 

Now in the dwindling firefight, he walks around the side of the house steady as a stalking cat, jerking the lever on his repeater, snatching it to his shoulder and hitting three more as they run away. He puts two bullets in the last one running, and nods at Javier already walking up to see the job finished.

In the aftermath, it’s quiet. No groans of wounded men; he’d felt sharp in his aim, more than he had in a while.

He crouches by the body of the kid and rubs his eyes still stinging from the gunpowder. They’d cut his head off with a goddamn saw. Triangles from the stuttering teeth speckle the skin around the cut.

And his eyeless head with its round bloody sockets holding the tails of dead nerves hanging out, its jaw hanging lax as if he’s still dumbfounded by the last thing he saw, gapes up from the ground and he has to look away. They’d tortured the kid in other ways. Deep cuts in the web between each finger. Thumbs lopped off. One ear gone. Lord knows what else. He steals the note off his chest Send her out before the Reverend or Charles can see it as they pick him up, but as Hosea lifts the kid’s head he shares the long uneasy stare of warning where dead ends are met.

Jack looks out over Marston’s shoulder as he walks alongside Arthur, though John covers the boy's eyes with a hand as they pass Kieran’s corpse. 

“Figure out where you would go, John. You and Abigail and the boy.”

And Marston stops himself replying when Dutch walks between them catching a fistful of Arthur’s sleeve. Marston keeps walking, Jack still silent with a soldier’s deadeyed stare, past Karen sitting against the wheel of Pearson’s wagon wrapping a bandage around her hand.

“This is war, Arthur.”

Arthur stops at one of the bodies lying curled up over a gut shot and pulls the rifle out of his dead grasp. A Winchester. The next body the same. Brand new, the finish of the receiver still shiny. “We don’t want this war.” He holds the rifle up. “This is Pinkertons backin em, Dutch. We gotta leave. Tonight if possible.” 

“No, Arthur, this is an orchestrated retaliation, and I’ll be damned if I let us escape straight into a trap. We are leavin on our terms.”

He starts to protest but stops mid-word, and by that time Micah has slunk over to Dutch’s elbow and speaks looking away over the swamp.

“All we need to do is send a couple folk back to Blackwater, dead of night.” 

“I’m considering all our options -” Dutch holds up his hand as if they were both offering up such a stupid idea.

Arthur leans sideways to catch his eye. “You don’t have to consider the bad ones.”

Micah pinches the yellowed tarry bud of his hash cigarette dainty to get the last puffs off it. “Ain’t heard you come up with a better idea the whole time I’ve known you.” 

“Where was you during the attack, Micah? Don’t think I caught what it was you did to help.”

“What are you sayin, cowpoke?” He blandly sneers at him as if there’s something he knows and holds for safekeeping. 

“You know goddamn well -”

“This ain’t the time, boys.” Dutch holds up a finger to him, that garnet ring, hardly a shine on it anymore.

Arthur stares at him past that insult until he lowers it. “We need to stay as far away from that snakepit as possible -”

“All options, Arthur.”

“That ain’t an option, Dutch. Blackwater’s gonna chase us to hell.”

Dutch glares at him. “You will never let a man make a mistake, will you. Make plenty of your own, abandon your family when they needed you most, but god forbid I have the luxury of being human.”

“I’m sayin stay away from the scene of your mistakes when we’d be wrappin ourselves up like a Christmas package to show up there.”

“That’s very cute. You got a pretty good idea of what the Pinkertons expect, do you?”

Over by the gazebo, Hosea holds his upper arm and seems to wobble as he sits on the step. 

“I’m gonna forget you said that, Dutch,” he says, leaving them to whatever conspiracies they want to make up their minds about and heading for Hosea, who gives him a grimace of a smile and bats his hand in the air.

“I’m fine, I know what you’re thinking -”

“And why would I be thinkin that.” He stoops down and helps him up by the elbow. “Don’t need to be out here with all this bullshit anyway.”

In Hosea’s room, a newspaper scrap lies brown and brittle on the table, and he picks it up as Hosea lowers himself onto the bed. 

“‘Brazen Bank Robbery.’ You gettin sentimental?” He hasn’t read it in a while. “‘A fine talker’ they called you.” And he tries not to look concerned at Hosea allowing him this glimpse of pain. 

“And you a ‘big, sullen young man.’”

“Well, one of those has changed.”

Hosea smiles weakly as he grips his shoulder. “Had it out, thinking back on old scores. I thought, what are we doing wrong now compared to then.” 

Arthur pours him a glass of water from the basin pitcher and leans on the table across from him. “Ain’t helpin folk no more, that’s for sure.”

“No. Now we justify our crimes as survival, and it costs us more than it saves us every time.”

He nods down at his crossed arms. Hosea winces, easing sideways to lie down, and coughs violently enough to lift his legs from the cot. Arthur lets it pass as if he doesn’t notice. Reckons he would be irritated if someone made to dote on him.

When he’s calmed down again Arthur pours him another glass and sets it on the chair beside the bed.

Hosea stares up at the ceiling, his hands clasped on his lean stomach. “I heard something interesting from a fellow who was up in Annesburg not a week ago and watched a ship come in. Not a military ship, but a cargo ship unloading men dressed like military. Quite the sight, he said. Uniforms and all, but no insignia. Waves and waves of them. He caught up with a few of them when he stepped into the tavern. Asked one of them his business.” 

“Reckon I would too.”

Hosea nods. “Well he said they were hired soldiers. And he wouldn’t say who did the hiring, but my guess, up in that area, it’s Cornwall.” 

“What don’t he own.”

He shifts a different way on the cot and then gives up and pushes himself up to sit again, and leans on his knees for a while breathing. “Never seen anything good come of military under contract. Nothin but mountains of buffalo skulls and flattened Indian settlements. They’ll make up a war custom-cut for the highest bidder. That’s what it’s come to. Closing the roads, setting up traps, flushing us out, clearing any obstruction to make way for that engine. Pinkertons will look like town deputies in comparison.” 

He shoves against his knees to stand up and steadies himself on his feet. Then he grips Arthur’s arm and gets him to look at him, his beady brown eyes hooded in seriousness. “This thing is bigger than any Goliath. Even David would be smart enough to see that.”

Arthur walks out past Dutch walking in, the air moving with him like a gust from a train, and outside Micah makes his slow way over to the campfire coals to smoke and not do a damn thing around there to help while the rest of them collect what little they can get off the bodies and move them to the skiff to be rowed farther out in the swamp after dark. The Winchesters, at least, are a good score, though there’s only enough ammunition to make them practical for two men to carry. And Grimshaw is rattled, judging by how she’s dressing down Karen for working one-handed, and Uncle has hidden himself in the trench to drink, and the Reverend stands on the dock in contemplation, and Missus Adler sits on the front steps sprayed in maroon blood, letting out a big sigh before she sees him. He lights a cigarette and gives it to her with a nod.

Upstairs, he can hear Dutch failing to convince Hosea, his voice rising like the late morning heat in that building, that throb of lingering violence in the air. Swallowing his own resistance, Arthur heads up the stairs, about to go into the small battle coming to a head in the sitting room when he hears something back by his room and finds Mary-Beth and Tilly crouched in the corner against the door. 

“What’re you doin up here?”

Mary-Beth raises her face from her knees, and seeing him she seems to crumple. Tilly looks guilty and starts to get to her feet. “I’m sorry, Arthur -”

“It’s okay. It’ll be okay -” He waves for her to stay, scuffs his boot against the baseboard, and then notices the blood splashed on his toe and moves it out of view.

“Will they do that to all of us?” Mary-Beth trembles so much even her teeth chatter. “What they did to him?”

He shakes his head emphatically. “No. They -”

“I want to leave.” She covers her mouth with both hands to muffle an onslaught of heaving sobs. Tears dribble over her fingers.

He holds his hand out over her head and lays it there lightly, embarrassed by the weakness of that comfort and the intensity of her sobbing, feeling the heat through her scalp. She only cries louder. He shares a look with Tilly, who startles at the sound of something dropped outside. 

“Shh, hey.” He crouches by them. “Honey you gotta stop that. I know it’s bad.” He rubs his forehead and checks around. “We’ll look after you. But we gotta…it’s real tense right now. Don’t help no one to fall apart.” He grips Mary-Beth’s shoulder, and then Tilly’s. “I won’t let them do anything to you girls, I promise.”

She nods, gulping, and wipes her face with her skirt. He tells them they can stay in his room as he pushes himself up by his knees, feeling the strain from the fight in his shoulders, and as an afterthought gets his knife and sheath off his belt and hands them to Tilly, her voice small saying thanks.

In the other room, the battle rages, and he listens from the hall for a minute about Colm and the succession of mobster kings and invaders with their armies amassing. Hosea, telling him there ain’t no poetry in dying for a lost cause. 

The architect’s draft spreads out between them like a wide-open street. He has seen them at odds before, but not like this. Hosea in the chair. Unarmed. His steely glare unbroken by Dutch’s sweaty rant. And Dutch pleading with a stage actor’s emotion to get him to see his way, voice falling soft, then rising with the color in his face 

When he sees Arthur, he points at him sharply with his cigar. “Should I ask you to settle this or would you rather doubt from a distance until you’re finally right that we failed?”

Arthur leans against the wall inside the door and lets him get it out, not looking at Hosea, who speaks up again.

“When it comes down to it, there is no such thing as ‘enough,’ Dutch, and you know it.”

“On that point, we can agree.” Dutch smiles sardonically. “But one of us will keep tryin.” He looks to Arthur now, and his expression changes with the angle of his head, now hurt. Now sincere. 

“Blackwater was a terrible mistake, is that what you want to hear? I’m sorry. I’m goddamn sorry. I’ve been atoning for it ever since, so there’s your ‘never enough.’ And right in front of us might be the one move that sets us free, and all I am askin is for your help, like we needed it back then.”

Hosea glances up, and his face falls, seeing the cards laid down, as Dutch steps in front of him, staring, waiting.

Arthur shuts his eyes. The feeling of being played all over again. And Dutch so insistent that he can’t see another way for it to go. “If it’s one move and it gets everyone out safe, well,” he says, and when Dutch turns away in quiet triumph, he nods in wordless apology to Hosea.

As he rides out, Bill is kicking dirt over bloodstains, and to his left, far off in the field, John stands arguing with Abigail, keeping their voices low, but they face off in rigid postures, and suddenly he reaches out and grabs her to him, her arms stiffly protesting, then falling to her sides.

Send her out. Shaky handwriting. He stares at the withered ink curve of the S. A rusty drop of blood on it. Has to shake his head to stop himself thinking of the torture they put him through. There was no satisfaction in seeing him dead, even considering what he had thought about doing to the kid. How can he blame a man for what secrets he spills as a knife slices between his fingers or gouges out his eyes?

He tries not to imagine it, but hears the words over and over. Send her out. And those damn fools, even with Pinkertons backing them, too bungling to know she wasn’t there.

I hope she’s well. The kid could hardly look him in the eye. 

Send her out.

He has to stop Georgia in the middle of the road and get off, and stands a while staring into the pasty mud and the weeds.

A man suffered his own eyes gouged from his goddamn head. And told them nothing.

 


 

The first time he’d seen the photographer feller in the piney woods outside Strawberry, the man was hunched over the camera stilted on its tripod, being outsmarted by a coyote. Despite the last few hours weighing on his mind, he can’t help a dry smirk to think of it, and out of habit now glances around for what other predators have come stalking, and then slides down from Georgia.

“You are about six feet from meetin your maker,” he calls, trying not to startle him, but Mason jumps, bumping his camera and grabbing it as it tips, his other hand over his heart. 

“Dear god,” he breathes, as Arthur takes his shoulders and guides him to the right, well away from the creature lying motionless in plain sight. “Mister Morgan -”

“And that ain’t no way you wanna die. The wolves would’ve done you better.”

“Oh, you remembered that.”

There was no forgetting the confounding sight of a man hanging a sack of meat in wolf country, but he doesn’t say it. 

“Still takin pictures of nature, Mister Mason.”

“Still the same,” he says, his voice sinking somewise sad, somewise tired of having no excuse for himself to satisfy the ones who don’t understand. “Seems I’ve developed a sympathy for all wild things that want to do me in.”

“Ought to hire a guide. Let you focus on your work without worryin about a bear comin around to find you.”

His face goes long with shock. “Are there bears here?”

“Not the big ones. But no one likes a surprise, them or us.”

“That is true.” He fans himself with his straw hat and eases down to sit on the edge of the skiff. 

The gator ahead of them shoves itself around and slides into the water with an ungainly spiteful surliness like it had acquired its craggy hide by being hateful.

“And here I was focusing on that one,” he says, pointing across the water to the next flat where a fat bull gator lies sunning itself, and shakes his head. “You may be right, about the guide.”

“I would if I was you.”

“I ought to hire you, at this point, often as I seem to need your rescue.”

He coughs lightly. “Well if you’re ever up in Vancouver.” 

“Ah.” Mason smiles with a touch of disappointment. “I hear it’s beautiful there.”

“Heard the same.”

He claps Mason on the shoulder and makes to leave, but that fine wood and brass camera standing up like a big-headed statue in the swamp makes him stop, picturing a time long ago when it was just him and Dutch and Hosea, no raging arguments, no slow undoing, and how a photograph had captured the suppressed panic of a boy who, that very day, in a dusty town, had gotten the news of his life.

“Can I ask you somethin Mister Mason?”

“Sure?” Albert swats a horsefly on his arm.

“Why’d you come out here to do it? Folks pay good money to sit inside on a chair. No flies, nothin tryin to eat them. No snakes.”

Mason glances around as if the risk of snakes hadn’t occurred to him, and then realizes with a heavy good-natured nod he’s being messed with. He takes out his handkerchief and wipes his face. “Time is my medium, Mister Morgan - like paint to a painter - time and light. The mere second it takes to capture an image, the precise time used to develop it, all counting and waiting and watching. In the city there was never enough, all that sifting time. Consumed in engagements and appointments and counted out for you. Often I didn’t know the sun had set until I stepped outside. It always felt like something lost.” He sweeps his hand out toward the sunning gator. “Out here, you can see the accumulation of time, everything leading up to a moment that is contained in every speck of nature, even as we destroy it in the name of progress. Selfishly, I suppose, I feel I’m making better use of my own time, bearing witness to the end of it.”

It’s that held breath of the day, with the sun overhead like a ball tossed straight up, where it seems to hang motionless before sinking again, and gators sunning but watchful and buzzards teetering in their wide spirals high above, shadows gathering underneath everything like wavering drops about to spill with the tip of the earth. 

When Mason asks if he’ll help, he sees no harm in it, not until he finds himself getting himself chased on purpose by a gator so Mason can get a shot that looks natural, arranging a truth when all the chaos of reality won’t give him the truth head-on. He’s barely recovered his breath by the time they get back to shore, and Mason packs up his camera while Arthur whistles for Georgia.

“If I’m ever in Vancouver, Mister Morgan, I’ll look you up. Then I can spot a grizzly and live to tell about it.”

“I might take you up on that. Long as I don’t have to get chased by one.”

They shake hands, and he leaves him, thinking of what predators Mason’s had posing in front of him for portraits he didn’t need to put out bait for. They’ll stare a camera straight on, daring a man to expose them. 

 


 

The light from the window had come in clear and wavering like water, and spread over them both where they lay, that day he would look back on as one of the finest of his life.

What you dreamin about.  

She stirred and he kissed her belly lightly glowing in that sunlight, a fine blonde fuzz making it glow. His journal too far away on the nightstand to capture it. And nothing he could capture anyway. Meant to fade. What made it so lovely, but he wished time would slow to a crawl, times like this.

She could sleep so deep, and had talked in her sleep last night. Almost an entire argument with him. He had laughed silently to the point of tears, the bed shaking, and tried to write it down in pitch darkness. Nonsense about the oyster luggers at the docks and something else he couldn’t make out, how she couldn’t believe they were selling tickets to watch it all. Angry about it, too.

He kissed her, moving lower down her belly. The pretty nautilus of her navel. Now she felt him and started to stretch along the mattress and he caught her hip like pulling her up while riding past. She hummed and slowly twisted with him, legs bent around his side. 

He moved with her, rolling her onto her back, and unwrapped her arms from him until she was reclined on the pillows and watching him as he descended her body. Kissed her sides. Her hips. No piece of her unloved. He drew a line with his nose and mouth from her navel to her copper hair. 

Her legs moved apart with the languid willingness of all blooms. She liked to give herself to him that way. That shine in her eyes for him. Verge of trouble. Verge of grace. 

Her delicate asymmetry opening to him, whorling from no known outset to no definite end, all of one in some indication of infinity. He would never tell her, but he had wracked his brain thinking of any fitting word countless times as he touched his tongue to the details of her. Floral but visceral. A bloom that flared internal, and here only a hint of what lay within. Or like soft bright fins he had seen on an exotic fish, in gradients of pink like the flesh of a peach. Or simply her. No decent word in English, nor good-enough one that could come from his mouth to be worthy of what he took in it. He thought this while tonguing the space between, or taking her more deliberately, the lush petals he gently kissed and drew out between his lips. Prodding his tongue up to her clit and flicking it slow, watching her come alive to it. 

Then more, putting his mouth on her, tasting her dewy cunt, sucking on her, interspersed with laps from the tight inlet up again toward the bud, sometimes digging into her stronger with his chin until she gripped his hair and raised her hips in the afternoon light. 

In his mind, he pictured her showing him where to find orchids, that moment when he turned and she had smiled at him so willful, caught him up lost for sense, and fingered herself for him in plain sight, in that bronze sunlight. He’d tried to sketch it numerous times. All these sights too pure for keeping. But wildflowers and orchids now filled the pages.

He kissed and kneaded the firm muscles of her thighs. God, he would die between them happy. A passing hope crossed his mind that she would crush him there for a moment and let him come up for air rebirthed. She was softer from living in the city, her hips no longer so sharp, every curve of her his own pleasure to feel. 

Her breasts rose in deeper sighs above. If he could be in two places at once. Soft shapes over the cathedral arch of her ribcage. His mind would go white for them, dissuaded from rampant worry just to see them. He loved something about them beyond sense, something primal, the beauty of such a pure form, the shape of her arousal to him, the flush that spread between them like lace.  

Not that he would be distracted for long. When she was quietly starting to suffer for more, he sucked his middle finger and touched her by the edge of her hollow, shining wet and deep pink, to prepare her. Then tried to focus completely on her chest spreading as he slid into her, her mouth opening, eyes closing, head tipping back, though it never failed to spur something in him too. Her pelvis rocking into his hand in rhythmic rolls, her gloss collecting in his palm. And if he brought his mouth to her clit while beckoning her with his finger, how her soft moan then made him hard like nothing else. The distant ache, relieved only by what they would share. Her next sigh broke raw from her throat, sent lightning through him. He felt wired to her soul. 

When he felt her come open enough and she started to pull on his arms, he could permit himself to move up, knowing by now how she wanted a little pain when she took him. Her eyes begging him. He wiped his mouth on his wrist and lowered over her, nudging her nose with his nose, her chin with his chin, his lips on hers as her legs wrapped around his waist and he reached down to take himself full and rigid and stroke the head of his dick in her hot slick and push in, her gasp stealing the breath from his mouth. The quiver of her lip as he fucked deeper, the sudden hunger in her kiss. The heavenly glide out. The godlike automatic way they began to move together. 

Her breath came fast and light like the air beaten by birdwings, like to lift her just as high, her plaintive sound enough to break his heart for the sheer luck of finding her, to hear this now, how he could make her feel. Enough to make a man believe he had lived a worthy life. Enough to cloud the back of his mind with fear of losing her.

He felt an innermost satisfaction when he could make her come before him, her fingers clawing into his back, to feel her strong spasm seeming to swallow his cock and his soul with it, how she moaned or cried out, cursing, and he struggled to hold himself back when his entire being needed to fuck her harder. His own urgency then as he pulled out of her and his head and back bowed with the strength of his release, as if in coming man was made reverent. 

At first, she seemed confused, until he kissed her and passed it off as nothing as he reached for a rag, and they lay there and dozed and he sensed her being patient with him, musing about nothing much, through the ripple of her voice in her chest when he lay with his ear there. Other times she gazed at him with a thousand thoughts on her mind but did not find the words to speak them, and her half-pained face as she accepted him acting strange bore no intention to make him feel guilty, though he did. 

But that day, when she reached for his neck. Shook her head, her green eyes staring clear into his and christ he couldn’t think. Let go in me. His mind faltered and his resolve. His own back overpowered him, and he drove his cock to the bone as her tight cunt throbbed around him. And at the height of their breathless fucking, he broke, fusing into her so furiously he grunted like a damn beast, fell to an elbow still lurching against her, his head shoving into her shoulder. Her hand held the side of his face, her thumb swiping his cheekbone. He eased out and off to her side and had to close his eyes in that quiet moment after, when the light shone a little too bright to take. Blinding gold through his eyelids. 

Her kiss on him was deep and serious as a vow. He lay with her, forehead to forehead, and he must have slept.

He opened his eyes to an indigo afternoon heavy with low clouds in the air, the quiet before the rain and then the patter. While she was still asleep, he pulled on his trousers and climbed up to the deck, tied on that old lure and fished from there in the light late summer rain, and made up his mind to tell her.  Wondered how he could tell her. Things he had not put words to in years. 

When she came up with a shawl wrapped around her, and sat on the bench beside him under the canopy, she seemed to know there was something on his mind, watching him sling the line into the water and reel it back empty, seeing through him as he stood there hoping for anything outside of himself to break the silence. Her bare feet one atop the other on the rail. 

He reeled in, cut the lure off the line. Old now. No shine left on the tin, the red paint worn off. 

“I had a son, Nell.”

The dark yawing bodies of gar resisted the slow current below.

“I’m sorry I ain’t told you, never seemed quite right to say.”

He coughed, reached down for his cigarettes, she shook her head when he offered, he lit one.

“‘Had.’”

“Yeah.”

Her hand rested behind his knee. Her thumb stroking there. “Tell me.”

What he thought or feared she’d say, he couldn’t recall. 

In halting sentences, he told her. About the girl - he liked her alright. They ain’t meant to get in that way. About her giving him the news. Showing him the bundle wrapped tight and sleeping in a crate while she worked. The shock of his life. Took him one glance to see the truth of it. Days to come to terms with it. But Bessie would have kicked his ass if he’d left her with nothing. She made him work extra jobs to take money her way. He’d always be grateful she didn’t let him fail them completely. He’d asked Dutch to set by the money from his share, thought he’d do right by them and build a cottage. 

And then that day. 

“How long ago now?”

“Bout ten years.”

Four months. Two weeks. A Sunday.  

The horrific hour after he discovered them, guilt gored him, a pain like nothing he had ever felt before, and he flung that desperate hate out of him in that fight he meant not to live through. He’d gone in drunk, violent, guns unloaded. When he woke, Dutch was standing over him, then sat beside him in the dust. If he was sullen on crisp mornings, it was because the air felt like it did that day. And as deep as it was buried, it could show up right at the surface too.

He sat next to Nell on the bench in that sweet dusty smell of rain. He’d put it all out of his thoughts for so long, but lately, he’d been seeing things. The boy. The pale-face man. Felt like he was losing his mind. She took his hand in her lap, her thumb rubbing his rough knuckles many times scarred, the watermarks of his great loss. Pieced together the form of his fears, should she take.

“If I take,” she said, intently spreading her fingers between his, that gesture alone enough to make his throat ache, the thought of welling life coming up waterlike from a spring with all the clarity of joy and the weight of pain. She stared out at the river as if it had left her speechless too.

And the other fear. That he would be no better. 

She tipped her head, staring out, like she did when she tried to see things his way. Her fingers bent harder over the back of his hand and she pressed her lips to his shoulder. “Well that I know isn’t true. And you don’t live back then; pain changed that man. You live now.”



But now… Now tears him apart. Too many lives involved now to live a single one. 

And so, when he goes to get dry goods from the store on the edge of town, he stops off at the tavern. Stands beside Hosea at the bar.  

“Never gets any cooler in this hellhole,” Hosea says like a stranger.

Arthur nods, gazing at the wall crowded with advertisements and cheap paintings, a calendar three years old. Back when he was running schemes and living his life out in mindless dispersal, hands of cards and shots of whiskey and rounds fired and cash stolen and spent.

Hosea stares down at the bartop. "We do it first thing tomorrow." 

Arthur lifts two fingers at the barkeep.

“I won’t tell you what to do, Arthur. But I'd see to it Dutch understands.”

Two glasses set before them.

“He won’t understand.”

Hosea huffs, shakes his head, takes a drink.

“Are you sittin out?” Arthur holds his drink up and watches Hosea over the rim as he tips it back. 

“Someone’s gotta make sure this doesn’t turn into another Blackwater.”

The whiskey burns and he coughs into his arm. 

“Don’t go through with it, that’s how.”

“We’d be better off scattering as far as we can.” Hosea considers his glass and drinks the rest.

"Yeah, I know."

The piano player stops to talk with someone, and the new quiet is like one of Dutch’s records come to an end, that amplified spit of the needle, the disappointed peace of reality.

“You good, son?”

“Yeah, Hosea.”

“She good?”

“Yeah.” He smiles a little, thinking of her that day, how she’d swatted his ass when he walked by.

They stand there side by side, glasses empty in front of them.

“I should’ve told you to leave the first day I saw you happy. I’m an old man and I still haven’t unlearned selfishness.”

“We’ll be gone after this.” He lays his hand on Hosea’s shoulder, and the old man suddenly seems smaller, frailer.

With a compressed smile, Hosea claps his hands lightly on the bartop and pushes himself away. “At a crossroads, you can always turn right, ain’t that the saying? Don’t forget it. If I don't see you…”

They shake hands. When Hosea departs, he takes his bag of supplies from the store and heads back, and the thunderstorm on the horizon makes promises in lightning it keeps in rolling thunder. He gets back as the first drops fall. He buries himself in her and they lie there breathing the fresh air of the storm. 

He thinks it’s a wonder the world ain’t come apart for all the opposing will of men. 

He loves her. 

That night, he sleeps restless and sweating, wakes feverish before sunup, and sits hunched on the side of the bed propping his head in his hands until he feels her touch on his back. 

“You feeling alright?”

“This air I think. Makes me look forward to the mountains.”

“Two days.” She wraps her arm around his waist as she lies there, and he sighs long, coughs. Wants nothing more than to lie back down and feel her warmth behind him. Her breasts on his back, the arch of her foot over his calf, her fingers sleepily exploring his chest until he doesn’t know he’s fallen back asleep.  

 


 

He stares into the room and clears his throat a few times. 

“It’s early. What do you have to be up for?”

He reaches behind him and runs his hand over your hip. “Couple last things before we leave.”

“Me too.” You had woken with a buzz of energy. Things planned that you will tell him about later.

He doesn’t seem to hear you, rubbing the back of his neck and slowly reaching for his trousers. With a groan, he goes to the dresser and splashes water on his face and chest from the basin and dries off looking out at the swamp and the fog over the water.

You make coffee and bring it to him as he’s getting his gun belt on and watch the sunrise colors bleach the sky. He tells you he’s off to see about something in town. You tell him you’re visiting Algernon, which isn’t a lie. With an eyebrow raised, he sets down his cup. 

“Don’t head into town today, please. It ain’t safe.”

You push him ahead of you out the door. “I’ll be fine.” 

“You know how I feel near the end of things.” 

He kisses you briskly and gets up on Georgia, and you watch him for a while heading west. That fine sway of his back when he rides. And he turns his head, and smiles at you one last time.

And you ride east toward the city, early because you have an appointment to keep, and later will wonder if it was excitement you felt in your gut or the first clinging roots of premonition.



Notes:

I got on a Neil Young kick and had this bittersweet fading fever dream, and it’s come to define Nell and Arthur for me. specifically, Comes a Time, which is kind of a weird little tune I haven’t been able to stop playing just for the chorus alone

This was one of my favorite chapters to write, and hopefully it landed as intended. Thanks for reading 🖤

Chapter 18: The Waves

Summary:

At some point you would consent to die just to rest.

You fight that impossible battle by doing the grim calculation of odds all desperate fugitives do. If they catch you alive they will hang you. If you run they will shoot. So you must keep going.

Notes:

cw/tw: references to threatened sexual assault, no depictions. see end notes for spoiler-related tw

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Salt on his lips.

A crawling thing scuttles near his hand, almost translucent pink, the innard hue of creatures living close to the sea. Skirts him like driftwood. 

Waves lick his feet. Wash away the sand beneath them. Rush up to his knees. 

His arms ache as if the muscle is ripped from the bone. They hold the memory of fighting giant waves. His throat is raw from choking on seawater, his hands exhausted from clawing at the stormy surface. Feeling sick with guilt, he remembers wanting to give up, when he couldn’t kick or fight anymore, and at the lowest point of the wave, that sucking dragging stomach-dropping lull, then looking up and seeing a flash of blue lightning through the immense body of a wave towering over him, the biggest moving thing he had ever seen, a mountain clear and full of terrible silent light, and the last thought on his mind was of her, Nell forgive me.  

White heat. Grit of sand. The tiny crab waving its heavy claw. He glares at it puzzled. As if it is trying to signal him.

How does a man know he is not dead. Is it only being awake? The lack of oblivion?

Or could he wake and not know of death?

All them stories of spirits wandering forever. 

He feels pain. Every muscle in his body is worn out. When he tries to get up, his leg sears with a cramp so tight he can’t move and lies panting in agony. He coughs and his chest seizes up and he strains to catch his breath for what seems like minutes. Lies there exhausted, at first too cautious to try to move again, but the waves start to crash higher and he crawls away from them. 

Get up you fool. Can’t hold a thought in his head but for her face, her face lit up in morning. With his forehead on the sand, he vows if he is alive he has to get back, and as long as he is alive he will try. He reckons he has to try until he knows for sure he is dead, and it is no more complicated than that.

On hands and knees he coughs, sags on the sand, then pushes himself up to stand. He has never felt so weak in his life. Lightheaded such that he seems to float as he digs his feet into the sand and takes his first steps. The sand burns his feet. The sun scorches his face. There is green farther up the shore, the edge of a forest. He seeks shade like it is water, but the creeping weeds near the shade are full of thorns and cut his feet. A shimmering tide pool to his right gives him a furious thirst to drink from it, like a mythical fountain tempting men to their deaths. He doesn’t notice the world tipping. 

Wake up, Arthur. He blinks awake, his face on the sand. 

What monumental effort it takes just to turn his head. To bring his hands up and press on the searing sand and lift his body that is heavy as iron, move his legs, grunting from the pain, the torment of moving. 

He passes a small field of jagged shapes, what looks like a children’s cemetery of stones toppling in ages of long-forgotten mourning but they are only rocks on the beach and his own mind haunting him.

His legs give out and he crashes to his knees, a jolt shuddering through his whole body, and he kneels there head bowed, supplicant in the sand to indifferent fates, and the whispers of the constant waves lure him to lie down, to give himself up and melt into the unconscious stillness of all unliving things, and he feels his heart breaking as he drags himself onto one bloodied foot and then the other. He will walk until he cannot fight his own weakness. Until he knows he is dead. 

It has been a day since you saw them but they are not far behind. 

You bend the edge of the blanket down with two fingers. Light mist of early snow all around you, flakes swirling aimless in the wind and melting as soon as they fall on any surface. You hear no horses. No clicks of readied chambers. 

Your body is as tender and raw as oyster meat, and you don’t want to move but you must, despite your tongue and lips swollen from thirst, breasts sore and untouchable, your stomach turning, your skin prickly and hot, your seat bruised from days in the saddle, your nerves tuned to every rustle, every breeze. 

Moving as little as possible you roll up the blanket and feed Apollo a handful of meal, then, as you figured you would as you fell asleep an hour or more ago, you mount and walk him backward to the stream, praising him low under your breath. The bottom is not too rocky. He takes careful steps, trusting you, and when you face him downstream, you guide him toward shallows and sand, but it is slow progress and you sit rigid and talk soft to encourage him until you get to a better path out. 

You wear the coat you had ordered made for Arthur, with the fur collar, the flannel lining, and although the snow is premature and melts quickly, the wind comes up and whips you in biting gusts, fluttering the fur against your cheeks, and you try not to think of its intended purpose and the plans of your lives that buckled in a series of moments, or you will begin to cry.

You haven’t eaten anything since the day before, and Apollo begins to stumble more and give you grief, little hops and threatened bucks, tosses of his head, needing food of his own, but you have reached that terrible extremity where you had to decide to push him on, knowing the other choice was death, and you talk softly to him I’m sorry sweet boy, we’ll rest soon, just get me someplace safe and I’ll take good care of you. You wrap the end of the reins around your wrist and around the horn when fatigue sets in and that inner bargain teases you:

If you hide yourself you can rest. 

Sleep is the only thing you need. Sleep and death are the same. 

At some point you would consent to die just to rest. 

You fight that impossible battle by doing the grim calculation of odds all desperate fugitives do. If they catch you alive they will hang you. If you run they will shoot. So you must keep going.

But your sickness has begun to wash over you in cold sweats, and you have to get down from Apollo, trying to hide yourself in a gully as your stomach, already empty, trickles a bright release of bile. The bitterness makes you gag harder, until you are so empty even your tears have stopped, and when it’s over you kick dead leaves over this gruesome evidence, this trail you will make over several such miles, where you manage to pull yourself back up into the saddle and ask Apollo ahead and get as far as you can before you are forced to clamber down and puke again, shaking as you cling to a tree trunk, shuddering in a reflex of revulsion, and lemon-colored bile drizzles from the corner of your retching mouth. Your canteen is empty, your body so weak you feel light and giddy until you cannot overpower your own exhaustion and you slump to your knees with your forehead in the dirt, and your nose fills with the smell of leafrot and earth and you breathe shallow into the wet ground, spitting weakly and with every pulse in your ears telling yourself to get up. Get up. Get up. Get up. GET UP to your hands and knees, and then to your feet by pulling on the stirrup, struggling into the saddle and moving forward.

That last bright morning you had gone to town, first to leave your cluster of orchids tied to Algernon’s door, then to pick up the coat you had made to measure for Arthur which he would need in the Coast Mountains and which would look handsome on his shoulders and drawn around his chest. The haze from the river was light, the air cooler than it had been in some time, clammy before the sun again stoked the city like a furnace. It did not dawn on you until you reflected on the details of that day to notice the lack of lawmen around town. Truth be told, the twinges of nausea that morning made you feel slightly weak and preoccupied. Your appointment with the Irishwoman was not for another quarter-hour, so you waited on the steps in front of the tenement, watching the whores smoking on the gallery unoccupied so early, the men making their own business in alleys, the crowding traffic, the urchins in their play gangs already getting themselves into trouble, trouble which would be the lot of their lives soon. The habit of trouble was on your mind when the first explosion went off. 

In your heart, you knew. 

You mounted Apollo and steered him carefully in the direction of the smoke rising over the buildings to the east, watching for the law, and when the gunfire started, you damned yourself for having left your gun back on the boat. When you rode past two barricades you understood the trap that had been laid, and although you felt the disastrous weight of your choice to leave him, you knew what he would need you to do when he could not, and you headed out of the city by the northwest road. 

There, you spotted Abigail riding Old Boy, tears flying back on her temples, her hair whipping behind her, and you caught up to her.

“They got John,” she said. "Hosea.” She swiped her wrist over her eyes and faced ahead.

“Did you see anything else?”

“I had to get back to -”

“I’m right behind you, go.”

She led you, riding hard south, past the stockyard and the old part of the city being taken back by the swamp vine, to an old plantation house deep in the southern shoals off the river. While the rest of them packed, to be ready to leave in 10 minutes, you followed Abigail upstairs, and she went to her room to get her things and pointed across the landing for you.

His room stood bare. No sheets left on the bed, not so much as a blanket. Clothes remained haphazard in his trunk, nothing you had seen him wear. You scoured for anything that might incriminate him or be missed, and came up with nothing, but found an old bandolier, an old gun belt and holster, and a Cattleman you’d never seen him use, and loaded the bandolier across your chest with as much ammunition as you could, bundling the rest in an old shirt and fastening the gun belt just as Grimshaw entered with Pearson and they moved past you to pack up his trunk and the few things he had left behind as if they knew their worth more than you. She did nothing more than give you an indifferent glance, knowing indifference’s particular sharpness. 

They gathered all the things they kept and packed and carried with the necessary efficiency. Grimshaw’s cobblestone weighed five pounds or more and she wrapped it in an old kerchief and put it back in her crate. The only thing she had of her mother, the stone that struck her in the riots in the Bowery. Pearson’s uniform, long outgrown and his polished boots. Karen’s silent music box. Mary-Beth’s stack of books she had read and memorized yet carried, portholes of momentary escape. Tilly had little of her own, but cherished a small bundle of beads she had found in the places she had been as if she would someday string a necklace with the traces of those times, as if she could ever recall them fondly. Abigail had more to gather, the tools and materials of a mother. Sewing kit and bandages and quilts and medicines and Jack’s few toys and a couple of trinkets he’d made her. She placed John’s chest of clothes, his gun case, his boots, his hat in the middle of the room for Pearson to take. Molly wept as she packed Dutch’s things and set them out too, and in this furious haste, the chests of all the absent men were loaded onto the wagons without a moment’s uncertainty as to their future necessity.

Outside, you asked Jack where his momma was, as Grimshaw was shouting at them all to be ready, and inside you found her in Hosea’s room under the stairs. She was pulling a photograph out of a frame and tucking it in a book, and she lifted his big winter coat from his trunk knowing it fit her. Although her chin quivered when she saw you, she smiled thinly and followed you out. 

You and Sadie would lead them, armed, to the run-down place in the swamp you told her about, a place you had happened upon once or twice as you hunted orchids, and you would split into two groups to get there, and be set up before nightfall. Everyone kept vigilant, in that quiet haste. Even the dour little Austrian man with the glasses took hold of a sawed-off to watch from the back, and put up no resistance.

At the new hideout, amid the shouts of Grimshaw to unpack only necessities, quit crying, get moving, you helped Abigail carry Jack’s things inside, and as you both knelt and spread out his bedding, she put her hand on yours.

“I didn’t see him - Arthur,” she said, what little reassurance it was. 

You nodded, and there was nothing more to say or do but to face unwritten futures with the plain motions and tasks of living. When they were settled, you went back to pack your own things.

His journal lay on the nightstand. His hat on the peg. As if that evening was just last evening, and he had come through the doorway as he came through it yesterday, out of the rain, and hung his hat, and stood against that low frame, watching out at the rain and making a decision that would tear you apart. 

And when you came up next to him he had turned to you and pressed you against the wall, and you had not foretold the future in his touch, though you now tried to bring it back, certain it was there, his lips on your throat - did they form any hint of warning - his hand on the small of your back - did it hold you tighter, knowing what would come. When he spread the shoulders of your shirt down, when he brushed the backs of his fingers around the side of your breast before his full grip as he kissed you, was he seeking an answer to his question, one way or the other? And if that was so, how could he have had you that way, lifting you, carrying you to the bed, making love to you as if you were everything to him in the world, and in the end make the choice he did?

You whipped the journal across the room so hard your shoulder seemed to tear with the force, and the journal hit the wall with a loud smack. The pencil slipped out and rolled away as the journal landed upright and then toppled, pages-down. You held your shoulder and sat on the bed, the squeak of the springs familiar, the smell of the quilts familiar, all of it familiar as if that day had been a dream. And in horror, it crossed your mind it might turn out to have been the last place you would ever see him. Penitently, you retrieved the journal and the pencil, and sat back on the bed.

His last page was crowded with his handwriting large and diagonal and hard to read, but below that in his usual graceful lettering the last word, 

Nell

and a few points where his pencil had stood contemplating the next. 

The pencil was short, carefully sharpened many times by his knife, and you rolled it in your fingers as if touching some of the last things he touched would bring you closer. You smoothed the next page open on your lap and imagined him sitting there in the dawn light before you woke, leaving you no trace of his last thoughts but for your name. Perhaps even he didn’t know what to make of his own mind.

Where are you? Are you wounded? It is torture, not knowing. All I can see are my worst fears. I don’t want to move from here. I want to lie in this bed where we were together this morning until you come back to me. 

You had curled up on the bed holding his journal and could not sleep. 

And now you push Apollo on in the late day carrying the weight of all the unknown miles between you, pursued by your haunting fate, the consequences of a past so remote as to seem irrelevant now.

He blinks awake, his stinging eyes, by a fire, in the shade. For a moment thinks he is alone and dreamt that he found them, but something nudges his hip and he sees Bill holding out a canteen. He drinks until he feels sick and coughs, choking on a mouthful of that metallic warm water. Out on the beach, Dutch and Javier and Micah stand surveying the entire ocean in view. As if it holds answers when he knows it does not. There are no answers in the sea nor the stars to what a man must do, only the one truth that they are impossibly small. They share a kinship with gnats and specks of dust floating in sunlight. He thinks of her and knows he is not insignificant. His only proof on earth. A realization like another giant wave.

When soldiers find them, and shackle them, he can hardly move but shuffles forward not thinking of his pain, determined not to think of it, and when gunfire starts it is as natural as breath for him to find the first weapon he sees and draw his silent bead in the midst of chaos. And when they must run, he goes with them, his empty body carrying his heavy head, Dutch hauling him forward by the arm, C’mon son, you ain’t quittin now, uphill, barefoot over the hard jungle vines and roots. Under the lean-to of a crumbling old building someone shoves a rifle against his chest and a handful of rounds. He slumps into cover and loads it, and steadies it on the ledge to get his aim, and fires and reloads until he is out, and the shooting dies down.

They eat stale provisions so picked-over only the worst things are left, some canned peas, some old canned meat he can hardly get down, and he stretches out like a rusted hinge on a cot made of sailcloth in the encroaching night of this damnation. The practical hopefulness of the revolutionary, his name Hercule, counts as one piece of evidence that he lives. The sticky wet heat counts as one he is dead and judged. And he lies there watching the moves of all his choices leading to this place, tempting this very outcome, so why should he be surprised to find himself here in the end? When sleep comes, it takes him without knowing, quiet as death, only to bring him to life again in dreams of washed-out light. She walks ahead of him on the sand. He cannot reach her. She stops then, and in the blinding sun her turning profile swells as she looks back at him. He runs to her, falls to his knees in front of her, and puts his hand up to touch her miraculous curve. The only good thing he has ever done in his life.

He jolts awake to a kick in his ribs through the canvas. 

“Your turn, Morgan.” Micah holds out a carbine to him and waits impatiently for him to curl up to sit, and then to pull on the boots of one of the dead guards, and then to stand. He takes the carbine and Micah takes the cot, and he watches the red sun rise over the jagged tops of the palm trees. He coughs, lights a smoke, the one puny comfort there.

“We’ll make it back, son. I’ll get us out of here.” Dutch leans against the same wall looking out, nodding with assurance as to his own words.

Arthur bobs his head slowly. Tries to name the specific color of red in the sky. Only one word comes to mind.

“We can escape the frail clutch of a weak despot who is too absorbed in this theater of man’s inhumanity to man to notice a few small fugitives.”

“Just need a boat, when it comes down to it.” He can practically feel the heat of Dutch’s indignant glare.

“If only you could appreciate our position. Hosea would see the benefit in disrupting this evil machine to satisfy joint purposes.”

“Hosea’s dead, Dutch.” He clenches his jaw, tosses the cigarette down, and leaves him there.

The dirt shoveled easy, sandy soil not far from the river, and you covered their faces with their bandanas, all pain and fear now lost in their slack attitudes of death. Lenny, suddenly appearing so young, his facial hair sparse, his hands soft, not yet worked into hard leather, and never to be. You felt his promising strength stolen like a strangled voice, as you helped Sadie lower his limp body down. You knelt by Hosea, the marks and liver spots showing through his thinned skin, and wondered if he would have wanted the comfort of a good bed to die in, or if, in the end, the plain dignity of a bullet was his intention after all. As you tied the bandana over his face, you blew at the flies to keep them away and picked him up. Good friends, good men, to those who knew them. You, Abigail, Charles, and Sadie spent a moment to think on their lives, and left in different directions.

It was not far away from there when you saw the two riders, and you had not doubted for a moment you should go another way. The road took you north along the river, and you would glance back every few miles and still see them, and you led their slow pursuit no matter which path you turned on, no matter how much farther ahead you would get on the straight roads galloping Apollo to a lather. 

Three days now.

By sunset, you are shivering and haunted by the sounds of others on the road and creatures in the brush and the wind. You have not been in this part of the country since you had robbed a train coming out of Roanoke, and with that realization you could not hold back memories of what you used to do, what seemed an age ago, your carelessness, your stupid callousness, how he had loved you and you'd refused to admit the same. Would he have loved you still, had he known what was to come.

Those lovely days were so far gone, they were little more than the bright leaves whipping past you now, their color barely catching the last light as you all fall into darkness.

You recall a small shack near there, and head for it. An old trading post long forsaken, where you had gone after the robbery of your second train, a couple of days after your harebrained plan to steal the oil wagon. So strangely long ago now. You’d ridden through the river in making your getaway, and a stinging wind had come up, and in the twilight all colors and shapes deceived your sight, and you began to feel numb. When you started shivering so hard you dropped your reins and couldn’t get down to reach them, Arthur made for the first shelter he could find.

It was little more than an empty shed with hardly four sides and a roof, with weeds growing up through the floorboards and drafty holes in the walls, but it was mostly out of the wind, and there he lit a lantern for a little warmth and you stood across from it awkward and still new to each other. All the eagerness of your couplings until then seemed distant and unreal. You felt lost for a moment in that rampant insecurity of new lovers, suddenly fearing, despite all your self-deception, he was not truly interested in you for more than the physical satisfaction you had given him lately. Until he stood and shook out his bedroll and the blanket, and his glance to you was almost shy. Then he shrugged off his enormous coat, and the sight of his shoulders under that soaked shirt did leave you staring.

“You should get outta them wet clothes, look at you,” he said, shuddering a bit himself by that time as he pulled his shirt over his head, starting to unbutton his union suit, and you weren’t thinking straight, your fingers fumbling like stiff claws at your buttons while your coat still dripped icy water down your neck. 

When he looked at you he became serious, and shucked your coat off you roughly, tossing it on a warped piece of lath on the wall, and he knelt in front of you, ordering you to hold onto him while he got your boots off, an attentiveness and concern in his eyes you had seen in your first glimpse of him, and you were still confounded at any such care directed at you at all. Still shaking, you managed to get your shirt off, your chemise, and he hurriedly hung the blanket around your shoulders. He pulled you closer by the edges of it while he rose on his knees, and he proceeded to unfasten your gun belt and you felt somewhat dismantled as he lifted it off your hips, jerking you forward. He plied each button of your fly out of its slit, glancing up at you as his determined fingers performed their task. 

“Lips are damn near blue,” he said, with a sudden tremor. As a kind of afterthought, he worked off his own boots, his pants, to your surprise his union suit, and turned in that low light and got on his knees, and you held the blanket around him. His hand carved down the sides of your thighs to peel off your soaked pants, and as soon as you were out of them he got you to the bedroll as fast as your stiff body would allow, and he lay down behind you.

Before he even had the blanket down over you he flinched away. “Jesus chr-”

“W-what?” Your chin was so stiff with cold you could hardly speak.

“Your ass is like a block of ice -”

And you were about to become irrationally defensive when he wrapped you up so tight against him there was no space anymore between you. He tucked the blanket under your knees with his own freezing hands, and he rubbed vigorously up and down your thigh, your knees clutched up to your chest, he rubbed your arm, and then he had covered even your faces with the blanket to keep in the warmth while you shook in his tight hold. 

The other times, when hundreds of miles stretched between you, even the numbing expanse of a year, you had not felt so distant from him as you feel now, standing in that same shack, to think of yourselves skin to skin, and the heat of his body now gone, a chill as empty as death in his place.

“Ah, sorry,” he had muttered, adjusting himself.

“You trying to take advantage of me?” you said through chattering teeth. 

“Oh no ma’am,” he said with real meaning, nearly contrite, and his low breath on the nape of your neck was warmth of a sort you didn’t know you could feel. “Though you are takin up half my bed-”

A wild shiver rammed the back of your head into his nose and he grunted in pain, leaning away from you.

“Goddamn -” he said, muffled through his hand. 

“Fuck, sorry - you bleeding?”

“Don't think so.” He dabbed at it and tried to check in the lamplight.

“Let me see.” You twisted around to him but your elbow nearly hit him again, and he pinned you down on your back. You grabbed his face and lifted it up to check his nose in the light.

“Not bleeding, you bab-” you’d started to say before he kissed you, and his lips left yours still seeking, and you opened your eyes to his gaze, something pleasant on his mind as he lay over you, not his full weight on you, but when you shivered again he lowered his chest, tunneled his arm behind your neck, and kept the blanket close.

“You don’t warm up soon, I’m gonna make you get up and run around this shack a few times.” He held you tighter.

“You wouldn’t dare.”

The pulse of him at your leg made you feel flushed, and he shifted, cleared his throat.

“I swear I ain’t tryin to -”

You pressed yourself a little more into the heat at his center, and closed your eyes, curious for a moment to feel the live change of him getting harder against you. “I don’t mind.”

“Seems wrong when you’re still shiverin,” he said with a chagrined smile, reaching up to hold your chin shuddering a little less now. Yet he let his body weigh into you. His pupils dilated in the small light of the lantern. You curved his hair behind his ear (you’d forgotten how long it was back then). His hand ran the length of your thigh. You could feel his heart pounding through his chest. His breath as he kissed you then, suddenly ragged with want. His hips seeking the earnest contact of yours. The fall of his cock between your legs. As you took him heavy in your hand his body on you seemed to ripen in response, almost against his will, and he broke off his kiss and looked at you (still, then) in his honorable way to wonder, did you want to. Under the thin wool of that blanket, you joined, a two-spirited soul under one skin, the living movement of breath and blood and muscle, the flare of shared consciousness as you looked in each others’ eyes.

If something happens to me, I love you. I think of us in those first days. When we fell into the meadow grass. Your hand on my cheek. Your body heavy on mine. Love in our eyes before we knew its name. If I never see you again, my last thought, whenever it comes, will be of that.

You do not even feel ashamed when they find you, unable to get up from where you lie, and they pin you to the floor of that shack and kick you under your ribs, beat your face when you curse at them. You watch them tying your wrists as if you are across the room, and you slump in your dizziness when they lift you onto Apollo so that they have to tether each ankle to your stirrups, tie you around your waist to the horn, and even then, they noose a cord around your neck that will hang you if you try to run, cowards, fucking scared of a woman who is too weak to fight back. 

You expect they will bring you to Saint Denis. When they stop at an abandoned mansion instead, that is when you begin to feel real fear.

Someone already inside opens the door. They carry you between them. One man stands in the kitchen. A shotgun next to him is bolted to a table and trained on the door. Another man stands in the doorway where the two men carrying you turn and begin to take you downstairs to the cellar, all their faces casual, even lighthearted, seeing you caught. 

A lantern hangs from a beam, and in that insufficient light they throw you on the dirt. No courtesies here outside the law. And then they take the lantern and leave you there in the dark. Something crawls against your arm and you jerk away from it, centipede or silverfish or some other creature that dwells in dank spaces. Although you hate to do it, you have to, you have to let yourself think that way again. 

That you can do whatever it takes to escape. As you have before. And give no protest, should it come to it - always worse if you protest - and you are no further down that path of thinking when it starts to break your heart to think of Arthur finding out and you cannot think of it anymore. 

When the door opens, you try to slow your racing heart. You take your mind away from hopeless thoughts, into a blank place, a milky shallow lake you can walk in up to your shins and see no other living thing around you -

“Where are they, Scarlett.” The man holding the lantern up speaks with a patient voice that lets on to what hours lay in front of you. 

“I want Frank Livesey.”

“He is far away. On a boat, if he knows what’s good for him.”

“Get me Frank.”

“You don’t want him. You want to tell us what you know. In detail. Starting from the beginning. Or you can wait for Milton.”

You know how they play, although you’ve only heard about this mediocre cunt of an agent, Milton, who seems to know about you.

“I’ll wait until I see a judge.”

They leave you in the darkness. 

And sometime in that endless cold night, the door opens again and a lantern brightens down the stairs with their footsteps following. A couple of them stay back. A smaller man in a bowler hat approaches you like you are a caught and rabid dog and he is merely curious to see the symptoms for himself before putting you down.

“Miss Riordan.” His somewhat piercing tenor matches the rest of him. Precise. Thin. “Do you know who I am?” He walks around you. The smooth soles of his shoes scrape the floor. Dry dirt skids into your face, an intentional aggravation, despite the agreeable tone of his voice.  “And what I have the power to do?”

“Fuck you,” you seethe into the dirt. You cannot stop shaking, and you just want to close your eyes, you just want to be left alone to die.

“I’m not a bad man, Miss Riordan.” He removes his bowler hat and smooths his black hair back off his forehead, sees an old chair over by the other collected junk, and places it a ways off from where you lie on the floor. He sits with ease. “I’m not in the habit of letting women suffer.”

He sets a tin cup on the floor near his feet, a broth you can smell immediately, still steaming. When you look up and don’t reach for it (though you want to, lord you want to), he taps it further toward you with his toe and a good deal of it splashes on the hard-packed dirt. 

“I would rather look at you to talk to you.” He nods to the other two men, who cut the rope around your wrists and ankles, pick you up under your arms, prop you up sitting against the earthen wall with its dried roots sticking out like hairs, and he motions for them to leave. When they are gone and the door to the stairs is closed, he takes the cup with his black-gloved hand, brings it to you, sets it in your hands without looking at you, and returns to his chair.

He thinks he is buying you with this most basic provision, but in desperation there is no shame, and you drink it quickly. It burns you like a poker down your throat but you cannot stop drinking.

“You shook a few things up with that business at Six Point,” he muses, when you wipe your mouth on your wrist.

“It wasn’t personal.” 

“Shouldn’t I take it personally when my new recruit is killed?” 

“He got himself killed.”

“That is an interesting way of looking at things. Do you see yourself as a weapon, Miss Riordan? Just the point on a knife, no will of your own? Did my partner simply fall on it and slice his own throat?” 

Six Point had been silent in an afternoon’s overwarm drifting light for hours, but for the occasional cardfall on the table. Cleared throats. Sniffs. The sparks of matches and flames touched crackling to cigarettes. Liam Byrne’s rumbling stomach. Harry Donnelly’s cracking knuckles. Martin Logue’s habitual snort and spit pinging dully on the spittoon. The two Pinkertons, sitting there in mind of their hourly pay, and patient as lawmen of contract could be. The paper sack of bonds with them, browned with an outlaw’s blood, worth more than all of you had seen in your lives, lay on the floor beside them like a sleeping terrier. Your footsteps thumped loud as you walked to the potbelly stove to get yourself some coffee. The men playing their game hardly noticed him following. 

You really as good a shot as they say you are? He was young, perhaps younger than you, and stood by the stove with his coffee, and was the sort the folks back home probably thought a good boy.

They say a lot of things. Colm was already three hours late. The dull spread of sunlight in that cabin gave you the mildest nausea; all the many hours he’d made you wait.

Takes an arm to hold an iron. He’d reached out to squeeze your upper arm and you’d flinched away. Whoa now, he gentled.

Gonna find out if you keep that shit up.

She’s as sour a cunt as they say, anyway, his partner laughed from the table. Your men laughed too, loud. You thought for one final dwindling moment, for you always seemed to be giving them some benefit of the doubt despite all proof, that they laughed to think of these goons finding out for themselves the trouble they’d walked into. But.

That’s Scar for ye. Takes two to hold her down. Liam Byrne smiled lopsided to conceal his rotten teeth on one side. And the kind-faced Pinkerton smirked without his same lightness, and looked at you differently.

Milton sits with one shoe up on his other knee, leaning back with his head cocked to one side. 

“Yeah. He fell on my knife.”

“Unfortunate for you.”

“I’m the one still breathing.” 

He tips his head to qualify your words. Right about then, you decide you will kill him should you ever get the shot.

“His young wife was beside herself.”

“Didn’t know him well, did she.” You swallow your sickness, the gush of saliva, with all the resistance you have left. “Why am I here, Mister Milton? You handing me over to Colm, or the law, or what is it you really want.”

Milton clasps his hands over his small stomach, his machine-sewn vest. “Colm? Used up his last chance with us a week ago with that stupid stunt. Next we see him, he’ll hang.” His eyes, glassy with the vacancy of calculation, never directly meet your own stare, and see a grander scheme over your head. “But you have a chance.” 

“I don’t know what stunt you’re talking about -”

“And as I understand it, after speaking with a Mrs. O’Sullivan in Saint Denis, you may be more likely to take that chance as it’s offered, just now.” He nods at you, his eyes trained lower on your body. “Consequences can be delayed for women in your condition. Or perhaps deferred altogether, depending on how cooperative you want to be. I can’t make promises for you. But your child -” he raises his eyes to yours now - “didn’t make your mistakes. The law is compassionate.” 

He leans forward, elbows on his knees, as if he is explaining man’s superiority to a son. “For the cost of two thousand dollars, the US Government will let the gentlemen upstairs furnish you to the State of Lemoyne, which will happily feed your head through the eye of a rope. But, in your lucky condition, for the successful recovery of two hundred thousand dollars in cash and bonds belonging to Mr. Leviticus Cornwall, and the successful capture of the Van der Linde gang, the US Government may be willing to cut you a more generous deal.”

You set down the cup. Your eyes fall closed and you can hardly hold your head up. Another swell of nausea builds in you and the prickles of sweat sting your face.

Milton’s voice lowers severely. “Would the child’s father have some stake in deciding whether the money could suddenly appear?” 

“Get me Frank Livesey.”

“Frank’s too busy saving his own hide. That’s the hard reality for you, Miss Riordan. In the end, you all desert each other. Colm would sell you out for a dollar if it served him. Even Arthur Morgan chose to save his own skin, rather than come back for his girl.”

You look up and back at your knees - idiot - and you can feel him smile.

“Though we expect he’ll be the first one trying to get back.”

You will not show him one twitch of your face, though you feel the shade of red firing your cheeks.

“I imagine there are some things you would like to know.”

“You’re not as clever as you think you are.”

“He’s alive.”

You clamp your jaw.

“I’m told they were seen on the island of Guarma.”

Your nails dig into your palms. You feel them break the skin.

“It would not be difficult to arrange their return. Thinking themselves lucky for having found a way back. Mister Morgan, at least, will try.”

“Then why are you talking to me.”

“They won’t give up a thing. We’ve tried a year or more. We tried with one of their associates as he lay dying at the scene, and even he wouldn’t give it up. But you? In your position? I’m told you nearly sold them out once. My bet here is you would be a great deal of help, with just enough pressure.”

You seal your mouth shut against the next qualm and rub your forehead, breathing shallow, and find yourself laughing softly, as tears drop onto your thighs. “If you think I have anything to say to you, you’re stupider than Colm.”

He merely blinks, his eyes bored and empty of care for the likes of you, and scratches the back of his head. “That’s the beauty of it, Miss Riordan. You don’t have to say a thing.” He stands and fits his hat carefully on his head. “Not for now. Just know this: Everywhere you step from this point forth, consider yourself watched. Consider yourself followed. The less you cooperate, the worse it will get. There’s no way out of this for you.”

He jerks awake, in his dream back in that chair, the interrogator shouting at him, beating his face. His cheekbone is still tender where it feels surely broken. He works his jaw loose from its perpetual clench, winces as he pushes himself up from the cot, and clears his chest from the crud he gets in that thick air there, though he feels better after a smoke and moving around. So he gets up. It is early. He drinks from the canteen by the fire, and forces himself not to think of how much he would like coffee. The denial of all things takes its small daily toll. The conscious work of survival. 

Regret seeps in, in those quiet dark hours. He remembers with a pit in his stomach the moment he and Lenny turned to run ahead. The kid’s magnificent quickness in turning, the speed of his few final steps. Then his slow stop, his body pulling upright and leaning back, his shoes digging into the rooftop tar when he saw the men, their guns raised. His memory remains stuck in that moment, where his hand was never as fast as the bullets that zipped into the kid’s chest. Never enough. 

And that last glimpse of her face, as he turned back to look at her. Brighter than the dawn behind her. Orchids in her hand. Some secret in her smile.

Dutch says he has a lead on a boat, but the price is this conscription in a revolution not of their making, and at this rate he will die in a jungle or on a beach, but he cannot think that way. It is harder, all this time, to stave off bitterness at himself, at Dutch. He reasons they are doing all they can. That every step is a means to an end somewhere. It feels like a lie, but that is all he has. So he stands and slings a carbine and a rifle on his shoulders. Dutch will be by the caves to the west, waiting, waiting for him like he is the laggard key to all their fortunes, and they would all be free soon if only he would hurry up.

You cannot go back to camp. When you ride out, the trees on either side of the road in the dark hide specters watching. How had you never felt it before? Now every tree, every building, every coach lurks aware of you, watchful, twisting, all-seeing. You will refuse to lead them back; you will hide in sight of them, if they are so determined to watch you, and you manage to make it to the old boat on the river, drag the gangplank up, and collapse on the bed. You wake and feel better for a time, stronger, and try to eat what you can, crackers and the like, drink what little you can before you can’t keep anything down again. You sleep. And in those crazy-making days of fatigue and shame and isolation, something changes. 

When Charles and Sadie find Apollo on the road and track from him to you, you are in too much pain to stand. From then on, you don’t want to recall. Time flows thin and vaporous in between one cluster of lights and another, the night sky a rushing field of blooming stars, a reversal of light and dark. You are carried. You are helped to lie down. The tonic from Grimshaw invites hopeless dreams, where you must flee but cannot move faster than a crawl, where you must talk to save another but you speak without a voice, where you hang by your fingertips over a height so great you cannot see the bottom, and your body weakens but it is your cowardly will that gives in every time and you cry out the agent’s name to save you. You stand alone in a wide-open street, and no one is there but you, no one for miles, and as you stagger in the confusion of the forsaken you know in your heart with no question at all you will never be loved again.

“Don’t tell him. Please,” you whisper to Sadie at your bedside.

She holds your hand in that cold and rotting place, perhaps for hours.

Then sadness washes through you like waves, each a tidal swell and wane.

September 12, 1899. X  

She sits next to you on the bedroll, using your tools to clean her guns, while you lie propped against the wall, and you fold the journal closed.

“Did you want it sweetie?” Her voice is quiet, and she doesn’t look at you to ask it.

Your tears leak without warning still, no matter how you feel. You palm them away. “I’d started to. Once I thought we could have that kind of a life.”

She sets down the cylinder and touches your shoulder for a long moment. “I wanted all of my four.” She pulls her necklace from her collar and leans forward for you to see four tiny blue beads strung on that simple chain.

“The bleeding will stop. Then the tears. And someday, you’ll wake up and realize you can live with the pain that’s left behind.”

She gives you the gun oil and rod to hold while she reassembles it.

“He’ll give you lots of babies sweetheart, if that’s what you want. Or you’ll find another way to see your life together, in time.”

The well-worn regret in her voice has lost its outward grief, but it’s there in the peculiar wrinkle of her forehead that shows up in furthest thought, in the depth of her voice that reaches where it’s gently hidden away.

You squeeze her hand, and see the side of her smile. You can’t speak your doubt aloud. She hears it anyway.

“He’ll come back.” She sniffs, almost a chuckle, and gets up stiffly to her feet. “For you, that man would find a way to walk around the world.”

Still, you lie on that bedroll, feeling nothing but the distance as the nights drag lonesome on.

In a few days you can get up. You can begin to help with the cooking and keeping the weapons clean and mending clothes, and try to distract your mind. You find lightness around a fire with them, Pearson’s stories, the girls’ bawdy songs. You take a place on the watch with a purpose that fills you too. 

Unable to sleep some nights, you sit on the dock with the lantern and his journal. You listen to the creaking noise of life in the swamp. In certain frames of mind you feel little separation between your insides and the wide inchoate dark, and one night in such a mood you pry open the casings of a few bullets, and pour black powder into the chamber of your locket and tamp it down and snap it closed. It lies cool on your chest, darkly potential, and fills you with a certain wildness.

You spread open his journal. 

It has been five weeks.

How can you put in words what is only real when he is close -

I miss your breath on my skin. 

Your eyes burn with tears and they drop on the page.

I want your voice in my ear saying things you only want me to hear. Things that are so private that when we are gone, they are gone, and not a soul will know them. 

I miss your body against mine, and it is painful not to feel your touch. I feel adrift in air. I am scoured out. Make me feel alive again, for I am something less than alive now. I need you to be strong against this dangerous way I feel, and hold me together until it is past.

Come back. Come back and we will go away. Life has shown us no reward for waiting. 

It is Micah who arrives first, slinking dismissively past Charles on watch and acting disappointed to see you all there. He reports that Dutch would likely be there soon, and glares sideways at you to say he knows nothing about the cowpoke. But he was alive and heading toward land; that much you know, and for a day afterward you stand on watch, your pulse springing at every sound. That night only Dutch arrives rain-drenched, haggard, and pleased at the fanfare, and even, in the midst of it, smiles at you, nods his head, making a sort of wordless amends. Bill arrives the next evening in a huff, and by that time you have to go outside and stand for a while on the dock to guard your heart, for if Bill can make it, then you have to begin to reckon with another possibility, and you grip the railing until your hands ache.

When you hear the deep thud of boots coming toward you on the dock and they stop, you turn, about to warn them away, but then his shadow spills over you from the torchlight behind. 

He stands at the corner. Beard longer, cheekbones sharper. His jaw set hard, his hands unclenching. He walks to you quickly, reaches you in four strides, and you shove him back. He only looks at you, his expression unchanging, worn, bruised, full of the unwavering certainty of you. He tries to take your wrist. You slap him. You beat your fist on his chest and he stands firm. His eyes never leave you as he takes each hit, rocking back, steadying. I know. He throws his arms around your shoulders, your neck, as your weakening fight resists him and then you grasp his back and he holds you tight. I know, sweetheart. His voice trembling. I’m sorry. I'm so sorry. You can’t let go. You will never let go. 

We’ll leave tonight. He bends his knees to look at you earnestly.

Arthur, I have to -

Not a goddamn thing you have to do. He starts to head inside with purpose in his step, even ignoring the surprised greetings of the others.

But a man is shouting from out front now, and though you can’t make out the words, you freeze to hear the voice of Milton. 

Without further warning, the bullets begin to fly.

 

 

 

Notes:

cw/tw: miscarriage, referenced, not depicted in detail.

Chapter 19: The Words

Summary:

“I need to hear you say it,” you murmur, your arms slowly crossing over your chest as you stand apart from him now.

He scratches his jaw, and you watch him fighting his own insides, as if you’ve asked him to cut open a vein, and he would if he thought he could survive it.

“You really want this.” He gestures in the space between you, this odd notion of yours there, and you wait.

He takes a somewhat halting breath and lets it out slowly. His lips pull to one side and finally he nods, and takes off his coat and hangs it on the back of the chair.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Gus knew range like a sixth sense, and he called it knowing your place in the world. Twenty-five yards. Fifty yards. A hundred yards. Two hundred. He could shoot accurate beyond range at a rate only he knew the facts of, but it was better than anyone else’s, that was for certain. Most days, he took you out into the valley on his crutch. You would make four trips for all the cases and a chair, and while he set up the gun rest and then sat there, bottle in hand, he would send you out with sticks nailed with crude bullseyes and tied with strips of red cloth, and make you run until he shouted Stop! And you would plant them. Twenty-five yards. Fifty yards. A hundred yards. Two hundred. And run back, struggling to catch your breath in the thin mountain air. 

“What’s your drop at a hundred yards with this instrument right here?” He patted the Springfield as he handed you the little brass spyglass. 

“That’s easy, four inches.”

“You sure about that?”

You nodded.

“Anything else?”

“Watch the mirage.”

“Not usin the flag?”

You rolled your eyes.

“Okay, smartass. Hit it.”

Though the wind gusted, and the sun burned everything dry and white, the scope was quiet and cool on your eye and heat waves shimmered around your target and showed you your way. The red flag whipped sideways like a furious tongue. He said the army marksmen did figures they glued to their stocks. Accounting for all factors under the sun. But he taught you different, and you fired in the lull of the gust and hit it true.

He gave you a biscuit from his satchel. You were always hungry then, and growing.

With each rifle mounted, he’d catechize you on your technical details, and then tell you it was all bunk if you didn’t feel in your gut that you were on. Go at one hundred. And now take it right to two, adjust on the fly.

“How about five hundred?”

“Five? You ain’t a sharpshooter.” 

“Why not?” 

“Why not? You can’t sit your ass still for that long, for one.” 

He wanted you fluent at a practical range with practical guns and cheap ammunition. No high-powered, heavy, fiddly Eye-talian guns, but saddle repeaters. Revolvers. Pistols. Be a watchmaker with a .22 all day long. Single-action Army 1873? Well, aim her couple feet up, you could lob it fifty yards accurate as a crack shot at twenty - what’s your two-foot reference? 

“End of that crooked tree branch.” 

“You goddamn right.” 

Gus prided himself on it like he was being frugal, teaching you to shoot over range.

But first he made you run out the stakes. You did it so often you knew the distance by the feel. 

There is only one of them today. North of you on the road. And at the bend, where the trail tree indicates the path to the left, and the hill up ahead shields you just enough, you cut west into the forest, knowing he will follow.

In the aftermath of the attack, the air rang, your ears rang. Arthur stood breathing hard, hanging onto the spinning, ringing Gatling. Coughing. Shouts of Pinkertons fleeing. Groans of those still living. The simmering screech of insects. Seeking shouts - you alright, and you? 

You caught one heart-wrenching glance from Arthur as he jumped down from the Gatling before you heard the wail, Jack!, and saw Abigail running over bodies to look for him, and you ran too. You flew around the back of the larger of the shacks, up underneath in the muddy banks - he’d shown it to you days ago - and found him huddled up in the supports. You waded to your waist in mud. He hyperventilated and covered his ears, and his terrorized pressured sobs escaped him as you wound his arms around your neck and his knees up over your arm and made your way out with him. He would not let go, and you could not get up the banks with his weight so you stayed there with him locked to your neck, hip-deep in the mud, uttering your low and powerless hushes. His sobs put a shearing thrum in your ears. 

Arthur found you, and reached down to help you and the boy up, first the boy - hey little Jack, you did good, such a brave boy you are - and then you, gripping your forearm, and Jack had his arms around you again just as Dutch strode by, calling for Arthur, Charles; he needed them now; they could not wait for the Pinkertons to regroup.

“I’ll be back -” he told you. He held your arm one more moment, and jogged after Charles.

He meant it. You know he did. But meanwhile the screams were stuck in your skull like the grooves on phonographs, straining in between the concussions of every shot, and you knew it was the sound of your path changing. The constant rattle of the Gatling, the cries of Tilly searching for Mary-Beth, the whimpers of dying men. The single squelch of Micah’s boot turning one man's face into the mud and standing there. That’s the beauty of it, Miss Riordan. You don’t have to say a thing.

You sat beside Abigail sharing a cigarette against the swamp-side of the shack, with Jack huddled tight between you, and you faced out at the dark, feeling your own same darkness. Arthur crouched in front of you.

“Nell.” 

You held up your hand, clutched tight by Jack’s. He nodded. 

Charles stood by, fastening his tomahawk, not wanting to put pressure on him, and although he faced away, you knew he waited to part you again. 

“We’re, uh,” Arthur ventured, clearing his throat, “headin up, stakin out the new place, to get em safe.” It made his upper lip quiver in anger to say it. You told him to go.

As the sky started to lighten into a sickly gray over the foggy wasteland of the swamp, you managed to get Jack to lie down, Abigail folding herself around him. Pearson and Uncle and the Reverend towed the bodies far out into the water by boat and cut them loose there, and came back, sober. 

You made coffee as you usually did. You woke Tilly long enough to give her your pillow, thin though it was. You fed Apollo and got him brushed and ready. You filled your saddlebags with enough supplies to last you, unnoticed as Grimshaw began to shout for the rest to begin packing, and coming into the piercing light outside, you lit a cigarette before you saw around yourself.

“Miss Riordan.” 

Dutch stood against the shaded side of the shack with his cigar and surveyed the activity of the yard. Miss O’Shea rushed away from him, her face flushed, her eyes some rounded shape of panic, ire, or madness, going past you as if she did not see you, though she surely heard your name.

“It has been some time.” His face was a painful red, burned and peeling, though he did not seem to care as he smiled and the raw skin of his cheeks stretched, ready to split. “I’m told you and Missus Adler did us a great service, getting us moved off Shady Belle and hidden here.” He puffed on the cigar. “Well, for a little while.” And you found his voice surprisingly amiable, when you considered all that had passed since the last time he had aimed his sharp focus on you.

“Charles too. We did what we could.” 

“Ain’t we all doin all we can.” For once he seemed sincere in saying such a thing, instead of luring his prey into letting down their guard. Though you would not risk it anyway.

You couldn’t do much but smoke and step aside as Strauss and Pearson waddled behind you with a trunk between them.

“And you appear about to do something more,” he said, nodding at your gun case and your pack.

“With the camp moving, I thought I would scout. Make sure no one is followed.”

“Now there is the kind of initiative and selfless thinking we need more of.” Again, his face on you was approving, a face of letting bygones be, a face even seeking forgiveness in its painful rawness and the way he nodded with that understanding that passes between equals putting the past aside. “I won’t delay you.” He held out his hand to let you go on your way.

By that time, the sun was just a high vague bright spot through the clouds, and you figured visibility was as good as it was going to get, and you tried to shake off the feeling of Dutch watching you leave, your long-gun case strapped diagonally across your back. You mounted Apollo and turned him to the road. At the end of the path, Sadie stood in front of you, the carbine held low.

“What’s this about?”

“Something I should’ve done weeks ago,” you said.

“Oh yeah? Pretty far away, is it?” She nodded at your cased guns, your saddlepack. 

“Hard to say.”

“And where do I tell Arthur he can find you?”

“Not sure yet.”

“Honey -” 

“Van Horn, maybe.”

“Nell -” She put up her hand to try to hold Apollo by the bridle, but you steered him away.

“I’ve got to do this, Sadie.” You rode around her and felt her watching you, out to the main road, and you aimed yourself in the direction of the wide-open marsh. 

“How far does it go?” you asked.

You stood apart from Colm, squinting through the binoculars, and the falconer beside him, and Frank behind him, and Gus standing by you all watched the goshawk soaring sentry in the air.

“She’s onto something,” the falconer said, hushed, pointing at the hawk as it fixed its attention along the edge of the pines. “Two hundred yards, two-fifty,” he said sideways to you.

The hawk came down, converging on its prey, accelerating. “What happens if it doesn’t come back?” 

“Kill it,” Colm said savagely, and laughed. Frank laughed. The falconer did not. Gus did not. Colm thwacked your arm. “‘Swhy we train em, ain’t that right child.”

“Yes sir.” You brought up the binoculars again.

As the swamp cleared out into the marshy flats, and the sky there hinted at rain, that was where you first spotted him. Two hundred yards. A glint in the dim light. They never take off their badges.

At times of the day there are two of them at once, and it seems there are four of them total. The range they allow, as far as you have been able to test over the last few days, is two-fifty. When you edge outside of that, they get nervous and try to close in. Your boundaries are Annesburg to the north. The Kamassa on the west, Lannahechee on the east. Saint Denis to the south. They tail you, they head you off, capable hunters.

And now one follows you, keeping his careful distance. When you stop, he stops. When you lose him, he quickly catches up, and you like to make him catch up. You stop in Annesburg at the gunsmith and buy high-velocity rounds. At the train station, you post a letter with a sharp two-word message addressed to Pinkerton. From the hill, you watch him go into the train station and a minute later come out again, straightening his red vest, then up to the gunsmith, and emerge newly struck with the vigilance of a prairie dog. Then, pretending you don’t see him watching, you ride out south again toward Van Horn.

“That’s a beauty,” Colm said, as the goshawk alit on the glove and he gave her a bright slice of raw meat.

They ride north in silence for a while. His hands buzz from the rattle of the Gatling gun. And he tries not to think about first seeing Nell. How it hurt. He was an idiot to have expected relief or understanding, he realizes that now. And to think of how they’d leave, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, when of course it would never be so simple. By the timing, a superstitious man might think it an omen, how the bullets had immediately cut between them, and they crawled on their stomachs into cover. 

Afterward, in those few still moments, he recalled something different in her face. He had made her worry. He’d made her suffer for his choice. Her stare, distant, the kind of stare that sees inside, not away.  

“Charles, anything happen while I was gone? I mean with Nell.” He’s never seen that look in her eyes before. “I worry about her.”

“It’s not really my place to say. I think she went through a bad time.”

“Yeah I think so too. I understandably upset her. Just think there’s more.”

They come upon some equipment along the roadside, sawhorses and sandbags stacked orderly, a few crates with a black stamp on them, though he can’t make out the words. Another couple of miles ahead, another such display, a preparation.

“Hosea was sayin somethin about contract military up here.”

“He mentioned that to me too.” 

They pass a settlement by the river smelling high of offal and manure, the runoff thereof collecting in puddles in the road before feeding into the river, and they walk their horses around them. He turns, feeling watched, and sees them watching, a couple of stringy-muscled men in bibs sitting silent on a slanted porch, their harrowed faces concealing the color of their thoughts, the way hillfolk liked to play dumb and act clever, and in his experience violent. 

“These Brooders?”

“I don’t think so. But probably kin with them, or friendly.”

“Yeah I don’t like it.” One of their jaws hangs slack as he watches through the open frame of a skinning shack that appears never cleaned, waste parts left in buckets that swarm metallic with blowflies.

It is a fitting sound to follow them to the cave. The evil they flush out of the cracks there, it horrifies him. He has never seen a man flayed. He sees it now. Feels like they have awoken something dark, not eradicated it. They have invited violence in kind. And here is where he is supposed to send the women and Jack, and the old men, for safety. It don’t feel right, but he sees no other way.

The girl they find sinks his heart like lead. Shaking in that cage from the terror of her recent days. What else those fucking inbred bastards did, the devil knows. He gives her the blanket from his bedroll. He takes her home, to that earthen scab of a mining town, and feels in the stiff detachment of her hands on his sides as he rides how she will never trust another man again. Nor should she in this world. It leaves him in a cold and lonesome way, far from the warmth of Nell’s arms around him that might reverse this collapsing sense inside. He is about to cross the road, wanting only that for himself, when he stops.

The whore expects him as much as he expects her. Jointly, they seem to have seen each other before, but where would he know such a one? and in the next moment her face turns to grief and he realizes the first time he saw her. 

"Mrs. Downes," he utters, just a reflex of recognition, and when she finds her voice she lights into him; he stands keeping his hands back, capitulating, open. Not the bloodied fists she had seen. Stay the hell away; you’ve ruined enough lives.  He blanches, and retreats a step, unable to find any word to speak for himself. 

Her anguished, accusing eyes bore into his back; he feels her watching even far outside town as he rides south, telling himself those were the ways of a hard world, though he was sorry for her lot and regretted the coincidence of their lives’ brief intersection.

You hitch Apollo to the post at the northern edge of the street in Van Horn and slip around the back of the livery there, and watch from the cover of a crate as he rides in behind, your Pinkerton with two days’ stubble on his cheeks. When he sees Apollo, he pulls up, dismounts, hitches his own beside him, and checks him over. You have to smile when Apollo’s hindleg flinches up ready to kick if he gets any closer. He sees it too, and backs away, up to the boardwalk, and is glancing around himself as you come up behind and pin the point of your knife into the tender meat of his flank, your arm across his neck, guiding him backwards into the alleyway with a light warning to keep his cool. A couple of men on the boardwalk watch it happen and go back to their grim observation of the thoroughfare. 

“You and yours followed me to a camp with women and children there, and shot the place to hell.”

He says nothing. As if such measures are no longer beyond what is decent if the law is on your side.

“Get those hands up before I field dress you, asshole.”

He obeys, and you relieve him of his Volcanic, half-cock it to safety, and stick it in the back of your waistband.

“Ready to use that weren’t you?”

“What do you think you’re going to do, Miss Riordan?”

You kick him in the back of his knee and shove him ahead of you to the boardwalk, keeping a handful of his collar. “I’m gonna buy you a drink, Mister Orly. It is Orly, isn’t it? Thought that’s what your partner said.”

When you’re in plain sight, steering him up the street, you do make for the most interesting sight in those parts in some time, and those who are sober or at least minimally so gather at balconies and doorways and emerge from their usual nests behind the buildings.

“Excuse us, gentlemen; I’m taking this Pinkerton agent to the Old Light for a little talk if you care to join us.”

“Real clever, Miss.”

“Fuck you, sir.”

The saloon keeper is about to protest you bringing an unsheathed knife inside when you tap Orly’s badge with the point of it, two tinks the entire place seems to hear. You push him to a table near the hearth and sit him down roughly and call for a couple of whiskeys brought over. When you sit across from him, he watches you, somewhat upset, of course, but also nervous, as well he should be, judging by the fine folks in your periphery. 

“Better take that drink, Orly. You’re gonna get thirsty.”

He scoffs. You drink.

You set your glass down daintily. “You know where we are, so why are you keeping on me so tight?”

“Boss’ orders.”

“Your boss is a moron.”

With a stare that could put a frost on trees, he works something out of his teeth, and it isn’t disagreement.

“This is a real situation for you, Orly. It would behoove you to play nice. Make a little conversation.” You point to his drink with your knife, and he seems loath to drink it, although he does.

You turn around and order two more whiskeys. Orly sighs, but sits up straighter as a few more men come in and gather by the wall as if they’re about to witness a fight or a demonstration. When you turn back, you sheath your knife. “Now we’re gonna settle a couple of things today, Agent Orly. The first,” you say, loud enough for the room to hear, “is the matter of you following me around the whole damn state. Four days since the attack, you’ve all been at it.”

There’s a noticeable shift of weight in the room.

You lean forward. “And then there’s a few things you’re gonna tell me all about.”

You’re standing behind him, clapping him on the shoulders announcing the markings of his chestnut morgan to the crowd when the door opens and Sadie walks in with Arthur. You see him see you, and you ignore him watching you and your own sting of emotion as you smile at the crowd and tell everyone to toast the man’s good health and get a good look at him so they could all greet him heartily any time they see him on the street. The crowd forms a closer crush around him, and a large bearded trapper-type plants a chair right next to Orly and wrenches his arm around him as he sits down, pounds him on the chest and means to show him what might happen to a man who followed a lady around, were he to see it next.

You pat Orly’s bowler down firm and make your way back to the bar, putting yourself on the other side of Sadie from Arthur as you order another shot. The barkeep saw you coming and has it ready for you, so you take it before it even hits the counter, tip it back, and hand him the glass. Sadie and Arthur watch you with a palpable sobriety.

“What you been up to here?” Arthur asks, not truly asking, the far edge of accusation.

“Zeroing.” You put your finger up for another shot.

“I’ll pretend to know what you mean by that.”

“You do that.” 

Sadie turns and leans back on her elbows between you.

“Why don’t we take this somewhere you can talk -”

“I’m fine right here,” you say, knocking back your next shot, and straight away thinking you might regret it.

“Well I ain’t - you keepin a room in town honey?” Sadie nudges your arm, and you push yourself up and slap ten dollars on the bartop and walk around them. Arthur quickly takes back seven before the barkeep can claim an astronomical tip.

As they follow you out of the bar, Bill and Javier push past you inside, strapped like they’re ready for a job, and sullen as soon as they notice you. Bill mutters, “Ten minutes, Morgan,” and gives you an evil eye like you are the source of all their trouble, having to wait in a saloon, poor devils.

“What the hell is goin on?” Arthur tries to touch your arm as you stride with Sadie through the evening crowd up the boardwalk, and you yank it away.

“Nothing is going on -” You hold out your arms, stand broad-chested, as if he should try that again.

He throws his hands up, looking like you’ve just changed shape in front of him, into this new wild form of yourself, and then points back at the saloon. “What was that in there?”

You lead Sadie around the milling drunks and shore-leavers and traders toward the inn, and shrug off his next attempt to turn you to face him. “Looked like a lot of good people enjoying themselves -”

When you stop at the door to your room, Sadie turns to you, no humor in her face and suddenly not the ally you were expecting. “This it?”

You concentrate on fitting your key without wavering too much to open the door, and when you get it open she shoves you through it, then Arthur. 

“You two are gonna exchange a few words and reach an understandin before I have to live through another minute of this.”

With your head up proud, you walk the straightest line you can inside, and behind you his reluctant hollow steps, and the door slams shut. You stand by the window that faces the alley, some distance from him.

He looks around the room in the glow of cold blue moonlight, the bed unmade, your clothes shed around like rattler skins, the table cluttered with the disassembly of your Schofield and your tools, a browned apple core on the dresser which you quickly throw away, and it’s not obvious what he’s thinking but the pity or dislike on his face fires your temper up.

“Why’re you stayin here now?” he asks, nudging your open gun case with his boot, its crowd of two rifles and a shotgun gathered like fallen sticks.

“I feel like it.”

He nods slowly as if he could have guessed the same by the state of things. “Well, we’re moved up to a new place now; should be safer.”

“I’m settled here.”

He frowns with acceptance for a moment, sighs, looks at you sincerely. “Nell, I should’ve told you about the bank.”

You rear up a little. “Told me?”

He looks pained. “They’re my family, Nell. I had to do it.”

“Oh? Would it have gone worse if you hadn’t been there?”

His jaw sets askew and he exhales bullishly through his nose, glaring as he fights to temper his words. “Probably not.”

You hold onto the dresser to steady yourself. “That island you ended up on?”

“Yeah.”

"Bet you're wishing you were back.” You mean to make it sting, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

He looks everywhere in that room but you, first, and then takes that authoritative tone that he knows goddamn well you hate. “Nell, I gotta leave with them, and you need to lay down and dry up so you -”

“Dry up?”

“-feel more like yourself -”

With a snort, you square up your shoulders, and outside some glass breaks and a drunkard shouts, trailed by mirthless cackles. Arthur turns for a moment, distracted by it until he turns back and sees you still riled up.

“So you’re running his errands again?”

He glances over the mess of your Schofield, trying very hard to keep his mouth shut about it, but then looks closer.

“You missin a pin?” He counts your pins and screws silently with his finger. 

“No I am not missing a pin.”

He tears his eyes away from it, and holds out his hands, drops them. “They need the help; you were helpin too.”

“Well I’m not gonna sit back and watch after all that.”

“You know it’s important, is what I meant.”

“I’m not heartless, Arthur.”

He holds the back of the chair and wiggles it on its uneven legs just to avoid looking at you. “Course not.”

Outside on the boardwalk, a couple of men shout an escalation of threats that amounts to only silence in the end, and both of you are caught up listening for the result that never comes.

And he looks at you, and he shakes his head slightly, as if he can’t make sense of a goddamn thing. He rocks the uneven chair again.  His voice is softer. “What happened, Nell. Sadie said -”

You bristle immediately. “That is none of her -”

"Now hold on, she wouldn't say what, just said I had to ask you about what went on."

You glare. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Goddammit, Nell, somethin happened, and I -”

“You robbed a bank is what happened, and everything went to hell.”

He looks straight at the floor, and when he glances back up he seems unable to face you and instead stares sideways at the bed as if it has drifted away some.

“You’re not back one hour before you’re off running for Dutch in spite of the first thing you said to me. And here now, gotta leave on another goose chase. Let me boil it down for you, Arthur, to a few words I can get in before you ride out again - you weren’t here.”

Nodding, he takes it, eyebrows raised like you landed an honest blow. He swipes at his nose, sniffs, holds out his hands offering no excuse. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well.”

In the moonlight, your room gapes cold and silent, and the span of floor between you is cut with the jailbar shadows of the window panes.

Outside, the voices of quarrel and the saloon girls’ sly enticements and all the worn-out grievances collect in that constant meaningless jumble there on the banks of the river. Then the burr of Sadie’s voice clearly cuts through the night noise as she berates some idiots in the alley, and Arthur doesn’t smile but seems to consider something.

He pinches the peak of his hat and takes it off and sets it on the table with a slowness that seems to say he’s preparing himself. “Alright.” Perhaps just to break the stinging silence, he lights a match and picks up the glass globe of the lamp on the table, touches the match to the wick and turns the key as he watches up into the rest of the room until that small flame has kindled a gentle dim aura, and replaces the glass.

He gives you an attempt of a smile as he straightens up. “What went on? Tell me what I missed.”

And you stand there near-bursting with everything you have to say and not a word to describe it, not a single goddamn one. The entire field of your sight has been fogged by the ghosts of recent memory, all too close and tangled to describe them; on the other side is only the emptiness you’ve felt ever since. The silence within that you can’t bear long enough to close your eyes to sleep. A vacancy that has made you aimless in your time apart. You shake your head. He is there, but his attention is outside with the others waiting, impatient. Or his mind is across an ocean for all you know. Or halfway lost. Seeing him there, you wonder how the rest of him - bruised, thinner yet - could bear to know when you can hardly bear it, knowing all. 

“Ask me something else.”

You need him to reach for you again and hold you until this feeling breaks from you like a fever, but you’ve made yourself dangerous and unwantable. And all this ignorant tenderness in his eyes, like you’re liable to break if handled without care, hurts more than it gives you comfort. This painful indefinite silence. You need more, and he doesn’t know what.

You grab the opened bottle of bourbon on your dresser and take a swig and feel him watching. Then, with that same forced purpose, you pull your shirt off over your head, heeling out of your boots, and you stumble a little getting off your pants, and he watches you while you do, his arms crossed. “You too,” you say, standing in your chemise and drawers, still feeling strange in your own skin.

“Jesus,” he says, quickly stepping behind you and yanking the curtain over the window. “Nell, honey, I meant we can talk, but I got a job to -”

You raise your eyebrows in warning. “What, you don’t want to fuck for the first time since you’ve known me?”

“That ain’t it.”

“Then off with your clothes.”

He holds his gun belt watching you like he isn't sure what you're playing.

There you stand, in the middle of the room, taking a resolute breath. “I want you to tell me what you want.”

His brow crowds up in confusion. “I want you.”

You stare at him expecting better. “Tell me what you want me to do. To you.”

He coughs a little in surprise and rubs the back of his neck. “Sweetheart I can’t do that.”

“Why not.”

“You’re a little drunk, for one, and…feels like…payin for it.”

“How noble. Sadie said to exchange some words. So tell me what you want me to do.”

He’s straining to think of all the ways you don’t mean what you’re saying. “Like where, or -”

“Everything.”

“Red let’s just -”

“Say it.”  

His head straightens with the sharpness in your voice. The feeling between you is cooling, and a small insurgence of dread arises in you, like you’ve come to the end of a road to find the old bridge now in pieces on the floor of a ravine. 

“I need to hear you say it,” you murmur, your arms slowly crossing over your chest as you stand apart from him now. 

He scratches his jaw, and you watch him fighting his own insides, as if you’ve asked him to cut open a vein, and he would if he thought he could survive it.

“You really want this.” He gestures in the space between you, this odd notion of yours there, and you wait.

He takes a somewhat halting breath and lets it out slowly. His lips pull to one side and finally he nods, and takes off his coat and hangs it on the back of the chair. He unbuckles his gun belt and wraps it around itself and sets that huge grip of leather on the table, holster on top. “Well,” he says, “your clothes are already off…” 

“You need me to put them back on?” 

There’s that minute pursing of his lips and wrinkle on his nose he gets when he’s annoyed with you, and which you are glad to provoke.

“Then what,” you encourage. Jesus, it’s like sweet-talking a cold train to move uphill.

He swallows, and he goes through several attempts just to open his mouth and speak, as if he is unable to form an idea of what a person ought to do next, confronted with an undressed lover.

“You have more of an imagination than this. I’ve seen your drawings.”

The lamplight flashes sharply in his eyes. Again, that tightening of his lips.

“Okay, christ,” he says, teeth all but melted together, and starts to unbutton his shirt, like an indignity he had hoped to avoid. His boots drop in two heavy thumps. Then, after kicking off the second leg of his trousers and union suit, he stands in the middle of the room glancing at the door one last time, his missed escape, and then looks at you like some kind of compass.

You wait, your gaze not giving anything away. 

Hesitantly, he gestures to join him to the bed, and you slowly shake your head and tap your lips with your finger. 

He rubs his face in disbelief, and points in front of him, forcing himself to man up to the words he’s about to say. “On your knees.” 

But you sink to your knees in front of him so unabashedly he seems almost startled having caused it. His body rises over you newly unfamiliar. His shins are crossed with bruises, bare feet scarred with old cuts. Scrapes, fading burns from bullet casings on his forearms. Traces of a painful time slow to fade. He is lean, something straining him from within. But his hands hang near you at his sides, loose and strong, nails trimmed neat, they are as known to you as your own by now. 

He clears his throat, and flickers of his thoughts pass over his face, discomfort, pity, temptation, helplessness to understand. Finally determination to do what you need, but damned if he knows how or why. 

“...Would you use your mouth.”

You blink patiently for the last time.

He sniffs. “Please.”

You sit back on your heels and glance up, somewhat less patient.

The lines of his forehead gather in a tight band. “...Lick it.”

You sway forward and lick his thigh, glancing up with complete innocence, and he sneers at you, then seems to cringe a little as he prepares to give you what you want.

“Lick my…cock.” He can’t look directly at you.

“That’s it.” 

“Nell, this is embarrassin…” 

But his embarrassment seems to evaporate when you obey untroubled as if doing something as necessary and common as taking a drink of water, spending time to give every inch of his fine cock a good, indulgent lick, enough to reward him for doing as asked. Being this close nearly brings tears to your eyes, your senses unfolding at what is familiar but somehow strange under the circumstances, so you focus on him fully, with the side and lively tip of your tongue, the changing character of him in the first dilation of arousal, barely brushing him with your lips, and then you lighten your pressure until you come away from him with a featherlight remembrance of your tongue, and see him watching you.

His sideways nod admits he enjoyed it, though he has to look at the wall when he says, “Do that again and…”

“And?”

He sighs, scratching beside his eye with the back of his thumb nail like he can’t believe what he’s about to say. “Squeeze my -” clears his throat - “balls,” he mutters, almost too clenched to hear. And he is about to cringe again, except that when you do take him full in your hand and slowly constrict your fingers, his brow relaxes as if a light breeze has busked his face, and his cock swells and moves of its own accord, growing thick as you lean in and gloss the bottom of your tongue down his length again. He holds his hand down on it. You pull his hand aside and slowly wrap your thumb and middle finger as far around his base as you can manage.

“I’m glad to see you too -”

“Jesus, Nell.” He rubs his eyes hard, and his ears go bright red.

You dispel his vexation with a long, slithering lick along the underside toward his balls, at which point you lift your fingers there enough to continue your trail under them, and suck lightly on each and then blow a whisper of air on them a moment before returning to his shaft, and by that time his cock is half raised and getting as hard as his wrist, which itself is a thick cable of tendons and muscle alongside his upper thigh, his balled fist withholding his true want. You would tell him what to do, but that would defeat your purpose here, so instead, when you finish another long journey up and down, and tease his head with a flick of your leaving tongue, you lean over and bite his bent thumb. He flinches and looks down as if reminded he has hands, and you give him the most innocent wink you can before returning to his center, holding the point of your tongue out between your teeth in silent asking, Is this still all you want?, an inch away from the needy tip of his cock and you can’t help but feel gratified as he appears to be giving it some real thought.

“What you do with your lips,” he says, his voice lower, graveled, a little less hesitant, and his eyes meet yours on the last word with a spark between you, captivated then by your unbroken, dutiful willingness as you wet your lips and run your mouth in full, slow, growing and ebbing kisses along his shaft, sometimes laving circles underneath with your tongue, and you kneel up higher to do the same along the top, pushing his cock down under the weight of your kisses and feeling a stab of pleasure at the sound of his guttural exhalation. He gently removes your fingers from the base of his shaft, and you twist your hand to hold his thumb and move him to suggest his hand find your head, then hum as he lays the weight of his hand on your scalp, his fingers streaming into your hair and gripping.

“Give me your mouth.” There’s demand in the jut of his chin, the near-clench of his teeth, the depth in his voice, a rush of breath, and you reposition yourself in front of him, ignoring your sore knees on the rough floor, and admire the sight of him fully erect, veins crawling around his shaft, the handsome upward curve to his deep red head, and the man high above it sweating slightly in the light of the lamp and swallowing as he looks at you. You lock eyes with him and lick your lips again, then lightly touch them full to his tip, pressing them there for one rising pulse before you run him deep into your mouth, and the sound from his throat drives through you in kind. His jaw falls open in the first awe of pleasure. Something he hasn’t felt in weeks, something he missed more than he knew, and it’s hitting him all at once; you watch it wash over him. You do your best to suck his thick shaft as you begin to slide him in and out, restrained and even slow, saliva gathering at the tight corners of your mouth, slicking him well. 

You pull off for a breath, and feel a sudden sweep of nervousness before you murmur, “Tell me how you liked that,” and then slowly glide him in again.

I liked that, he manages to say, bless his heart so overcome. You glance up at him for more and quicken your pace as he gets harder in your mouth.

He’s biting his lip with a silent fuck. Your sweet mouth, you think he says as his head tips back.

“Tell me what else.”

Ah - with your tongue at - there - His stomach draws in tight and you reach up and scratch your nails through his coarse hair, and his right hand clutches a full fist of your braid as he looks down.

And. A strand of spit breaks between you and his tip as you come off just to say it, and he reaches down to thumb it off your chin.

The roof of your - and he can’t speak as you lightly burnish his head against the ridged roof of your mouth, and when he ventures to say A little with your teethaah and his hips start to urge forward, you pull away to keep him at bay. You’re starting to ache for him, and yet the sound of him talking to you now feels like to spread you open with the warmth of sun on flower buds, and it hurts as much as it gives you pleasure to hear it.

He looks at you for a moment just breathing, his hand releasing your hair for a moment and holding your head, his thumb caressing your temple. “You’re beautiful, doin that to me.” 

“What else do you want.”

“I wanna fill y-” he groans as you take him in and out.

You moan on his cock as he takes a handful of your hair again and with some restraint thrusts himself to your throat and back out as if it’s all he can take at one time. 

I wanna make you come, Nell.

“You first. You like this?” 

His eyes round when you spit on his shaft and proceed to swallow him deep. He breaks at the knees slightly, uttering a fast whoah and pulls out of your mouth. “Honey, it’s been a bit -” he grips the base of himself and coughs a few times to the side. You sit away from him and look up, letting him fall back from his crest a bit as he stares down at you so madly excited, his chest flushed. There is a seriousness now that shades his features as he cups your jaw, as if he is pouring something into you. Like he realizes this means something to you, and wishes he knew what, and for the love of god, knew what it means for himself, for he’s needed this more than he could let himself imagine.

He gazes at your peaking breasts through the thin silk of your chemise, and your legs moving together as you feel the slick from your cunt, and when he can find the words, he has a hungry look in his eyes that takes your breath away. 

“Would you take that top off.”

You pull it off over your head, forcing yourself to ignore a new self-consciousness that has sprung up these last few weeks. If the expression on his face is to go by, he’s grateful at the sight.

“Your drawers too.”

You stand long enough to flick the waistband over your hips and they fall around your ankles. His eyes are ensnared by the revelation for a moment, but as you kneel again he meets your gaze with his full attention, more interested now in the effect on you, each way he makes you move, his fingers again combing into your hair, possessively now, angling your head to admire your face. 

“Spread your legs.” 

You widen your knees. Your slick cools between your thighs. 

“Touch yourself.” He says it almost experimentally, and tilts your head to see your face better. “Touch your clit.” 

You grip the back of his knee with your left hand as you lift your right hand, and you glance at him, and slowly suck in his cock as you drag your fingers upward, and let him come out wet from your mouth as you glance at him and your fingers slide up between your legs. His face shines and he swallows again, and your name escapes him with your first touch and the sweet simultaneous lap of your tongue, as if what you are giving him is just about a gift. 

Without warning, the door behind you starts to open, letting in a breeze and a footstep with the swell of noise from the street. You jump and kneel up higher to cover him, but Arthur stands where he is, snatches his gun up in his left hand, and has it aimed straight at the door, chest pumping, gleaming in sweat, before that dumb fool can step inside. The ratcheting click of his hammer seems to echo in the room, and stops the intruder dead.

“Get the fuck out.”

Footsteps back away. The door bangs shut, and Bill calls through it. “Dammit, Morgan, we’re leavin.”

“Goddamn right you are,” he seethes back. His gun lowers, and you admire his strong wrist, the muscles in his forearm, when he holds the grip.

Bill’s low curse is an audible hiss as his footsteps leave, and Arthur uncocks his gun and sets it quietly on the table. He hasn’t lost a bit of his arousal. If anything, as he looks back to you, he seems to have a renewed will to sustain himself through this experience, and when you fuck him with your mouth and begin to roll your clit again, his own confidence spreads to you through the hot pressure of his hand that never left your head, and your vigor gets a full moan overhead. 

Slower, sweetheart.

You slow your pace and at the same time tongue him more intently, watching the change in his breath. Saliva trails out the stretched sides of your mouth, soaking your chin and jaw.

Your fingers in you.

And you slip your middle and ring finger into your cunt, just a bit. Such a little movement. Not even a gesture. Yet his hand grips your hair and his cock seems to harden to its extremity so fast you have to rise up higher on your knees and stretch your jaw. Would you swallow my cock, sweetheart he asks, his voice low and quiet. You show him with your willing eyes. And then his hand presses on the back of your head. Light at first, and then when he seems assured that you’re able to take him, though you’re never able to fully take him down, he presses hard. You choke a little, just a little, and he pants to see it, whispering sorry and you shiver your head to say it’s okay. And in proof open your throat to him. The grunt from his chest, his breathless endurance.

Despite your concentration on him, or perhaps because of it, your own arousal throbs in you, new slick glosses your fingers, making a faint wet sound as you hook your wrist and work in and out and you feel the sudden urgency to rub your clit. He watches your hand, and when you moan with him in your mouth, the muscles of his thighs go rigid and he presses you a little faster, and then faster still.

Suddenly he releases your hair and lifts his hand, trying to untangle himself, and winces as he pulls away unfinished from your mouth. “Get up here.”

He helps you to your feet, wipes your lips with the back of his hand, cradles your neck like the stem of a cup and kisses you roughly. You grab his shaft underhand and glide your grip down his spit-slicked length, and he carves his tongue into your mouth with such lust that your body crushes into his beyond your control.

He nips a light mark on your neck and starts to slide his hand down your belly when he thinks better of it, and straightens. Gazing at you, his cheek twitching slightly, he touches his middle finger to your lips and slowly inserts it deep in your mouth, tasting of tobacco and metal and salt, your eyes never leaving his as he draws it out and then brings his hand between your legs, leans into you, and his voice rasps in your ear,

I wanna hear you moan. His last word shakes as he slides his finger inside you, and the sound he gets from you comes released from the bone of your sternum, where your pleasure darts through you now. He whispers You like that?

You nod, as he adds his ring finger and leaves you speechless, and he quickly has to brace you up with his other arm. His head urges against yours, the bristle of his beard scratches you; you hold onto his back, seeking more of him, more pressure, more roughness, and he wrenches you tighter.

Did you miss me, you gasp, as he reaches into you, his own air cut from his throat with the pleasure of each slow glide of your hand on him.

Every minute - he pulls back from your hold and has to turn you around, pushing you forward so your hands fall on the mattress. 

Tell me what you’ll do to me. You glance over your shoulder at him sweating and focused on you.

He grasps your hip with one hand and entices the head of his dick at the very rim of your cunt so deliberately slow your spine begins to arch automatically. What I wanted to do for weeks.

What’d you think about? When you were alone.

You both groan as he pushes into you.

I thought of you at sunrise. His last word rushes out as a fast exhale and he regrips you to thrust harder, and your ass slaps against his hips.

In truth, you were expecting him to say anything else. Tears spring to your eyes and you blink them back.

That color red. Made me think of you. His hand hooks over your shoulder and locks you to him and you cry out as he bears into you deep.

Suddenly he pulls you upright against him, kneading your breast as if he had longed for that part of you, and the squeeze of your legs together tightens you around him and makes his head drop to your shoulder.

His voice is hoarse, grinding through his teeth. Fuck you feel so good. He bites your neck and sucks a mark there.

The tight plunge of his cock brings you so close you have to grab at his neck behind you and simply succumb to his pace. He holds you easily with one arm, spits on his fingers and rubs your clit, and almost immediately you start to come with a ravaged moan, and he braces against your arching back and panting climax until you’re weak and heavy and relishing the thick slide of his cock drawing out.

You hear the giveaway scratch in his breath, and at the last second you kneel and he strokes himself and begins to release on your breasts, hot and dripping, his chest heaving. But just as his eyes roll closed at the peak of the lovely strain, he starts to cough, what becomes a violent, grinding fit that overtakes his pleasure, and he can’t really move, covering his mouth with the back of his wrist. His spend cools as it slides white and thick down your stomach and you put a hand on his thigh in concern. He shakes his head. He has to sit on the bed until it passes. When he’s recovered, his eyes are watering and he stands, reaches for the rag in the basin. A few revving coughs threaten to get him started again.

You ask if he’s okay and he dismisses it and refuses to give you the rag, gently helping you to your feet and taking care to clean himself off you, and you sense his contemplation of your belly, still a little swollen, your breasts too, your thinness elsewhere, you sense what’s on his mind, and begin to fear what feels like that cooling detachment again, until he raises his face to you, sniffs, smiles a little as with his usual care he wipes across the top of your breasts. His eyes are sad on you a moment, but then he kisses you, and he smiles with a resolved shine in his eyes.

“Well ain’t it your turn?”

That rasping tease in his voice. You realize with an ache in your throat how much you’ve missed it, and how can a person feel both the residue of longing and the spark of pleasure at the same time? That turbulence remains as he nods toward the bed, and then he backs up, as if he’s forgotten himself and broken a rule, and gestures for you to proceed, with the formality of ceremony. 

You didn’t imagine the same for yourself, and are now somewhat lost for words, and he sees it. Goddamn smug, that look.

You back up to the bed, and sit on the edge. “All right then, so full of yourself. Get on your knees.”

He’s still got that lively look in his eye as he steps toward you, stands over you, and with two fingers shoves you onto your back. 

You sit up again fast. “I said -” but he’s walking to the window sill and pulling out a cigarette from your pack and lighting it. He takes a drag, coughing slightly, and then holds it for you. Annoyed, you take a drag and then he takes another and stabs it out in the brass tray. 

You exhale your smoke to the side. “Arthur -”

He turns to you, standing closer, and his cock hangs heavy, level with your face, a kind of predicament for you he seems to enjoy. Then he kneels as if it’s his idea.

Slightly annoyed, you try to summon grace. “Kiss me.”

“What was that?” he asks with mock sincerity that makes you wrinkle your nose, and you’re about to tell him to kiss your ass, for all his playing, when he takes your knees in his hands like a door and a jamb and slowly pulls them apart. 

“This what you want?” He kisses the inside of your knee. 

“Taste my cunt.” There’s more than a little insistence in your voice now.

Eyes closed, eyebrows raised, he alights another kiss perhaps a quarter inch further up, and opens his eyes on you with such a flash of self-satisfaction you almost smack his proud cheek.

“You have to do what I say, Arthur, that’s the -” 

“Changed my mind. I wasn’t finished gettin what I wanted.”

He lifts you by your armpits and practically throws you back on the bed, and crawls up to kneel at your feet, and lifts your left leg over his shoulder. When you try to pull it away, he holds it there, fighting you.

“Dammit, Arth-”

He kisses the arch of your foot. He kisses the inside of your ankle. Lips bite at your calf like the most delicate taste of ice cream, his tongue carving around in an obscene wave. He delights in it. 

“You’re ruining it.”

“Am I,” he mouths into the flesh of your calf, his scruff scratching you there in just the way that gets your hips to lift an inch whether you want them to or not. 

You recapture your escaping composure and push yourself to sit up straighter. “Fine, kiss my thigh.”

His head swings to your other leg and he lavishes a kiss on your knee. “I ain’t there yet. Lie back.”

You sigh heavily, though his game-playing is somewhat sweet; you feel that strange inversion, in which, somehow, Arthur on his knees is the one in control, yet you have wanted to feel that deepest sense of him taking care of you, not just wanting to fuck, and if he sees your disappointment, it only seems to incite him, slowing him down to just that tempo of -

He draws a breath from you when he kisses deeper into your inner thigh with the gutted sound of his own satisfaction. Another. His hands travel up your hips, spreading over your stomach, gripping your waist. Despite yourself, you feel a light trickle of your slick.

With each kiss, and the husk of want in his breath, he’s no longer playing, but now moves slow and watches your need with interest. Kisses the softest part of your inner thigh, and in moving to your other thigh grazes your cunt with his chin and your breath deserts you. He looks into your eyes as your hips tilt toward him, and there’s a solemnity in him now, a sense of understanding, as if he’s gotten you to reveal a magnitude he wasn’t prepared to see. He rises, comes up your body, and kisses you so deeply your tears well again.

“Touch yourself,” you say, your whisper shaking. He obeys now, and takes his hardening cock with long loose strokes, and eases down lower, his lips alighting on the sharper bone of your pelvis, the line of your thigh, and just as your back arches with ultimate need he puts his mouth on you and you gasp.

He tongues you in slow, rhythmic waves, each a full and tender adoration, glancing up to watch your progress as if he’s testing you. At first, with each lick a flicker of arousal. But in that slow deliberate accumulation, you are surprised to feel a growing need that’s soon almost unbearable, and he seems to build it with every rise of his tongue. His hot breath there, his seeking mouth. Your need quickens until you have to beg Arthur I need you in… and you will come whether he’s inside you or not but you have to have him inside you now or you will fall apart. As if he knows, he doesn’t stop, his eyes never leaving to see how close he can bring you to the brink before he pauses long enough to pull your high back and to move onto you, chest on your chest, and you take in his cock like a missing piece of you, your moan met with his own as he kisses you. Harder, you gasp against his cheek. He drives his weight into your hips and pulls your leg around him higher, your ankle slipping on the sweat of his back, your heel digging into his working ass. He hits deep within you as a new fullness begins to well up near your spine, and it livens in you until you are unable to withstand the rupture of your own orgasm and cry out. He holds you as hard as he can and fucks you slow through the immensity of this feeling.   When he can’t hold back any longer, he’s overtaken with two hard thrusts and surges tight against you; your high erupts anew and you come again with him, yourselves urging together, an unexpected flood between your legs as he pulls out this time and you whimper and can only lie there panting, but then he’s coughing into the pillow, trying to muffle it, while his hand rubs a reassuring pattern up and down your side.

You wipe your eyes before he can see. 

“You alright?” you ask.

He sits up sniffling, clearing his throat, taking a slow, cautious breath. “Fine. Just been takin a while -” He swipes his hand in the direction of past misery. 

You get up to clean yourself and pour him a glass of water, and watch him pretend nothing is wrong. 

He sits now at the table, still naked, reassembling your Schofield as you lie on the bed. 

“You should be furious at me,” he says, in the compressed voice of deep concentration.

“I was.”

“Good.” He hunches close over his work, twisting the tiny screwdriver. “I can't give you an excuse for it, except I thought it would turn into somethin worse than Blackwater, and sure enough anyway.”

You watch him escaping the worst of the memory by fumbling with the pins. 

“I’m sorry about Hosea. And Lenny.”

He clears his throat, sniffs, and searches the tabletop for the next piece. “Yeah me too.”

From the bed, the ten feet or so that separate you bring to mind all recent distance, and you pull the sheet up to your chest. “What happened on that island?”

As he carefully fits your weapon back together he tells you about waking up on sand. Nothing to do but walk, no trace of things to follow, leaving tracks for unknown ends to come and find him. Revolutionaries and sugar barons and slaves. The odd luck of surviving, and finding a way back after all. Living minute to minute. He coughs lightly, again, and you can watch him suppressing it.

Sitting up with the straightness of satisfaction, he spins the cylinder and sets it down with care, then returns to you in bed, and you roll closer to him. 

“Is that all you wanted to know?” His fingertips spread and retract on your scalp.

“Everything you want to tell.”

“It was boring and terrifyin at the same time.” He smiles. But you will catch him in quiet moments staring distantly, through worlds and terrors you've never seen, and never know, when he comes back with a blink to you, how the light is still captured in his eyes.

While his fingers unconsciously untangle your hair and you are lulled by the slow rise and fall of his chest, you don’t notice him working up the wherewithal to ask again.

“Red,” he murmurs, as if he thinks, maybe hopes, you might be asleep. 

With the sudden shiver up your back you can’t pretend you were. 

“I saw what you wrote. I don't know how to get you to tell me. You don't have to. I just wish you would.”

You sigh, and for a long time you don’t know how to start, and you realize your thumb is rubbing a nervous line back and forth over that part of his stomach. 

“John is in Sisika,” you finally say. “Sounds like they’re planning to hang him in two weeks, maybe less.” 

He is quiet, hardly moving.

You sigh again, bigger. “And the reason I know that -” you push yourself up to sit with your back against the wall, and your heart is hammering in your chest  - “is because that man in the saloon is a Pinkerton. They picked me up -” You swipe away a few tears.

 He’s sitting up now, pulling you close, powerless to comfort what is beyond comforting.

“I tried to lose them, but I was…I should’ve told you too…”

What you can tell him comes out broken, the story that rubble reveals of what was lost. The brokenness of a place, but one unfinished and only dreamed of, so was it broken after all or just a faded dream. A date, only, to mark the absence of something neither of you had seen or known together, and still it broke you. 

“I’m the reason they found us -” An unexpected sob chokes your voice and you cover your eyes, holding back what you can. “I’m not a rat, Arthur, but they’re tailing me now.”

He kisses your temple, blinking in slow shock at all of it. 

You reach for the cigarettes and he gets one from the nightstand and lights it for you. You let it cool your head and exhale what there are no words for, not now, and lean back against the wall. “We can’t leave. I've thought about it. A long time. Every way I can see it going, something goes wrong. Someone gets hurt. You die. I die. Or we are chased for the rest of our lives.” 

He drags on the last of your smoke, coughing as he puts it out, and lies back with you, staring at the stained ceiling together like a corrupted night sky.

“Well I’m gonna kill em,” he says.

“Leave Milton for me.”

He starts to sit up and you pull him back down.

“Not right now -”

“That one’s probably still in there.”

“He’s…he might be useful.”

You’ve never seen such a display of hard-fought restraint as the one on his face right now. The muscle of his jaw simply bulges. He doesn’t say anything for a long time, and turns his face away, watching the shadows move past the window. At one point he clears his throat. Sniffs. 

At length his hand runs along your hip, and makes its way up. He shifts onto his side, and purposefully now brushes his knuckles over your belly. 

He sweeps your cheek with his finger. “I should’ve been here, Nell.”

You drop your gaze between you, until your forehead rests on his. "But you came back to me."

His thigh rides up between yours, his arm curving around your back and pulling you close, and he nudges your cheek with his nose, presses his lips to yours, and bows his head. His breath is warm between you. "Always."

And you lie there, vined together, tight and tender, moving slow, as if burying pieces of a would-be life in each other.

A couple of days later, you ride into town after making your usual reconnoiter, and see her. She is singing softly to herself and crying as she sits on the edge of the boardwalk, and the drunks make way around her. They would have a second look if she weren’t crying, but none of them wants to handle a drunk and crying girl, even a pretty one.  

Bonaparte he commanded his army to stand

He leveled his cannons all over the land

“Miss O’Shea?”

She lifts her face from her knees and squints through her tears. “Oh, Nell,” she says, with a struggling smile. “They said you was here.”

“Are you alright, Miss O’Shea?”

She turns her face back to her knees, resting her chin there, her voice forlorn. “Wish you would say Molly. All Dutch’s manners leave us as strangers, no one knows you.”

You dismount and hitch Apollo some yards off, and sit beside her, glaring at one idiot who veers too close.

Broken-hearted I will wander for the loss of my lover

She drizzles the pendant of her necklace in the dust at her feet, a figure-eight pattern as she rests her chin between her knees and sings.

“You have a pretty voice for singing.”

“I used to sing, I’d sing all day long, though little point there has been, not in so long. Even he found me singing, and it all dried up.”

“Maybe you can start again, once you’re somewhere safe.” When she’s not looking, you take the bottle of wine by the neck and move it to the other side of your boots.

“They’ll think you’re a rat if they find out. They won’t like that. Oh they won’t like that at all, no, no.” She shakes her head many times.

“Find out what?”

He’s my bonny light horseman, in the wars he was slain.

“Find out what, Molly.”

“The Pinkertons,” she sputters.

Your throat closes. All things you might say, they whistle through your head there and gone. You can lie. You can lie up and down to this drunk fool, but they’ll all believe their worst fears, no matter who is telling them.

“Where’d you get that notion?”

“I were only buyin gloves. But I was a good girl, I ain’t said nothin, I was a good girl.” She sniffles and nods to herself. “The man they said was in the saloon with you. Mister Orly. I know him.”

“I’d never rat, Molly.”

“I know that. You know that. Arthur the shining knight will probably believe you. But Dutch -” her voice breaks and her face crumples in a brief sob she strains to hold back, her face screws up in anguish - “and them that wash his feet, they would shoot you sooner than ask. It’s impossible. It’s all impossible.”

You sit speechless beside her, glancing up and down the street to see who else can hear.

“You’re a kind girl, a kind friend,” she says, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her shirt printed in tiny brown flowers, glances at you with a flutter in her lip partway to crying, and you don’t know what to say to this poor creature who has found herself in circumstances that will never show care to the likes of her.

She leans her head on your shoulder. You smell the perfume in her hair, the wine on her breath. Her arm against yours is lithe as a porcelain doll’s, her hand mottled and cold when she takes yours, and you put your other hand over hers to warm it. 

After a minute, when you are afraid you will have to move her or attend her through her drunk, she wavers sitting upright, and manages to stand. She tries to fasten her necklace on, and you help her. You are fearful, as you help her into her saddle, of what will happen, letting her go. Knowing what she knows. You almost follow but think better of it. 

In the end, perhaps it would have turned out no different either way. They shot her. The poor girl, they shot her. She ranted for a time before they did it. A revenge-seeker through and through. Traitorous bitch. For not getting enough attention, the spoiled and preening minx. For not being given the life she was promised. Dragged through hardship, unwilling to work, and weak when things got tough. No wonder she talked. The rat.

Those who were skeptical kept their mouths shut. But then the truth came out anyway. Someone said a red-headed girl was seen talking to a man wearing a Pinkerton badge. So she had it coming after all.

But you sit on the side of the bed in your room as Arthur tells you, and feel only guilt. His own relief is slightly spoiled, but not much. That tipping equation of a gunman’s life. Guilt would always be the lot of the survivor. You live with it. Or you don’t. He walks to you. He crouches, looks up at you.

“We’ll get John. We’ll get them safe and gone. Then we’ll settle this thing for good.”

In his eyes, there’s a faraway look, the kind that scares you. The kind you get too, tunneled on your target, knowing the threats on all sides aimed your way, when in the span of a heartbeat you pick your path and you take it, damn useless fear, and damn all the unknown. It sees the simple truth shared by the survivors and the dead: There is only one way out. So you blind yourself to the dangers, and you run toward the fight.

You take his hand and stand. You stock your bandoliers, you stock your gunbelts. Check your weapons newly cleaned. You do not take much more time than that, for you must be on your way. You have miles to ride, and Missus Adler is waiting.





Notes:

for the curious: bonny light horseman
I used to hate Van Horn, but after spending a lot of time here thinking about the chapter, it really grew on me as a refuge of misfits and unwanteds, and it just fit for Nell. I can absolutely see her adopting a bunch of ragtag acquaintances who are always good for a drink and don't make her talk about herself. Like an old pirate cove. Love a good pirate cove.

Chapter 20: A Moment

Summary:

Reflections everywhere. And unexpected news.

Chapter Text

She had stopped at the crossroads outside the city knowing the Pinkerton was nearby, the following sonofabitch. Ahead of them, the morning plume of river fog coated the city in a dull pink plasm, its strangeness like an unexpected invitation.

“We’ll meet you back here, not sure when or what she has in mind,” he told her.

She said she’d keep herself busy until then, and there was an absence in her voice that has been there ever since he came back. He heard it then, and wanted to get her to say more as if he could counter it somehow.

But she smiled, pulling out a pear from her satchel, and took a bite, chewing as she gazed at him, placid and patient. He turned Georgia up alongside her, leaned over and gave her a kiss, her lips faintly sweet, the taste of pear thereafter married with the taste of her, and as she rightened in the saddle, he saw in the crook of her eyebrow that angle of concern; he ignored it. He headed away, and his ears took in a tunneled sound with the hollow knock of Georgia’s hooves over the bridge.

~

He stood in a parlor room. The kind of place good folk kept for Sundays and kept away from otherwise, with the good furniture and the heirlooms and the lace curtains brought from the old country and the Bible and the ticking mantel clock. The embroidery on the sofa pillow, From mortal deeds are spun the skeins of our eternity. What would he know of the cordial hours spent sitting there, visiting, ruined in the robbed darkness as the husband lay in his blood. The wife’s one brainsplitting shriek. 

Keep your mask up dammit, let’s go. Davey stepped past her, the wale of his trousers zipping against her shoulder. Her hands shook over the body, her mouth a black and soundless sob.

~

Side by side, his boots and Hosea's boots stepped on cobblestones newer than these. A heavy unhurried pace, and echoes of themselves wavering on the walls of wide windowglass. Moving out of the way of the wagon and the horse coming up behind them. The ochre runnels of washwater splashed to rinse away the residue of manure; a man ahead brushed the washed stones with a long broom, lettering on his overalls. 

They were quiet all that while, walking away from the back room where they had met the others at noon and been told the layout of that class of riverboat. Until Hosea asked his thoughts on the matter. 

I ain’t pullin that job with Micah, don't care how keen Dutch is on him. Got a screw loose.

Davey likes him.

He snorted.

Dutch’s expressionless stare had burned when he told him his preference for Hosea’s job. Kept on him for a while, and he stared back. Still with his eyes glazed on him, Dutch had turned his head and then named Micah point. 

We’ve got a good job going, Hosea said, clapping his shoulder as they walked. He’ll see you were right. You don’t carry everyone on your back. Mind-reader, Hosea was.

~

And the Sister, by her voice somehow glad to see him.

Mister Morgan!

The blood was still wet on his fist, some cuts from the bastard’s teeth. He dabbed blood from his nose.

Are you all right?

Dandy, Sister. He tipped his head up and tasted it down the back of his throat. The old man said some words as he left, a few he could make out from what Javier had got through his thick skull, señor, he thought, gracias, maybe, as the feller limped away. The Sister called after him, nothin he understood, and the man replied likewise.

Mister Morgan, you are a defender!

He tried to pretend he hadn’t heard her as he mopped his nose on his sleeve; bleeding more than it used to. She held out her little white handkerchief and insisted it at him until he took it. Patted his shoulder before she left. He heard somewhere later how they never got paid, sisters, for all the riches that church had, and pooled their own alms to bury their dead in the goddamn churchyard where they worked, and that rag would turn up in his trunk sometimes like a small stained trophy of guilt.

~

The hot mountain sun dried the sweat from their bodies quickly and parched them. They were close to the trail that would take them to supposed fortune, but it was too late in the day to set out, and so they set up camp by the west side of the lake and let the horses graze. In the shallows on the southern edge, the water was not as frigid as it was by the frisky stream feeding into it, and he lay out his clothes on a boulder in the sun. He waded out to one boulder, the far side of it revealing the blackblue dropoff, and he dived in and came up with a hoot at the cold, his voice echoing off the rocks, over the dark water and its white clouds like a fabled mirror showing you the all the deceptive expanse of possibility, the thing you wanted most in the world but flipped into its inverse.

He treaded water and turned back, being granted the glimpse of her undressing. The plain unconsidered act of pulling off her sleeves behind her back and the squint of her shoulder blades together. His personal favorite sight of the soft side of her breast as she pulled the undershirt over her head. The round of her backside as she pushed down her trousers, a rightness in her shape as if she had been made with a french curve. She stepped into the water, not daintily but disliking the cold, and as he swam closer and began to walk toward her she held out her finger; he stopped; she stepped in deeper; he came closer, just a yard away, and she said his name low like a warning growl, and they faced off, their limbs tight as mainsprings, and she was quick but he was quicker and hooked her around the waist and threw her in behind him. She came up briefly mad, an auburn sheet clinging to her face, and plunged down again, rising face-up, her hair now a hide of shining sorrel down her back.

That was mean. She swam backward.

Well I’m mean. He swam toward her, caught her kicking ankle and reeled her to him.

You act all mean. Everybody knows you’re soft.

Oh do they all know that? he laughed, and she rose up and put her weight on his head and pushed him under, and he pretended to fight her for a while and then made himself go slack and opened his eyes underwater at the level of her stomach, how her skin gleamed in the opalescent light, her legs slowly shearing with finlike grace. She lightened her strength on him, and when he didn’t surface she hauled him up by his head and at the last moment he surged up, catching the blink of worry on her face before he took her with him underwater.

Silently sinking, unbreathing, that cold and dark abyss below them, bright sky overhead almost too clear through the lens of water for his eyes to stand, it was an endless moment in his memory, her hair around her like a glow cast off precious metal, and the live presence of her body suspended, unencumbered, he wouldn’t say angelic (she’d never let him get away with it) but to him possessing a lineage to the divine. She slipped her arms up under his and kicked herself against him front to front and kissed him. For that unknowable duration they sank some inches, a slow and willing fall, and all at once the most tragic feeling overcame him. When she let go he steered himself horizontal one more moment and preserved in his mind the vision of her rising over him toward that overbrilliant sky.  

They swam until the heat had drained from their bones and then lay on the slab of the boulder nearer to shore to dry and warm up again. She straddled him and water from her hair dripped cold on his stomach as she forged him hard in her hand and when they were ready guided him to her and lowered herself on him. He looked down to watch his cock engulfed in the soft tulip of her shape with the first rise and sink, a sight designed by the gods to devastate him. He lost his mind to feel her strength and in the unbridled constriction witness the arrow of her lifted chin against the cobalt sky.

She lay at his side, her leg hooked over him. He swiped grit off her raw knee. They talked about a house. He found himself caught on the notion of a foundation, a cellar, and the things people kept there unused, stored in preparation for distant seasons. 

‘How do people’ what? she said.

Huh?

You said ‘How do people…’ and got lost in your head there. She rose and with her thumb pressed from the bridge of his nose up his forehead as if sculpting trepidation off his face. 

Realized I don’t know about settlin in one place.

She smiled at such a thought and then tipped her head, seeing it his way.

He traced the light freckles of her arm, the scars. I wonder how a person chooses one view to stick on. He lost track of how long he had been tracing her.

She was silent a while. Does that trouble you? Only one?

Me? No. He stretched and turned on his side, propped his head up. Movin all the time you never see the details for all they are. His hand moved up her side, the rise of that lean muscle there as she shifted too, and curved around her breast, and his thumb slowly circled her nipple, the softest skin in existence, until it came up a rosy knot. 

You stay long enough somewhere, you can take the time to know it through and through. I imagine it takin a lifetime. 

Her eyes contained a velvet depth he couldn’t name but he would gladly spend all his years trying. 

He stops.

Across the street, on the sidewalk against the building, a ten-point buck stares straight at him. He blinks, hardly time to comprehend it before it runs, and he takes a few steps to watch it but it is gone by the time he gets to the corner. The sound rushes back to his ears with a whine, and the buoyancy of his fever and the lightning from the doctor's injection force him to lean on the post of a balcony until he is able to stand and take an unsteady step into the street.

A couple of hours after he'd left you to head into the city, you stand beside Sadie watching a hot-air balloon lift silently away. He isn’t even twenty feet up when she turns to you.

“You up for a ride?” 

You can’t quite pull your eyes away from the sight of him in that thing. “Where to?”

She sniffs, hands on her waist, a savoring stare hanging on her thoughts just beyond you. “O’Driscolls.”

You feel your smile fall and quickly recover.

“Heard of a place they keep up by Annesburg -”

Hacker Mill.

“Gathered up there, god knows what they’re gettin ready for.” She whistles for her horse. “I thought, while you’re a free woman for the day, you might join me on a turkey shoot.”

The sisterly mischievousness with which she includes you in her plan, the way she hooks her arm with yours and smacks your wrist like she’s giving you a gift, is something you never knew you wanted. 

“We’ll just stir em up and root em out. Take a few more out of the world.”

“How many is too many for you?” You can already feel Arthur’s disapproval; for once, you feel guilty, knowing exactly what he’d say.

“You know, I have yet to ask myself that question.” She mounts up and waits for you. “But I’m feelin lucky, how about you?”

You get up on Apollo, trying to match the shimmering excitement in her eyes, when all you feel in all your veins is alarm. “What’s the place like?” 

(Steep mossy hills, the creek, the old water wheel just rotting in the water. Wheat still tries to grow through the cracks from grains spilled long ago. Ten years back, you saw a man tied up and his throat slit on the millstone. If they are there, you guess there are fifteen or more, and if they are there, then something is coming.)

It’s the first time you’ve felt a little better knowing Orly is within easy range. Better still if you could stay goddamn put, but Sadie takes off before you have a chance to think of a good enough reason to hold her back. Any reason at all.

The captain or whatever he’s called has a fast and excitable voice and keeps wanting to point things out to him but he’s too buffaloed at the way they float at the speed of birds, skimming weightless over the tops of tall trees, and the form of a pelican gliding level with them; was it confused to see such a strange vessel in its air.

When they rise into the clouds, he puts out his hand to shut him up. The cool, vaporous air floods in soothing on his lungs, the otherworldliness of that foggy white space around them, the sound of nothing but air, the blindness of it, seeing no end through it; he hardly has time to get used to it in his mind, and suddenly they break through the top of them and he has never been so awestruck. Who imagines being higher than clouds? He has been above them in the mountains, but this here defies all sense. He stares down at them, whiter than anything on earth, and then they pass beyond them, and the drop to the world below takes his stomach with it. He grips the ledge of the basket. A barge on the river lies there tiny as a grasshopper. The men on deck mere moving specks. More than anything, he wants to turn to Nell and share the oddity of the world and the feeling of being on a mountain of air, the danger of plummeting, the exhilaration of vertigo. If this can be so, what other things have they hardly discovered the near edge of?

But it’s only Mister Bullard there, nibbling on a boiled egg, and gesturing at him to pull the line of the torch, and with the island in sight he’s about to get an earful about this. Bullard is nervous when they change course, but easily sweetened up, curious himself at every new sight, Arthur reckons not too unlike his balloon; you blow enough hot air up in him and he’ll float just the same. When bullets sing past them from the prison guards below, he’s upset, naturally, perhaps more for the damage to the basket. Up in the globe of the balloon, a couple of holes let in pipestreams of daylight, though it doesn’t seem to affect them greatly. As to the danger to his own self, Bullard, being something of a daredevil, is quickly invigorated by relief, asking questions, declaring himself lucky, but as they approach land there is commotion on the road below, and as Arthur aims the binoculars down again, it’s not even the second time that day he’s been amazed by what he sees. Ain’t but ten o’clock, and he wonders if it’s been a dream so far. 

Goddamn O’Driscolls. Bullard is enthusiastic as a squire now, gladly taking the controls as Arthur shoulders his rifle, and for a minute or two makes himself useful spotting for him, his high voice chirping clear orientation as to where the next round might come from, six o’clock, three o’clock, bright and lively as a hummingbird until a bullet threads through his chest. He yelps in the surprise of pain, and then is punched by another, and tumbles from the basket lifeless, quick as a flame snuffed out. 

His own hand has done the same to many; he has snatched the light out of their eyes with the stroke of a finger, and used to feel angry at how easily it could be done, when all of life was a great struggle against time and any good man could spend it building and toiling only for none of it to matter, one moment to the next. The bad ones knew the truth, and did their damnedest to waste it. In the end, he reckons, it came as a shock to every man when his time was up or taken away, no matter his previously held assumptions. He’s so high from the injection that he finds his situation serenely fitting in a way, floating without any known bearing as bullets hiss nearby and he discharges each round with scrupulous aim.

You should have known she wouldn’t sit still long enough to make a plan. She’s already firing down from your cover on that little hillside, and there’s no point in getting her attention again. At least she’s not a bad shot. From where you crouch, you plug a few of them before they can return fire. There’s the reloading lull. Shouts across the silence, hard to make out over one man’s dying groans. 

“You boys ready for more?”

Goddammit, Sadie.

“You need help reloading, honey?” one of them shouts back.

Well. 

Someone’s Cattleman is going off again, and she slips away to head in from another side, telling you to head around the back of the mill, and you figure it’s her turkey shoot so you follow her orders, though for half an hour it feels like you’ve just been teasing each other for all the progress you’ve made. At one point you edge along the back wall of the stable and peer around the corner to come face to face with one of the boys doing the same as you, and he freezes there so dumb-faced you regret to think, only after you fire up under his jaw, he might have simply run, had you let him. 

At the back door to the mill, you wait for another stretch of quiet. Voices inside, but not many. And so many dried leaves on the ground there’s no damn point sneaking, all of this such a hapless disaster you wonder if there’s genius in not planning as you ease the door open and it creaks anyway.

“Where is he?” a man’s voice barks.

Two men hold Orly down with his back on the millstone. You recognize one, the older one with the gray braid, but don’t recall his name; the other you’ve never seen, a starved-looking Irishman in a ragged suit three times too big for him, holding a filet knife to Orly’s throat. 

“Kill him; he’d shoot you soon as you turn your back.”

“Saint Denis. They tried him overnight.” When Orly speaks, it seems to flatten him atop that stone. “They’ll hang him at the time and place appointed by the judge.” Tears choke his voice as the skinny one gets a firmer grip on the knife.

You shoot that one first, and the older one turns with a crook of his head as he recognizes you before your second shot.

Orly slides off the millstone and lands hard on his ass. 

Outside, the gunfire has slowed to the occasional pop, and Sadie shouts for you. “I’m headin after em!” and you call back that you’re right behind. On the floor, Orly sits touching his neck, the thin cut slowly soaking blood into his collar, and he’s quiet with that singular relief of the spared, diffident, his dark hair sticking to his face, his mustache stained burgundy from his nose. 

“Quite a feeling, a knife at your neck,” you say. The older one’s blood has spread to your boot, and you step away, scraping it off on the rotted floorboards. “That true what you said, about Colm?”

He nods.

“Thank you,” he says, still staring at the body of the skinny one. He sniffs and wipes his eyes.

You shake your head as you listen at the door for anyone outside. “Don’t thank me.” You turn back to him as you reload. “We aren’t friends.”

His head drops with his heavy knowing sigh. After a moment and with considerable effort he gets up to his feet and then leans on the millstone. 

“Go home, Orly. Get your head right.”

“Miss Riordan, I can’t do that.”

You cross your arms and watch while his delayed reaction continues to unsettle him. 

“I promise to be back where you can find me tomorrow.”

There’s no denying how his shoulders drop, his face eases, even though he tries to hide it, glaring. “Don’t keep me waiting.” Blood continues to bead at the cut.

“You owe me now, Orly; I’m not going anywhere.” You open the door a crack. “Better get that cleaned up, don’t want it to infect.”

A distinct trail of dead and dying green-sashes marks the road going south, and where the trail stops, you hear gunfire through the woods and turn toward it. By the waterside, a couple of men fire across at the billowing wreckage of the balloon and the crouching forms of Arthur and Sadie, and you jump down from Apollo with your Litchfield and take them out walking. 

Across the river, Arthur keeps getting in the way of your shots, and you hiss at him to get the fuck down. When he crouches behind a stump, facing your way as he loads (always smoothly; it makes you jealous sometimes), through your scope he seems in pain, the effort he summons to get back up. You can’t squeeze off more than a couple of rounds before the last of them are running free.

The balloon sways indecisively in place, a bladder of silk still glowing from its torch inside, letting out its warm breath as it settles, and in front of it Arthur stands in tired profile, his rifle held low. He kicks the torch away before the material can catch, and a quiet whoosh of air blows his hat off. He makes some irritated comment to Sadie as he leans down to snatch it back up, and coming to rise he sees you. 

He picks his way across the shallowest point, the water dragging at his boots up to the shins. He’s scraped on one shoulder where the sleeve is torn into a flap, and manages a weary smile as he gets to the water’s edge. “I can’t leave you two alone for an hour.”

You lean forward to kiss him, and your noses touch, your lips touch for hardly the measure of a blink before he jerks back, his eyes wide, and he smiles uncomfortably. You wonder if he’s cut but see nothing. He tries to dismiss it, but when you lean toward him again more deliberately he pushes against your shoulder. His hand stays there, even grips you. The corner of his lips twitches up in apology, but as soon as he opens his mouth to make some kind of impossible confession, he spots something behind you and runs past, gently enticing Apollo away from where he was browsing in the low brush. 

“Can’t eat that, boy, over here.” He leads him toward some harmless weeds well away from that spot. 

He holds up a red maple leaf, crimson as a flame sprung up from his fingers and shakes his head. “Don’t think he got any. Can’t believe it’s already that time of year -” he says, and muffles a few deeply resonant coughs in his sleeve.

“Well, that was close,” you murmur cautiously, just as Sadie is leading her horse out of the shallows. 

“A few less O’Driscolls, anyway. Keep comin up like rabbits. If we could just cut off the head, they’d all wither.” She slips her knife back in her boot sheath.

“They’re going to hang him.” You hear yourself say it, you know there’s a mistake in saying it somehow, but it’s as if you feel compelled to cut out a rib to see if it’s broken.

Sadie straightens up alert as a doe. “What?” 

For a moment, you can’t seem to find the words. “Colm. In Saint Denis. I heard them talking,” you add, hoping it explains you.

And you watch a year lift off Sadie’s face like a shadow under a hatbrim, the color that brightens, the marks that hate and grief will make on a person; you hadn’t noticed them until this moment as her eyes come alive like that. She’s talking excitedly, asking you questions, and Arthur is watching only you, motionless as a spy at the keyhole of your thoughts, and you wish he would look away, wish you could react now with Sadie’s same animation. Instead, your head feels full and numb, and suddenly you are very, very tired.

“They won’t announce it until the day before. Don’t want him getting sprung again.”

“Oh we’ll make sure of that,” Sadie says, her lip curling.

“He’s just a man.” 

In her excitement, perhaps, or the pressure of rage she has kept inside all that time, she doesn’t see what you hide, that heaviness you feel sinking through you like tar. Oh, he is not just a man, you are told. The things he has done have torn worlds apart. He is not just a man; he is greed itself, hoarding power beyond what any one man should hold, and for no reason other than because he is brilliantly violent. Sets his lackeys loose to punish the good with their chaotic rage at what the world hasn’t given them. And once, out of the way of everything, lived two decent people wanting nothing more for themselves than a small place to nurture, to work together, where they could love each other ceaselessly, a little land to sustain themselves and their friends, or perhaps to help a couple of strangers begging shelter on a cold night. For that, they were killed by his reckless men, one in the flesh, one left to drift in vengeant desolation. 

No, he is not a man. His guns, they are lower still. She says it plainly like you know this too. As you do. 

“But we will watch the body of a man hang, so they can all see what little he really was.”

And surely you must want the same relief, you guess is her assumption, from the squeeze she gives your upper arm. She has never asked about it. You don’t wear the colors of a cruel soldier of chaos. Would she blow a hole in your head if she knew?

She counts her remaining ammunition and is already mounting up, calling over her shoulder to meet her at Copperhead Landing in a couple of hours. 

Sixteen. The spray of blood spitting from the hole in a man’s esophagus was as fine as atomized perfume, the man himself unconscious while his chest pumped out its dying breaths. To Colm, this two-legged impediment had been in need of your bullet. Give him another; he’s still screaming. 

(Your place in the root cellar, any time you shot your mouth off. A week without light among the apples and potatoes. You still can’t stand them.)

Seventeen. The little outpost - he enjoyed outposts, like he led some conquering army - where the men cleared through, scrounging for everything of value. Everything. Bolts of fabric - the fuck did you ever need bolts of fabric for? Twelve dead. 

(The new horse, a butternut buckskin, and new Stenger saddle he gave you on your sixteenth birthday. Named him Cyrus. Always gifts he gave you after every chore - as he called them - that he sent you on.) 

Nineteen. Train robbery outside Lincoln. The rolling farmland all around you, settled and parceled neat with barbed wire fences that made for tricky getaways. But it had been a flawless train job, and so you could ride easy. The bang of something behind you made you jump, your reflexes hot as lightning sometimes, and before you gave it a thought, your Cattleman was in your hand. A single shot. That odd silence afterward, the bloodless moment before the wound begins to leak and you wonder did it really hit? Then the ugly lonesome groan of comprehending, lowing uncomfortably into the silence of all of you who didn’t give a damn about what was lost. The clawing, voice-shredding sound from that new widow’s throat and the horseshoe shape of her howling mouth as she burned those words into you. You have no soul! The man, her husband. He’d dropped off the steps in a clump of instant death on the track ballast, shit leaking, piss leaking, the indignity of the killed. The men with you laughed, and to your dying day you will feel pain to know you had laughed even a moment with them in the face of such incomprehensible grief.

(The gnawing agony of iron cuffs around your ankles. You hung six hours for pushing down Colm’s gun with the men watching. And he shot the girl anyway as she ran. Took you a month to walk right.)

“You okay?” Arthur asks from the other side of Apollo. He’s giving him a good brush after his hard ride, and you, meanwhile, realize you’ve been standing there smoothing the hairs of your left eyebrow, staring at the ruins of the shack at the landing, and are reminded of nervous animals who lick their coats bare in places, and go back to digging in your saddle bag for a box of cartridges. 

“Thinking you’d be upset with me.”

“What for?”

“Stirring up hornets.”

You’re wearing his old bandolier. Half-emptied from the day. He gives Apollo a handful of meal with a pensive crooked smile. 

“Should I be upset?” he says, focused on Apollo, patting his neck.

“You usually are.”

“You’re alive, you ain’t hurt -” he glances over Apollo’s withers at you - “and the world ain’t come to an end, so,” he says, his voice hoarse, “I guess I can’t be.”  He focuses on his brushing and inhales slow and deeply, seems to hold it before letting it out, appraising Apollo’s face and reaching up to scratch his ear like a dog when he says, “Thought you might have somethin on your mind after what you said back at the river.” 

You catch his eyes checking you sideways, though he hardly moves.

“Not really.”

“Nell you look about ready to cry.”

“I don’t know yet,” you snap. Which is as good an admission as he is going to get and which you are willing to give to yourself, so he nods, sniffs, needlessly adjusts Apollo’s bridle. Quiet all of thirty seconds, working that buckle like he’s wiring a charge.

“Hangin Colm O’Driscoll.” There’s a wise half-tease in his voice. “And you ain’t rejoicin.” 

You grab your cigarettes and stalk away.

Some time later, as you sit on the end of the dock, the unhurried thumps of his boots approach. He stops beside you. Between his index and long finger he holds out the matches you forgot in your retreat, and after you accept them he eases down to sit.

You light a smoke. He shakes his head when you offer.

The water shines in a paisley rainbow film in the overcast light, and the stench of the dead fish floating, their white bellies prodding at the waterline, is strong without a breeze to clear it. 

“I sometimes think she forgets who she’s runnin with.” He swings his boots over that oily water.

“Don’t think she fully knows what I am.”

What are you?”

“A murderer. His gun.”

“Ah.”

At that point in the river that is bifurcated by the distant island in its center, an old barge, as old as the war or older, lies half-sunk among the foggy shoals on that side, as if it had been dragged there by the inexorable current and failed to maneuver correctly, and so its failure was evident to the rest, a warning to steer away from there.

“You set out to be a murderer, ten years old?”

“Don’t try to make me out like some victim.”

He wipes his nose, and leans back on his hands, silent the way he is when he knows he’s right about something.

“I deserve to hang, same as him.” A notion that makes you sick every time you imagine it.

He swings his boots, checks the soles, and digs out his binoculars and peers across the cloudy span of water, at the watchtowers, and the farther shore. From that side, the strains of eerie singing reach you, river songs of some religious nature, and he hands the binoculars to you. There is a gathering of folk on the edge of the water, white-robed and watchful, as one in brighter raiment leans one of their kind back into the water and lets him sink under and holds him. A while longer than seems easy. As if there is a point in holding him under and bringing him up kicking and scrambling for footing again, sputtering, clinging. The singing gets louder as he wades out newly blessed and fearful, and another one steps in. A rusted barge steering down cuts between you and the spectacle, and after its long impartial passage the fog is too thick to see them.

He accepts the binoculars when you hand them over and puts them away, leans back again, talking like he could be sitting at a kitchen table. “I was up a thousand feet in the air this mornin. Could’ve been more, ain’t sure. Saw Marston.” 

When you glance back at him, he’s checking his torn sleeve and brushing the scrape on his shoulder, probably trying not to look at you.

“Everyone was tiny as fleas.”

“Oh? You impressed by man’s insignificance?”

He huffs easy, unoffended in a way that aggravates you right now. “Weren’t that. I ain’t sure what to make of it yet.” He sits up, leans forward, loosely folding his hands. “Wished you was there.”

For a while you sit there in that foggy stillness, both staring at the water between your boots, you at your own bitter reflection, while he seems to be watching a slow perch deep below him among the weeds. You notice him open his mouth as if he’s about to say something, an uncomfortable smile pulling at his cheek, showing the side of his teeth, like when a biting truth hits home. He shakes his head, and stares out at the water, and the island of prisoners, the fog that seems to want to sweep you all up. A few drops of rain trouble the glassy surface.

He coughs a few times into his shoulder. “It ain’t all your fault.”

“Oh, I definitely pulled my own trigger.”

“Ain’t talkin about that part. You and I gotta live with that.” He sets his hand beside yours and moves his thumb alongside your little finger, as if he’s remembering a night long ago, and a burned-out town and all the things that happen when a spark turns into flame. 

“You was just a kid when he caught you up in it, and he would’ve left you for dead at any point. And you knew that. Even back then. You weren’t actin out of any instinct but survival, and barely that.”

Your cigarette drops with a hiss into the water, and you look down between your hanging boots and reach your toe to touch the surface of the water that seems to stick to your sole. “You telling that to yourself or me?”

He sighs, coughs again, spits into the shallows. “Red, I understand you’re upset, I ain’t gonna try to argue. But don’t whip yourself on his behalf.”

With the sting of that particular insight, you’re about to show him upset, but he’s sitting there taking a breath as if he's unable to believe what he’s about to say next, his pupils wide, sweat dripping down his temple. 

“Nell -” 

He shakes his head, blinks, smiles in some kind of loaded amazement.

The sound of an approaching horse breaks that moment like a thread, and you turn. Sadie slows up, pulling Georgia in tow, dismounts and tethers both horses quickly. When she gets to you she doles out boxes of cartridges like small Christmas presents, and pushes between you to the rowboat tied up alongside the dock.

Each buck of the paddlestroke seems to insist you look at him, although he now won’t look at you, half-listening to Sadie and working hard at the oars, breathing as though he has to think about it. It’s not the solemnity of getting his head straight before a fight, but you convince yourself it must be.

He runs like you’ve seen him run. You tell yourself that too. His body is leaner than even yesterday, and it shows when his shirt clings to him, and although you see his chest heaving, he is fast. The shocks of pain in his face are only temporary. You run close to him. When you get to the field, you give cover as he takes control of the guard and forces him ahead. He is still powerful, and for a few moments at least you feel powerful walking alongside him, gesturing for the guards to set down their weapons and run for it.

But the front gate of that fortress was built with the intention of crushing all hope at man’s first glimpse of it. The wall rises a sheer thirty feet, guards posted every twelve feet along its upper rim, all of it red brick, the kind made by prisoners, as if to show them the fate they have built for themselves. Your stomach sinks desperately as you approach it over the bridge, and you can’t look at Sadie or Arthur as you start to reckon with the number of shots you think you can issue before one catches you, when all of a sudden he bellows out a name. You swear, wipe the sweat off your forehead, grip your rifle. 

Perhaps you should know better by now.

At some point you realize you’re watching him in awe. The balls that man has to stand there with a single guard, holding a mere six-gun to his temple, inducing a grown man to whimper in the act of counting to sixty, and making hesitant a whole line of guards up top, their rifles aimed.

For a few electric moments, he holds an entire prison captive. They send John shuffling out as if this was the arrangement all along; even Arthur glances at you, incredulous. But you are sighting the watchtowers for snipers with the reflexes of a goddamn squirrel, your nerves buzzing, scanning the turrets and the upper ledge, checking the low cover for any stupid guard about to get brave. Sadie shoots his leg irons free, and Marston jogs past you with a nod.

And all at once, it takes your breath away. 

How simple it was. 

Exhilaratingly so. You think you’ve never seen so clear.

Nothing ever comes free, of course, you remind yourself when the firing starts, and so you don’t waste a shot, picking them off like a line of bottles on a fence. Arthur has to grab you by the belt to lug you back across the bridge. You race through the cotton fields, bullets vaporizing the bolls on their sharp stalks, and cotton fibers swarm the air as the dried plants claw and cut you running. Shots bury into the cotton bales with the sound of a punched pillow. Behind one, you see him doubled over, his head almost to his knees on the ground, and between shots you dart over to him. He’s red-faced and gasping, though when he sees you he shakes his head, and seems to recover as if he was just taking a moment to reload. He’s slower running to the boat, so you bide your time, covering him and clearing off the ones on horseback before you sprint the rest of the way. The whole ride back, bullets shoop into the water on either side of the boat, perhaps in part because of Sadie’s erratic rowing, and more likely the poor aim of low-paid prison guards. With a hiss of disappointment, you miss the last two, but you’ve never shot two hundred yards with a Litchfield before, in a rowboat, one knee up on the seat and all sorts of things on your mind. 

The tirade you withstand when it’s over sees the four of you standing in camp like chastised school children. The timing not right, the plan not followed, and it’s curious, Dutch’s enraged glare; there’s fear in it. He tries to dress Arthur down, who only stands there unrepentant, though despite being in the right he’s in a hell of a mood and has to go tend to Georgia for a while. John holds Abigail behind him; his hand remains on her hip. When Micah backs away as though he is personally disgusted with all of you, you stare him down, daring him to approach you. Two new faces lurk over by the cave, a brute and an underfed hillbilly, and Micah retreats to them. You watch for any skill there to contend with. So far, they don’t let on to much.

That night, there are no parties. No music crackling from the phonograph. No drinking, no stories, no hands of poker. The few around the fire do not reminisce or bullshit or tell jokes or sing. Dutch’s tent glows in the mouth of the cave, the figure within never sleeping, never stopping, his shadow pacing, his mind racing. Arthur hasn’t seen him change his clothes in days, and tells you he saw him shaving with a knife blade, not a razor, though he had a razor in his kit. Acting odd in other ways.

He stretches out on his cot and you lie back in the crook of his arm, both of you staring at the canvas ceiling.

“So all it takes is shootin up a prison the size of a town?”

“What?”

“You was about ready to eat me alive before we set out for Sisika.”

You kiss his arm. “Seems that way.”

He coughs lightly with his mouth closed, but before you can ask him what’s wrong he’s telling you how good he feels after running through those fields, as if he’s talking about working Georgia out, and how it cleared his head, and deep down you know it’s because you want to believe him that you do.

The meager chatter by the campfire dies down and the owl nearby leaves to hunt. In the remaining stillness, you begin to hear the faint whispers of cloth somewhere nearby, the slow groan of a cot frame. The unmistakable quiet wet sounds of mouths on skin. Arthur clears his throat, and there is silence for a moment, and then one sigh barely withheld. You both quickly get up from his cot, hardly able to look at each other. The moon is out, low and large above the ridge, and you walk hand in hand down the path, past Javier on the watch, down along the river, where streams of moonlight pour through the leaves of the sycamore tree overhanging the water and shine coinlike on the river stones. 

“I never knew you could hear it that clear,” he says, and you smirk, and the old mischief in his voice is reassurance like wine; you feel it in your head and your heart. 

“Better keep to my room in town.”

He nods, though you sense in the back of his mind there’s a simmer of something. You know it, too, from the grip of his hand clasped with yours, and how suddenly he’s walking you backward to the ghostly bark of the tree. He goes straight for your neck before you have a chance to meet his lips, and kisses down to your collarbone with a fury you haven’t felt from him in some time, his ragged breath telling you what he wants. He lightly bites at your nipple through your shirt and your head drops forward as he lowers on his knees unbuckling your belt and slides his hand under your waistband, taking a hard handful of your ass before he shaves your pants down your leg.

“Arthur let me wash up first,” you whisper. 

He kisses your thigh. “No.”

“Dammit, Arthur, we’ve been…all day -”

“Don’t care.” He’s muffled by the inner crease of your leg and his tongue there makes you draw up.

“Well I care -”

“Red, honey, no offense -” Forced to look up, breathless, in that single burning gaze he melts you. “I ain’t waitin.” 

His mouth is on your cunt before you have a chance to get a hand on the tree and you almost stagger over his shoulder and hold onto his head. He grunts as you grab a fistful of his hair, and smacks your ass so hard your knee gives way.

When you tease him later and ask him point-blank if he had lost himself in the moment, or whether he was acting out of a spirit of brotherly competition with the casual intention of letting John hear how it’s really done, he simply says, “I had to.” 

By the time he has turned you around and started to work one-handed at his fly, you feel dazed by the intensity of your first high and you hold the trunk of the sycamore, watching where the moonlight sheds down and shatters over the water but never moves. The water flows through it, and although you can’t account for why, it feels important to take in a sight as simple and eternal as light within water on that particular night. He kisses your shoulder, tastes your neck, wraps his arm under yours, his hand snaking across your chest and squeezing your breast, his boot sweetly tapping your ankle. You pant to feel him gliding hard between your lips, slicking himself, his low voice rumbling in your ear, are you ready for him, and you never really are. You are always stunned by him, the ways he loves you, what he gives you, what he asks, what he doesn’t. Such a pretty warm night, and some events have come to good, and some to hope, and others to await your future turn. 

Sometime in the morning it’s the heat that wakes you. Your fingers are entwined with his, his arm hanging heavy over your side as he sleeps against your back, absolutely radiating heat to a point that leaves you gasping. 

“Good god, Arthur,” you whisper, untangling yourself, damp with sweat from his body, standing up, and are immediately chilled by the air in the tent. 

He groans, muffled in the thin pillow, and coughs several times, a sound so newly awful this morning it takes you a while to realize you’re staring. When he turns over, you catch him straining to take a few huge breaths, and he shakes his head at you, it’s nothing, and you know in your bones that it’s not.

But then the sawing precursor of a fit begins in his chest and he manages to get up and sit on the edge of the cot, hunched over his knees, suffering a long chain of wet coughs before he can manage to draw more air that’s forced out of him again until his eyes are watering and threaded red. His lungs afterward sound like gravel. There is blood on his sleeve. You stare at the blood on his sleeve. 

He wipes his eyes, his mouth, sniffs, tries to smile, and faces away. He reaches for a clean union suit from his trunk and changes out of the sweat-damp one while still sitting. He shivers, and the muscles of his sides and chest jump as if he’ll start in again. When he stands, he seems cautious about it, and buttons himself up and searches around for his trousers.

“Must be later than I thought,” he rasps. Tight smile. Still not quite looking at you.

You feel numb as you dress automatically, watching him check the watch on the table and seem to find himself in a hurry all of a sudden as he steps into his boots and pulls them on.

“Where are you going?” you manage to ask.

“Helpin a friend with somethin, should be back this afternoon.” He drags his suspenders up as if he is trying not to move very much, and when he ties back one side of the tent flap, the air outside is chilly enough that he turns back to his trunk and crouches down to open it. The notch at the base of his throat deepens with the effort of every breath.

You have to work up some courage to speak, for all his pretending going on. “Maybe you can go see a doctor afterward.”

He pulls out his old buckskin jacket and eases it on as he stands with his back to you, and you’re about to say it again louder when Jack sneaks inside past him under the flap of his coat.

Abigail can’t catch his sleeve fast enough, and she leans against the pole, smiling apologetically at both of you. “You say hey first, Jack, don't just barge in.” 

“I'm sorry.”

“Keepin him busy, all the excitement now that John’s back,” she says to you, awkwardness in her shrug.

He stands close to you with something in his hands, and you're frantic trying to catch Arthur’s eye before he heads out. Jack holds up a mound of seeds close to your face, each sporting a tuft of fibers on one end.

“They look like bugs.” His big eyes want you to find them exciting, and all you can think about is the pattern of blood on Arthur’s sleeve.

“Yeah they do look like that.”

“He’s all about seeds and bugs and little things now for some reason.”

“You gonna plant them?”

Abigail shakes her head. “We’re waitin until we’re someplace we’re gonna stay at a long time so we can watch em grow, ain’t we Jack. Can’t nothin nice grow in this place.”

Arthur is watching you intently, and then blinks at some harsh intrusion on his thoughts and picks up his hat from the table.

“I don’t wanna stay here,” Jack mutters.

“Neither do I.”

“Do you want some?” he asks. You nod in a daze. His little fingers pinch them one by one to put them in your cupped hand, and Arthur is putting his hat on, and your throat begins to ache. Abigail shares a smile that is sad and proud. She tells Jack they should go and leave you alone.

“Thank you both,” Abigail mouths as she shuffles him out. “Thank you.”

And before you can say another word to him, Arthur takes a half step toward you, and haltingly kisses the top of your head and leaves.

Mason walks slow beside him atop the ridge in the long morning light. The dewy grass clings to their boots and snags them. He carries the camera, and Arthur carries the tripod, and no word is said about the hard climb. When they stop for a third time, Mason straightens up as if he meant to stop for the view. Gulping for air himself, and smiling. When Arthur is ready again, they go on. He doesn’t ask where Mason means to stop. By now he thinks Mason doesn’t know the place he wants until he sees it. 

When they reach a vista with a long view of the ridge and the slope of the valley and the Grizzlies beyond, Mason stands for a longer time, so Arthur sits on a stump to wait. A photographer looks out at landscape different, he supposes. Mason doesn’t care he’s watched, with his attention on the horizon, the light, the shapes in view. His arms hang easy. He asks to borrow his binoculars; Arthur finds them, and Mason stands for a long time searching the high overlooks for the eagle he’s aiming to shoot.

While he waits, Arthur pulls out his journal, concealing it slightly, propped on his boot on his knee, and copies the snaking line of the horizon. No good at landscapes usually. Too much there to set in the detail on a small page. Anyway, he’s got no mind for it this morning, it keeps getting caught on other things, the strange spell of recent days.

“What have you got there?” Mason asks, a little winded from getting his equipment put up.

He smudges shading on a young tree with his ring finger. “I draw a little when I got the time.”

He would almost feel uncomfortable at Mason coming over to see, standing over him appraisingly, but the man doesn’t set him off ease like others.

When Mason asks to see more, he shows him the view over the sound north of Annesburg, and shows him the shoals near Copperhead Landing, and does not show him the many sketches of Nell.

“Oh these are quite good.”

“Nothin like your pictures. They take a long time. Things change - shadows.”

“Ah, but you are interpreting the world. I am merely blinking, and what happened in that flicker of the shutter is what emerges on the slide.”

“Just that little moment.”

“But every moment is an expression of all the time that came before it, and if you can capture that, well.” He looks out on that vista. “That’s the elusive goal, at least.” 

“That’s an interestin way you put it.” Arthur surveys the hill they’ve walked, and the breeze bending branches and a finch flying past, the array of sparks and flutters and movement contained in all fragments of time.

“The light on the water is well done.” Mason points to the shoals.

“I started it in the mornin. By the time I was finished it was two hours on, and the light’s different.”

“I know the feeling. I can set up a shot for two hours and when I miss that perfect moment, it won’t come again.”

“You oughta try your hand at shootin a gun sometime.”

“I’m afraid I would make about as good a marksman as I do a photographer.”

His self-deprecating laugh. This man who shoots straight-on and never kills. Arthur closes the journal and puts it away, and stands with that flush of lightheadedness he’s starting to get used to. 

“Well I think you’re probably better than you think, same as with your pictures.” 

The quiet morning light washes over the ridge, and in the distance there is a waterfall. Songbirds cross the wide sky.

“It is all just moments, ain’t it.”

Mason glances at him, and back out at the view, his hands on his hips. 

“Try to trap em, like a bird in a cage, but it ain’t the same.” 

“No. It isn’t the same.” There’s a sadness in Mason’s voice.

“I didn’t mean to insult your work.”

“That’s not how I took it.” Mason hesitates, and then puts a hand on his shoulder. They share the vibrant living view of that moment of the world, the mountains the only constant form as the clouds and the breeze and the light change and flow and decay around them. An elk carcass decomposes on the eastern side of the near foothill. A murmuration of starlings twists and expands in a powerful geometric undulation like a skyborne whale. The waterfall beats the rocks smooth over centuries. 

“Would you take my picture, Mister Mason?”

“Why sure -” 

“Trap a moment. For someone.”

“I’d be glad to.”

He stands like Mason tells him to, as natural as he can when thinking about it, and behind him the western sky. Not a bad view. Mason takes his time adjusting the heights of the legs of the tripod, fiddling with the lens, and so his gaze drifts off, and he thinks, if she were there, how she would look watching the distance, pointing out birds and the white specks of mountain goats up in the hard terrain, while he would be caught up mapping the light on her face. But the waterfall beyond pours out relentlessly, as if to remind him about time, how it all gets washed away in the end. And he thinks of another time at a waterfall, long ago, and the sweetness of all things just beginning.

The click of Mason’s camera makes him turn. 

“Oh, sorry, wasn’t payin-” 

“No, no.” Mason waves a hand as he straightens. “That’ll do, I think.”

 

 

Chapter 21: The Widow

Summary:

“This life tries again and again to put hardship between us,” you say. From this vantage point, the grave is hardly visible, and Orly on the far side acts as if he isn’t watching.

Arthur nods, thoughts still moving ahead of him into the dark.

“But it’s failed every time.”

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Part One

In the bright morning sunlight, the abandoned fort over Mossy Flats has slowly turned a secret garden, warmed and climbed high with flowering vines, and could even be thought lovely if not for the littered yard within. Rusted cans and bullet casings and sandbags form the ruins of warplay. A yellow and black flag has faded to the color of a gangrenous smear in the sky, frayed but still flying when the breeze picks it up. Someone piked a skull on a bayonet fashioned to a stick, and arranged further skulls at its base, an effigy of death, but more comical than menacing, considering its placement, on the inside.

Tanager calls ring high and clear and everywhere in the cool morning breeze. You climb up to the catwalk to get a better view of the trees in hopes of seeing one, but it’s just the crystal whistling in the air, no darts of scarlet among the branches. It sounds more like a signal than a song.

And you hate the unsettling hollow in your gut that tells you something is terribly wrong, and the yarrow stipples the hillside like bloodstains on his sleeve. If you could find him and steal him away from all this, you would be halfway to Mexico but there is no time. Never time. Slow urgency everywhere, and no moment for slipping away to tend to matters other than the immediate problem in your faces.

So here you wait. High on the catwalk, you sit and your legs hang over the edge as you study the courtyard and imagine the piece of shit kind of operation this had been in its heyday, when you hear the chucka chucka chucka of Orly’s horse coming up the road. You wonder why he paces his horse like that, whether he has a condition that requires such a grandfatherly evenness in the gait. He glides up the hill from the east, and even from that distance he keeps a damning stare on you until he’s stopped his nag in the courtyard, and sits there glaring up. 

“I said I’d be here,” you say.

The bandage around his neck would make him look trussed for a formal dinner, but for the black crescents under his eyes and his bruised nose. Between his index and long finger he pinches the piece of paper you had pinned to the hitching post outside the Old Light.

“You said you’d be there.”

“I was, and you weren’t. Guess I’m lucky you aren’t your partner. But time was wasting.”

“You’ve got him the next few days, so mind yourself.”

“Which one?”

“Johnson. Keep your head, I’m saying. Can’t wait to see what I come back to,” he mutters.

“Might as well be jail.”

He slumps, forearms on the horn. “Nell,” he says, rubbing his eyes gingerly. “What’s this about?”

You tilt your head to light the second half of a cigarette you had saved. “Do you like it?” You sweep your open hand at the courtyard and its trash.

Orly doesn’t have much of a sense of humor this morning.

“A monument to failed men. Violence. Bad ideas.” You blow at the ember to see it glow. “Why do they all love flags so much?”

“You’ve got about a minute before I lose my patience.”

“Thinking I might claim it. Fort Riordan.”

“Big trouble yesterday at Sisika,” he says.

“There’s always trouble at Sisika. Fort Nell?” You wrinkle your nose, shake your head.

He pulls this big sigh like he hates the game, and still plays along in mock gossip. “Sounds like a friend of yours got sprung right out the front gate. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

You take a long drag off your smoke and flick the ember until it drops in the mud. “Me, Orly? How would I know about a thing like that.” 

“I get some heat put on me when an associate of my subject escapes prison and I’m on duty, and a person bearing close resemblance to my same subject was seen shooting guards in the attack.”

You squint down at him for a bit, the pale sun high above you, and bring your legs up to stand. For a man who nearly had his head fileted from his body a day ago, he seems well.

“Sure wish I could help you, Orly. I wasn’t anywhere near there.”

You step over a pile of sandbags on the catwalk and make your way through the turret to the partially collapsed catwalk on the other side.

“But if I had been, I’d find it pretty interesting.” You jump down and kick some old shell casings out of the way. The brass skips musically ahead of you.

There he is, a male tanager, bright as the flame on an arrow sailing overhead, and you watch him pass from sight beyond the walls.

“Find what interesting.”

You bill your hand over your eyes and squint up at Orly glaring down.

“What it takes to free a person.”

The widow up at Willard’s Rest had been a sight of the kind a person hated to come upon in wild country, like a sleeping fawn not far from the carcass of a doe. She had knelt by the grave consumed by her own mourning, and didn’t hear him approach and dismount, even when he tried to make himself obvious. When he cleared his throat, she jumped like a startled bird and her tears streamed faster, but he was struck by how she staggered to her feet like she wished he was evil and would just do her the favor quickly. 

Her eyes were round with starvation. How long she’d been hungry, he couldn’t tell; her clothes weren’t too large on her. Helpless out there. Her voice was low, in possession of her mind still, her eyes clear but threaded in grief. He found himself forced to ask how she would take care of herself, and was surprised by her frankness to tell him she had nothing, and could do nothing, wondering if that was her way of asking for help. Which he did give, and passing the husband’s grave as he escorted her up to the homestead there, he realized it was too shallow, and that was how, after she went inside and he heard the scrape of the board to lock the door, he came to find himself now digging.

The poor bastard, coated in black dirt, had taken a deep slash to the throat; suffered longer than a man should. A week, she'd said. His paunchy suited body lies on its stomach as he digs deeper, and with each ditch of the shovel he hacks his growing fury into the ground. Who were you, you soft bastard, to drag her out here unprepared, on your fancy whim to live simple? Did you know what simple is? Did you know what you was askin, and in your soft mind livin large, did you assume she would die first or did you make your peace to leave a widow here someday? She said you wouldn’t want her to give up on your idiotic dreams, who the hell did you think you were. 

And how’d he come to get here digging a grave in the first place seemed a farce of its own kind. Follow some urchin from Annesburg up north on Dutch’s sayso, meet some Marxist fugitive about the dynamite, crazy feller, he was told. But the Cornwalls and capitalists of the world despised him, and so he was judged fit.  

The place the kid had led him to was said to resemble a gas lamp. When the rain started, he made up his mind to send John out for shit like this from now on, and it was getting near dark when they came to it and the kid took off, leaving him at the steps of that mad structure with a strange glow in the domelike tower behind it.

He stood at the door saying “Tuscarora” to the glowering upper half of a face through a slot in the door. The slot closed. Voices inside debated him for a while, and finally the door opened and he was led by a short hobbly fellow through a dim hallway with a few men along it watching him pass. Whole place looked like a mineshaft, which was fitting, he supposed, for miners, as he was guided downstairs and realized he was being followed by two burlier men intended to remind him of his manners.

He followed the short man through the passageway, hunched, holding his hat when it kept knocking against the braces, until they came to a chamber down below and a headache hit him so quickly he couldn’t open his eyes for a moment, and whatever fumes rose in that place, it felt like breathing smoke through a reed. He instantly started to cough and had to calm it down with every ounce of concentration he could muster, and breathe as though he could teach his lungs to tolerate fire.

“Ah, a neophyte,” came the hollow roar of a voice so hoarse it called to mind moth-eaten rags. Other men laughed, and Arthur forced open his eyes. The man seated at the table strewn with papers and maps fit half on the chair. His volume of a gut lopped over his belt and he kept one leg up on another chair, a crutch hung on the back of it. The ends of his hair were red, the roots white like embers quickly flared and gone to ash, his large beard the same gradation of flame. His eyes were wild and severe as an owl’s. The seven or so men in that chamber moved around him like a general, though when his crutch fell, he reached down for himself, far behind him to retrieve it, and sat back up, red in the face and puffing.

Within the amber glow of that cave burned the feeling of the fuse-headed time before war. Like men inside the belly of a wooden horse. A certain excitement without joy. A feel of something about to spill. The busyness of the preparations of the righteous; they don’t make war for gain beyond survival. It’s the bosses, with their trained armies, cold and scared and realizing in their towers that power’s whore is fear. He thought he must be feverish, thinking crazy like that, the fumes scouring his chest.

In the corner, a group of men sat over their work at a low table and a rope was strung around them like a boxing ring.

“Are you Roy Fincannon?”

The man at the table scrutinized him wild-eyed, poking the nib of his pen into the tabletop.

“I’m here for Dutch Van der Linde.”

“You’re late.”

A kid in the corner kept aiming a funny scowl at him. Skinny, dark-haired, vexish, and for that reason familiar somehow. The kid rolled ink over a small press while another cranked several small papers through and stacked them in uniform piles.

His lungs started to feel half-drowned and he grabbed at the button of his collar but it was already open. 

“It bother you?”

“Does what bother me,” he rasped.

“Nitro.”

Jesus christ. 

The word alone was enough to take a man’s breath away. He could not move. He could not so much as look around. Everything about that room seemed to crackle like sparks on a fuse. Both his hips might as well be loaded with kegs of goddamn blasting powder for as high as he could blow them just moving wrong. He cursed himself not remembering if his sixth slots were loaded and one careless slip from hitting the firing pin and he wouldn’t risk spooking his guards to check.

The man at the table laughed so loud he was an explosion of his own kind and it made him twitch. “We’re used to it by now; I forget how it hits a man.”

Arthur tried to stifle his cough but had to turn away, and muffled a long attack of it in his sleeve. He’d heard of men just clapping their hands and accidentally setting off a share of the good stuff, and he was in the middle of that horrific notion when one of the men spoke up from where he leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, “Are you sure about him Roy?”

“Course I’m not sure.”

“Leadville comes to mind.”

“He’s not a Pinkerton.” The kid by the press came closer now, jumpy, nervous to speak up, and seething.

Which was when he realized how he knew him.

“You sure about that, Downes?” The man against the wall straightened up.

“I am. But you shouldn’t entrust him with any plans, all the same.” 

Two of the men stepped closer, but Fincannon held up a hand. The ones crouched at the low, roped-off table didn’t glance up from their smooth and busy blackened fingers and clever tamping tools and their red paper tubes and the lengths of precut fuse.

“Why shouldn’t we trust him.” Fincannon kept his smile fixed on Arthur, as though he’d posed a riddle to them all.

“He’s an outlaw. And he killed my father.” The way the kid said it, cold and hard as bedrock, forced him to consider his first move, should it come to that. Which of the men guarding him he might have a chance against.

“This man?”

“Beat him. When he was too weak to survive it. I wouldn’t trust him not to give us away.”

All eyes funneled to him, all but the ones focused on their volatile task at the table.

“Calm down son. He’s a useful man to have around. A heartless one.” Fincannon stared at him a little too wise, and by then the air in there was like breathing kerosene straight out of the barrel. The Downes kid glaring hateful. The light and constant pat pat pat of the men packing blasting powder mixed with nitroglycerin and gelatin and wood pulp into tubes. “You can trust him to look out for his own skin before all else, every time. It's hard to find such a reliable man.”

The Downes kid turned to stalk away, and another man glared at Arthur as he stopped the kid with a brotherly embrace and gripped his shoulder as he passed.

Fincannon seemed unmoved. “Your boss is the one handling the business side of things, I hear.”

“He’s got his eyes on Cornwall.”

“I’ll need to have your assurance.”

“On the eighteenth. That’s what he says.”

“Got proof?”

“Workin on that part. I can get it to you in a couple of days I think.”

“You won’t get your share until it’s done.”

“Whatever you’re doin, that’ll be up to you; for our part we’ll be there.” Pinpricks of light start to taunt his sight. “Long as we get our share.”

“Five hundred pounds.”

“A thousand was the deal.”

Again with his wise stare, Fincannon. “Just making sure, tough guy.”

He turned, pressing between the two guards, barely concealing his sheer suffocating panic to get out of there.

“Hey tough guy.”

He gripped the rail at the bottom of the steps.

“The doc in Annesburg - he’s got medicine that’ll help that cough. Lotta men down there sound like you.”

He started up the stairs.

“Better see him before the eighteenth.”

He wasn’t two miles from there when he found the waterfall, and the widow at the grave. Now he stands up to his waist in the hole, driving that shovel into that wet, heavy dirt with such rage that when he feels the fit come on he doesn't stop until it staggers him backward, ink spots in his vision, and blood spattering the handle of the shovel. He leans over the edge by the corpse until the fit eventually dies and he hunches there sniffling, wiping his eyes, taking cautious breaths until he can take them without coughing. 

Goddamn you. 

The corpse’s hands curl up beside his thighs, cupped like old rinds. A callus where a pen would lay. 

Ought to let a wolf drag you off but for her finding your bloated half-mauled carcass you selfish asshole. How special must you’ve been, that she ain’t kickin your corpse right now.

It was selfish to love another and hope for their love in return. To ask them for their promise. To leave them missing you to the point of not caring for their own lives.

He realizes his tears haven’t stopped, his forehead propped on his dirty palm, he, standing to his waist in a half-finished grave. That shitheel’s seallike body a foot away already smelling putrid. He quickly wipes his face with his sleeve and digs more intentionally now, scooping up mounds of thick black clay over the side with enough care he won’t start up again. 

The body lies silent, and can’t report on whether dreams are the first or the last part of a person to die.

You even managed to get yourself killed by a black bear. What’d you do, pick up a cub to bring back to your wife as a pet?

The moon is already long past setting, and with his lantern hanging on the arm of the cross, he figures it’s deep enough, up to his shoulders, and anyway he’s starting to hit water. He shimmies out of the hole and rolls Cal back into his spot, where he lands face-up, a hand flopped on his chest like he’s declaring his heartfelt gratitude. 

He leans on the shovel, almost too drained to lift it again, and hates the bitterness and the headache brought on by the gum he has, but at least he can lift the shovel and fill in the hole, and spend a joyless few minutes tamping it down and wanting to leave his boot prints all over it like a dance chart but smoothing them out with the bill of the shovel in the end. He rides up to the homestead, its windows dark, and hopes she is not alarmed to hear him. He stands the shovel up in the shed by the rake and hoe, the ax with a broken handle, and rides away. 

Something in this place by the waterfall seems to invade you as soon as you turn up the road, and settles all around like a dream. The mist that rises to the tops of the trees is the color of the sky. Moss lies thick over the forest floor, ferns flourishing and the black-rotted trunks of massive trees crossing the ground. Arthur rides ahead of you toward a place he seems to know, and when he stops to look halfway over his shoulder at you, you sense the distance between you is greater than what you can see. 

At the elbow in the road, he glares at a recently dug grave, passing it to turn up the hill to slow under a gatehead, which opens into an overgrown yard in front of a cabin hidden up there, something you might find quaint in the mountains, but which here looks dark and lonely. What a strange thing, a porch, in a place a visitor would rarely happen by, to be greeted by the empty bench. Arthur gets down, holding his saddle horn as if he stumbled. As you dismount too, he takes down the burlap sack, draws out the ax, and with a mere gesture of an explanation walks ahead of you.

He avoided you for days; when he was around you, his mind was elsewhere. After he arrived covered in mud and was too exhausted to explain it, sleeping in your bed and leaving before you woke, you had tried to catch him alone other times, but for the Pinkerton Johnson, who kept you on a shorter leash, and you spent your days trying not to lose your mind for worry. Those moments you did manage to see him, he was abrupt, distracted, or too drained for you to have the heart to give him the interrogation you want to.

“Are you alright?”

“Have to head north, meet this feller for Dutch. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

In your dusty old room you had sneezed a single time, and he looked at you with eyes wide with alarm; were you okay, how did you feel? And you barked at him that you felt fine. When he left, he pretended he hadn’t forgotten to say goodbye.

Two days later, when he sat with you in the saloon barely making small talk over the dinner he didn’t eat, you tried again:

“I’m worried about you.”

“It’s just a strike they’re talkin about.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

So when Orly returned, you were already prepared, and insisted on going with Arthur on his next ride up. Which he agreed to, in about the worst mood you’d ever seen from him. He tolerated Orly like he would tolerate any other lawman: barely, and one ugly look away from shooting him. Hardly said a word to you on the ride up, and kept clamping his elbows to his sides, or pinching the bridge of his nose, and with Orly there, you couldn’t do anything but ride alongside this nigh-intolerable scorn. He had a strange bulky burlap sack tucked under his cantle, and an ax stowed in his saddle holster, and you thought it was possible this was what the first traces of madness looked like.

By the railroad tracks, he stopped you, ignored Orly with the kind of disgust you might reserve for a carcass in the road, and told you to wait there for him. He kept to the tracks as he rode away, not the road, and you watched him disappear around the bend feeling the pressure of an impossible problem.

“You know, I liked you better when you kept a respectful distance,” you said to Orly, dismounting and sitting on a rock to get out a cigarette, lighting it on your last match.

“You don’t give me a lot of choice, going out of bounds.” 

“Just figured you were bored with the scenery.”

He dismounted too, and sat himself on a rock across the road from you.

If he could see you worried, he didn’t let on. He surely saw you looking up the tracks every couple of minutes as though you’d waited hours, and saw you light a second cigarette on the nub of the first in the absence of anything else to do. He saw you lost in thought, and you hated his observant bold staring, always making it his job to find you out. What little there was to know. How little they should care, and could have hung you weeks ago but for what you’re the unwitting key to. You supposed there was luck in that.

He cleared his throat.

“I was in Saint Denis.”

“Good for you.”

“They say it'll be the twenty-second.”

“Of this month?” You stood straight up, and the flurry in your stomach almost made you nauseous as you realized he was talking about Colm.

“That’s what they say.”

“Sooner than I thought.” 

“You of all people ought to know why.”

“Even so.” You thought back. “What day is it today?”

“Fourteenth.” 

“Could we ride down Tuesday?”

“No, it’s Johnson on Tuesday.”

“Ah, well.” You flicked your smoke away like another such annoyance. “You’ll be missed.” 

When Arthur came back around the bend an hour later, you knew something was wrong. He was riding Georgia like he was taking her over thin ice, and she was bothered by it as much as you were, her head high, ears back. He didn’t look up, and even hidden by his hat he was unwell, you saw it in his shoulders, his arms tight to his sides.  

“We can rest a minute,” you said when he pulled up, but he shook his head, coughing.

“Gonna get back after dark as it is, and I gotta check on somethin.”

Now you ride into this place, where the mist lies over everything like smoke after a dead fire, and the woods seem to creep with movement unseen. A grave at the bottom of the hill. A cabin. You follow Arthur up the steps to the porch. He attempts to smile at you; you can hardly force one yourself, and you hear the rain begin to fall but don’t feel it.

A tall and slender woman answers the door and in the split second before her face brightens in recognition you are a bit startled to see anyone so well-dressed in this corner of the world. Her white blouse not grayed by many washings, the dye of her cotton skirt still a dark, rich aubergine. A bracelet, its dainty chain dangling bright and polished from her wrist as she extends her hand. 

“Mister Morgan, what a surprise,” she says, in diction that was instilled from her first words, a voice that has likely never shouted across a thoroughfare nor hissed a harsh word, but capable of a calm ferocity of its own, the pure possession of the authority of her class.

He nods in the awkward way he does when he is momentarily speechless otherwise, and clears his throat. “I noticed, uh, your ax was broken, and I had a few other things, thought you could use em.” He hands her the burlap bag, which she accepts with a curious smile, and finds a tin of coffee, matches, rifle cartridges, shotgun shells, other sundries. He leans a new ax head-down beside the door.

“How very generous of you,” she says, accepting this gift without even a pretense of saying she couldn’t. “You’ve ridden all this way; won’t you come inside?” she says. A puckeringly polite question you can never wrap your head around, the things fine people say.

“We do have to be getting on -” you say, as restrained as you can manage to be.

“But it’s raining; you should at least wait out the rain.”

Arthur seems to remember you standing behind him. “Missus Balfour, this is Miss Riordan, my uh -” he says, as she looks at you with interest, and you forget your jealous reflex the instant you see his face. 

Allowing no moment to fall flat in discomfort, Missus Balfour extends her graceful hand, which you accept in your dirty, blistered one. “It’s Charlotte, please.”

“Nell,” you murmur, and follow her through the door, trying to catch Arthur’s eye, but doesn’t see it behind the brim of his hat.  

“It’s very nice to meet you, Nell.” There’s such warmth in her tone, you wonder if it was put there to shame you into better manners.

You find yourselves sitting at her table. Somewhere outside, Orly manages the horses, and the manufactured calm of everything makes you feel like you’re part of a play, either an unwilling attendant or an unwitting actor as Arthur avoids giving you enough of a glance for you to communicate any piece of your confusion, annoyance, or concern. And Charlotte fills the silence with her practiced, pleasant silence-filling.

“You might be impressed; I hunted the meat for the stew myself.” 

“My, that is impressive.” You take a bite, too hot, and cave your mouth around it, trying to be inconspicuous. Underneath the table, Arthur’s boot knocks your boot; you can’t tell if he’s trying to tell you something or didn’t mean to.

“Sure didn’t waste your shot.”

“I did not; it was wonderfully satisfying.”

He nods approvingly down at his plate, coughs a couple of times.

“Are you new to hunting, Mis- Charlotte.”

“Why yes; Arthur taught me how to shoot.”

You don’t know what to think as you watch him across the table.

Charlotte is going on, politely ignoring or ignorant of your hostility. “This place teaches me every day the differences between my old life and my present one. I have yet to discover one thing they hold in common besides the rising and setting sun, and even that has taken on a decidedly different character.”

He doesn't so much as glance up, only smiles at the tabletop in reserved acknowledgement of such a thought. 

“I’m traveling back to Richmond to handle a few matters in the wake of Cal’s accident. I doubt they will recognize me after only this short time.”

She chatters on about writing stories, the difficulty in keeping a fire lit, the wondrous simplicity of living so much of life outdoors but how bedraggled it makes a person, to the extent that you wonder if she is commenting on your appearance. You would begin to take offense at such a suggestion, but in the drone of her one-sided conversation, you’re watching Arthur rub his eyes as if he’s in pain, stifle his cough, at one point put a hand on the back of his chair as if he will leave in the middle of everything, and any anger you had before is replaced by your immediate concern. The odd difficulty of interrupting someone speaking, of knowing whether to interrupt; you’re wondering if this is the first time you’ve ever considered such a thing when he starts to stand.

“We really gotta be -” As he gets up, you notice the shake of his hand steadying him on the table, and the color leaving his face. He gets two steps and falls to a knee and you dart up from your chair as he falters to his hand and collapses, crumpled by a bout of coughing like you’ve never heard before and you stand frozen as Charlotte runs around you. He’s lying there unconscious, his chest rattling with every breath, and she’s saying something but you can’t look away from his face, the blood on his lips and chin and teeth. 

“Miss Riordan. Nell!”

You blink out of your daze as she’s snapping her fingers at you. “Help me get him to the bed.”

The two of you struggle to drag him into the bedroom as he starts to wake, and although he can manage to stand he nearly tips over again as you both force him to lie down, and you back up against the doorjamb while he lies flat, gasping for air and she pulls off his boots. She stops at his gun belt like a contraption she’s only heard about. You come forward and undo it, an act that feels like a violation, as though you are ransacking his body, removing one holster so you can slip the rest out from under him. As she lays a quilt overtop, you are backing away, your hands clutching his effects. 

She finds you out behind the feed shed. At first, you don’t even hear her over your heaving breath, and then you notice her sitting beside you, holding her knees. Eventually, a hand rests between your convulsing shoulders, warm and abiding.

“I’m sorry,” you manage to say.

“It’s alright. Better that you manage it now and not in front of him.”

Your forehead propped on your palm, you struggle to stop with a long, jerking inhalation.

“That came as a shock to you, it seems.”

“I didn’t know it was anything that bad.”

“I’m not a doctor, of course. But I have seen it; have you?”

You shake your head.

“If you can find a sanatorium, I have known someone who recovered that way.” But she watches your face and realizes yet another thing about the differences between her old life and her new one, and further yet from yours. 

“Sanatorium,” you scoff. You hold your callused hands fanned out.

“I’ve learned when you can do nothing, you must do something.”

You swallow hard and wipe your nose, shaking your head at every new thing you must believe now. “Well where do you find one?”

She picks a clover from the ground between you and absently crushes the petals and smells them. “The ones I know about are on the west coast.”

You stare at the overgrown yard imagining a place you’ve never seen, so abstract it might as well be the moon, and now must do everything you can to get there, sniffling back your tears. “The coast.”

She takes your hand, despite your tears that cover it. “You seem like a brave young woman. You’ll have to be. You’ll have him, but you’ll lose him every day, a little. Love him how he is, not what you’ve lost. Help him forget suffering as long as you can.”

You roll your head back against the wall and smirk spitefully up at the hill. “How do you forget suffering?” 

She wipes her own eyes, and pats your hand. “In my experience, it is a daily game of distractions. And defying the world that doesn’t care about your suffering. Surviving as best you can. Make hope your foregone conclusion. Find little joys where you can, as if each one were a blow to the enemy at the gate.”

 

Part Two

 

The room in the afternoon holds a colorless light, not bright, and he’s slow to wake, and doesn’t see you sitting in the chair in the corner until it creaks as you stand and walk to the bedside table and pour him a glass of water. He sets it aside, next to a blood-rusted handkerchief, sees himself in that small, fancy bed, propped by a tasseled pillow. You sit on the edge of the mattress.

He wipes his nose and sighs, or what you at first think is a sigh but realize is him trying not to show you the effort in taking a simple breath. He turns his head to look out the window, but it seems to offer no consolation, as if it frames a life outside of himself now and different from this vantage, the way he blinks, looks down at his hands and the pastel quilt over his legs. 

He coughs away from you, mouth closed, gives you a twitch of an apologetic smile. “Well you’ve seen it now, laid out in front of you.”

You bear up, forcing yourself not to cry, and for all the thought you’ve given it over the hours, you don’t know what to say when he brushes the back of your hand with his knuckle, his eyes red-rimmed and glazed as he looks you over as if you might run. 

Without thinking, you lean in and kiss him, and he pushes on your chest with both hands and sits up higher on the bed, back against the headboard. An expression so guilty and worried you almost lean in again, and stop yourself, and sit there feeling useless.

“Nell, I -” He shakes his head slightly, and keeps shaking it at the reverberating terribleness of that thought to him. “I couldn’t live with…”

You stop yourself from saying the things that strike out evilly, selfishly in your mind, Well you wouldn’t have to live with it. What about me missing you. I already feel alone, compounding your sadness with the shame of thinking such things at all. 

He looks down at his chest, as if he’s the source of this. The corners of his jaw pulse with his clenching teeth, and you know his mind is screaming at him to do something. He sits up and turns from you, pushing himself off to stand on the other side of the bed. You watch him ache to straighten.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“We should leave.”

“She asked us to stay.

He steps into his boot with a hand on the wall.

“She’s gone for two days, said it would mean a lot to her if we could stay until you felt well enough to ride.”

“I feel fine. Gotta be gettin Marston and them on their way.”

“Well I don’t, and they can wait.”  

You watch him unable to wiggle his foot all the way into his boot, start to bend down, and his hand suddenly splay firm against the wall to catch himself. He sits on the edge of the bed, kicks the boot off. It drops with a heavy beat on the floor. He hangs his head a moment, and you hear the quiet steady effort in his breath.

You move onto the bed, and pull on his sleeve. You watch the slow expansion of his black-shirted back then deflate with a sigh, and in time he presses his palms into the mattress and pushes himself back until he leans parallel with you, and you both stare at the far wall, bare but for the other window and the green, featureless view, and you touch the fraying edge of that quilt, feeling its well-worn softness, something you have not felt in a while.

He takes your left hand, bends your fingers, inspects your cuts, presses on a couple of tender blisters from your reins.

“What happened to your gloves,” he asks, his voice low, distracted.

“I'm not sure.”

“Have to find you some new ones.” 

“I’ll get some.”

He meddles with the button of your sleeve.

“I don’t, uh -” he starts. His forehead tightens, and he looks up as if the room will help him find the words, and back at your hands, finding nothing. “I don’t know, what.”

“Me neither.”

“We gotta get Jack out, and the girls. John, if we can.”

You nod.

“It’s gonna get bad, the situation in Annesburg. Whole place is a tinderbox.”

“Yeah I know.”

In his fidgeting, he finally hooks your trigger finger with his, which seems to hold him motionless through his tentative inhalation, the kind that fills with regret and resolve, and your heart pounds.

“Nell I want you to go with them.”

“Don’t be an idiot. I can’t.”

“What, because of your Pinkerton?” He scoffs at the window. “If you’d let me -”

“No.”

“Won’t be hard to slip off from here.”

“No.”

“They’re gonna need you -”

“Don’t you pull that on me.”

“I ain’t pullin -”

“Look at me.” You turn around to kneel, facing him, trembling as if you have nearly fallen, “I'm not leaving.”

He starts to shake his head. 

“And you couldn’t leave me again. Remember?” You realize you’re gripping a fistful of his shirt. 

“Things changed.”

“Nothing has changed.”

He faces the ceiling in anguish.

“Nell -”

“Not what matters.”

He raises a hard stare from your hands to you. 

“I’ll meet you when it’s over. But you’re goin, that’s the end of it.”

“When it’s over.” You sniff, and you know perfectly well what he’s thinking, all the times you've thought the same, and shake your head as what becomes a rancorous smile splits your face. “Coward.” 

He rears back, more confused than defensive.

“Are you hoping they get you through the head or the heart?" The word dissolves in your throat, and you feel sick as you break your hand away and leave him, the instant hurt on his face burned into your mind. 

By the road down the hill, Orly is laying out the canvas for his tent on a patch of ground not nearly level enough, and he turns as you storm past him. He follows, calling your name, first a question, then a demand, then a warning, hand on his weapon like an asshole, but you pay him no mind as you break into a run. You slip to your knees on the wet slabs of granite near the water’s edge, in the fuming spray from the falls, and your breath seems to draw from the earth, arms limp by your sides, Charlotte’s voice telling you about a different kind of lonesome as that breath floods into you and you scream. Within the constant roar of the water, your sound is nothing. You fill your lungs again and your scream rips from your chest as your nails scrape on the stone, and then you hunch there powerless like a calving beast until you are numb. Your hands hold the coldness of the earth. 

Forget suffering. Fuck you. Sanatorium. Little joys. Fuck your little joys, go write your stories that never fed you. 

“You think you’re special? You deserve to live out the long chain of your days? Colm had stood over you. In the glare of the sun, his shadow chilled you. 

The bullet had cut a deep gash in the side of your scalp. You bled no trivial amount down your face and neck; he did have to send you to Denver the next day, on Gus’ say-so, when it did not knit on its own. 

“Man is foolish, who does not expect to die.” He lit his cigarette and flicked the match away. All flames easily snuffed. So easily, it seemed, a man might begin to divine a purpose in judging the ones to keep lit and the ones to stamp out. The ones to tend just long enough to let them burn all the way to ash.

For so long, you had believed you would be foolish to hope to live, let alone find anything worth living for. And he was right, after all, what pointlessness there was in hope. A buck appears on the far edge of the water, lowering to drink, its head crowned by its impressive rack.

“You’re luck-”

You shout and startle like a cat. The buck leaps away so quickly you see only the white herald of its tail disappearing into the woods.

Behind you, Arthur scratches his beard, the slight smile he hides, betrayed by his eyes. “Lucky I ain’t that cougar.” He stands over you, easy, with his hands loose without a place to hitch to. You haven’t seen him dressed without a gun belt on in so long, he looks oddly formal. Slim. He points to the fresh paw tracks in the mud nearby. “Can’t have been an hour.”

He steps forward and crouches beside you, rocks back to sit. Every movement must pain him, from the way his eyebrows gather and he lets out a tight breath. He sits shoulder to shoulder beside you watching out at the opposite shore, and the fading rainbow in the mist and the aquamarine shimmer of the shallows.

You face the rock beneath you. “I’m sorry.” 

His hand trails back and he takes yours, and in the hush of the falls he stares, shakes his head, as if disavowing the future he’s just seen.

“Ain’t a thing you got to be sorry about.” 

“I called you a coward.”

He gives a slight acknowledging cringe. In the silence, he sits perfectly still, frozen, it seems, in the midst of his racing thoughts. When he glances up, the faintest sad smile clips the corner of his mouth, but you feel his seriousness in your hand he holds tight, and in your chest. Your throat. 

“I’m the one sorry.”

“It’s all past.”

“It ain’t.” A single ripple in his voice. 

He clears his throat, and his jaw sets askew, eyes blinking in the harsh reflection as he glares at the water like it contains a piece of him he has to show you and hates to.

“I saw the wife and boy of a man I killed.” 

As his hand fidgets with your thumb, the bend of your fingers, he begins to tell you about what happened in a year apart, and how it felt, the time he beat a frail man senseless. He looks at the knuckles of his right hand, blunt tools for a brute’s work, and these scarred hands used on some errand that mattered little to anybody. He could have paid the poor fool’s debt himself. Hadn’t meant to kill him or leave a widow, and the thought of her seems to burn him anew.

You watch a man reliving the switch of the tracks in his life.

“He was sick. It’s how I got it, I imagine.” He says it plainly, no pity for himself in saying it. 

His words make you collect the column of your spine, to hear the low-voiced acknowledgement of a predator that prowls your midst, and as long as you don’t stare it in the eye and show it no fear, it will remain at a distance, it will leave you alone. 

“So we push on. We live with what we’ve done, as you said.”

“It don’t get easier from here.” 

He thinks he’s arguing with you instead of saying aloud what you both have known all along. You look down at your hand and his, which have entwined themselves so tightly they show you the knot you’ve made of things. Still holding his hand, you stand and pull him up with you. 

You walk for a while, wading across the shallowest part of the river that rises halfway up your boots, and you feel the heavy drag of water, the power of just a few inches’ depth to sweep you off your feet if you take a wrong step, until you get to the other side and the darker thicket there that swallows up the boom of the falling water.

“No. It doesn’t get easier,” you say. He’s staring into the dark of the woods like a place he must enter and facing it straight-on as if convincing himself there’s a pointlessness to putting it off, in the grand scheme of things.

“Since I've known you, life has tried again and again to put hardship between us,” you say. From this vantage point, the grave is hardly visible, and Orly on the far side acts as if he isn’t watching.

Arthur nods, thoughts still moving ahead of him into the dark. 

“But it’s failed every time.”

He turns his head to you, first nearly ready to believe you, but smiles regretfully, the two-edged disappointment only experience knows. As if you’ve brought him the hard-won treasure you had struck out to find that would pay your ways out of bondage, but in that time the problem has grown; the thing no longer suffices. 

He goes to sit on a boulder near the water’s edge, where he might have lit a smoke out of simple habit to keep his hands busy, and now he inspects them idle. You sit beside him. In his breath, you can hear the whispered promise of the slow loss of time, his constant reminder, to you mere moments of realization. He already looks at you like something lost, something he dare not hope for. The lines between his eyebrows deepen, troubled anew, and he stares at the water for a long time, swallows against the ache in his throat.

“The man in the grave at the bottom of that hill dragged his wife out here and left her alone.” His voice cracks, the thought brings breathtaking pain. “Half-starved when I found her.” He sniffs bitterly. 

You shift closer and curve your fingers under his, gently this time, tight as a coupling. The tendons of his fingers jump with his hesitant, wanting grasp.

“Don’t you think she chose to be here too?”

“She didn’t know the risk in it.”

“Maybe she didn't but it would've come as a shock all the same.” With your other hand, you rub his wrist, the bone a sharper angle, and feel for his pulse as you look up, and you find him searching you.

“I can’t ask that of you.”

“He didn’t either; she just loved him!”

When he starts to loosen his hold, you wrench your hand on his. The snatch of two gunfighters is so sudden and strong you are both dragged forward. Your stare aimed so direct he can’t look away. He cannot pull back, and then his fingers slowly tighten around yours. A pulse throbs in the grapple of your hands and you don't know whose is whose. 

Despite the exhaustion in his face, the red corners of his eyes, the leanness that seems to shave him away, there is strength in his grip and he can’t deny it, and the longer you hold him, the lighter the tightness of his brow.

You grip his hand harder than any gun.

“You told me about that beach. You told me you would walk until you couldn’t take another step.” 

You release him and he extracts his hand, flexing and stretching it painfully. 

“Now you are not the man in that grave, and I am not that woman. But she is smart and she sees things clearly. I’d trust her mind to be right.”

“Seems I’d be a fool to argue with either of you.” He grimaces, looking slightly chastised.

“You are a fool.”

“I ain’t the fool stickin by one.”

“Well I guess we’re each outmatched.”

He closes his eyes, fighting his mind, caught at every turn while you sit there by him waiting. He nods down at his chest with a beaten huff, and coughs into his arm.  

You mimic his huff. “What.”

“I think I wonder every day at how I ever found you.”  

“Moths to flame,” you mutter.

His hand finds the small of your back, and he glances sidelong at you as if he’s only discovered more of you he can’t understand. That, with time, a person might come to understand, and that, without it, a person finds himself with no choice but to simply accept certain mysteries around him.

“Until we can worry, we’re not gonna worry. But don’t you send me the hell away.”

“I shouldn't've said that.”

“No you shouldn’t.”

Around you, at the base of the boulder spreading out on the forest floor, a few mushrooms ruffle up like gills out of the soil. The small leaves of the undergrowth are jewel-like against the ground, and their berries red as rubies. Not far away, the fresh pungent scent of wild thyme. As if the world will taunt you when you would succumb to pity and refuse to see its point. Much as you’d rather not give the widow Balfour any further satisfaction, right now, when you can do nothing but stand in the thunder of that water damning time, there is, in fact, something you can do. 

When your hands are full you take off your hats and fill them, chanterelles and wintergreen berries, and although your ears are pricked for any low growl of a stalking cat you smile at one another as if there is no danger. You sweep your boots along the groundcover to find new hidden offerings. Sprigs of thyme and mint and the stalks of wild onion farther away. A ramshead big as a cabbage.  Neither of you can deny the occasional paw print you also see, how the soil within them is still damp, their outline still sharp. There is a feeling of a weight finely balanced, between provocation and the strike, a beast’s instinct to spring. You turn, and give Orly, still waiting, an evil stare as he watches like he has interrupted a ritual.

When your hats and hands are full, you go back, and you stop as you reach the husband’s grave. Orly approaches but keeps a little distance. You stand together staring at this place and the cross marked Calvin Balfour, III, as if this pile of dirt has been claimed by him and not the other way around. He makes for a strange sentry here, the dead man at the bottom of the hill, and Arthur can’t stand to look at him, moving on without you.

As he heads up the hill, you take a minute to collect yourself, practicing that breath you will learn to take, the encouraging smile you will put on, though when you see Orly, your smile falls. You push your way between him and the mound, and the ramshead rolls from your arms. When you turn around to pick it up, he’s already crouched and handing it to you. You snatch it from him, sullen, as if he is returning a fallen piece of your disguise.

After a few steps, though, you stop. On the road up to your keep.

“If you wanted to be useful you’d go catch a rabbit or gamebird,” you say, your voice flat. “Bring your shotgun. Saw cougar tracks.” You trudge up the hill as a few specks of rain begin to fall. 

In the dim light of the cabin, you stoke a fire and start a large pot of water boiling. Arthur sleeps, after some restrained argument, and through the narrow opening into the bedroom, you can see his motionless shape like low foothills, and you keep your hands busy in the quiet occupation of picking leaves from some of the stems and making neat piles, and with the rest you harvest some string from burlap and tie small bundles of the herbs to hang and dry. The busyness of all these little acts. A devotion, of a lowly sort. Mindless tasks performed out of the most basic faith in survival. You put thyme and wild onion and carrot in the pot, a few large pinches of salt. Out the window, you can see Orly on the edge of the property, seeming hesitant to approach, but he carries a rabbit, freshly skinned, and when you open the door to him, he seems contrite in handing it to you, getting a glimpse of that simple place, how hushed, how easily disrupted. He touches his brim to you and goes back out into the cloudy drizzle. The peak of his tent barely in view.

You cook the mushrooms and brown the meat in lard, and throw the bones in the pot, and next the meat and all you’ve chopped and cooked down and dissected that day, and swing the pot arm out a bit so as not to boil it hard. Gus tends to come to mind in potsteam, his own weak jokes he’d laugh at. Don’t waste a minute grousing; tastes like shit, for one thing.  

I’m not grousing.

You’re stewing.

I’m making stew, you old meany.

Well, cry off to the side, you could brine pickles in it at this rate. 

Daylight dies slow in the valley. You light the lantern over the table. In the next room, some coughing.

That sound you will act as though you do not hear and he will act as though he doesn’t make. 

The creak of a door and his steps on the floor give you enough time to collect yourself as you clean up at the sink before you turn to him.

While you wait for the stew to finish, in the light of the fire, you lean back in his lap in an old armchair and you read a strange book about a Time Traveler while he reads over your shoulder, and you wait for a sly comment that will skewer this moment before it gets too tender. But neither happens, not the comment, nor anything too tender. He appears to spend more time staring into the fire, one hand mindlessly assessing the threadbare edge of the chair arm, picking at its loose threads, smoothing them down. You sit across from each other at the table in the low aureole of light and find it quaint, sharing a bit of peace in there, dim and plain as that cabin is, a home. Filling his dish from the pot. Commenting on the stew. He laughs when you tell him you got a Pinkerton agent to shoot a rabbit for dinner. You smile to hear him tell you more about the time he taught this refined lady to shoot, picturing his patience in teaching the fundaments. 

Together, you clean up, and he dries the dishes as you pass them to him, and what begins as a memory spark of a long-ago time, a floursack dish towel draped over his hand, degrades into a stretch of quiet as your thoughts run off unchecked.

“What’s the matter,” he says after you’ve stood for a while with your hands hanging over the lip of the sink not moving, and he wipes the rim of a bowl as if he’s not merely waiting for your answer. When you frown to disregard it, he sets down the towel and the bowl, turns you around, and unexpectedly lifts you to sit on the countertop. You grab his shoulders and yip, though he seems not to notice your awkwardness. He puts himself between your legs and looks at you with an unconvinced raise of an eyebrow, hands resting on your thighs. 

Facing him so close, you forget yourself for a moment, lean toward him, and stop. With a sigh, you bring the back of his thumb to your lips instead.

“Just being selfish,” you say, and brighten your face to him.

“I ain’t sure you know what that means.”

You frown, and look down at your lap, shake his hand you’re still holding, his thumb you kissed. “Feels like…you're far away, when I can’t…” You try to shrug it off with a mock-frivolous smile, wishing you hadn’t said anything.

He holds the cluster of your wrinkled fingers, glancing down at them in thought.

Then he reaches up and presses his thumb to your lower lip like a seal. Indents it lightly, then presses your chin as he holds your jaw and coaxes your legs further apart, standing very close now. He surprises you a little when his hand wraps around the back of your neck, his strong hold at the base of your skull, and he rotates your head to kiss you on the cheek. You try to turn, but he keeps you there, and as you start to drop your head in another small defeat, he quickly bends his knees as if to catch you, and kisses your neck, right below the corner of your jaw.

“I’m realizin I’ve been negligent, all this time,” he says as he straightens, straightening you with him, before taking an affectionate bite of you there, savoring that spot with his tongue, the blades of his teeth, slow to draw his lips together. 

“Negligent…”

He takes himself another such taste. “I never thought much to light in anywhere else at the outset.”

He stops there, and picks up your hand, and presses the back of it to his lips as his eyes raise, but it’s not that rogue you expect to see, making fun to cheer you up. It’s the look you shared one day up on a mountain, in a dark hidden cave over a treasure you once found. Quiet. Laden with the trepidation and knowledge of new burdens just as much as new possibilities. 

He turns your hand over and kisses the inside of your wrist. Pulls your arm straight and does the same to the inside of your elbow, that seriousness still in him, although he huffs with a little amusement on his mind.

“What?”

“Well,” he says, kissing the belly of your muscle, the crease of your armpit, the bend of your neck, resting in each spot like stepping stones. 

“I might find it in me to tell you -” 

collarbone

“I ain’t never seen nothin I wanted to kiss more than your tender -” 

jaw

“sweet -” 

temple

“…ear.”

You almost laugh before his breath fills that hollow space, as his lips try a portion of your shape, like feeling in the dark, discovering you. 

“See, here,” he says, standing closer still, cradling your neck to keep you by him, “I might say things it didn’t occur to me to tell you before.” He teases your earlobe with his teeth as if it is a small ripe berry.

“Like what?” you whisper.

He tells you. 

You smack him on the shoulder and he laughs and pulls you in and makes himself serious again.

“I love your scars.”

“My scars.” You wrinkle your nose.

“I love everything that made you, Nell Riordan. Just like I hate everything that ever hurt you." He has to look down. "Myself too for what I done."

He clears his throat, and seems to find his way again along the repaired seam of your sleeve. "I would go back in time to keep away the ones who've done you wrong, but then I’d never know you or how strong you are. Where you're sensitive. So while I hate what gave you scars, I have to love them.”

He glances up to meet your welling eyes, his jaw skewed in confession as he draws his fingers down your throat. “Every one,” he says, turning your head to inspect the one over your left eyebrow, healed but pink yet. He leans closer and nips the delicate skin around the frame of your ear, and your neck goes loose and he scoops you tighter still by the small of your back, and he proceeds to show your ear more attention than it’s ever had in your life.

“This one the most.” He bends to claim a kiss of the scar on your shoulder through your shirt, and returns to your ear, his fingers purposely branching up the back of your neck, through your hair. The warm rush of breath from his nose.

“Even though it’s led to this?” Your lives, from that moment to now, strike you fast and straight as that penetrating shot, and you cave in slightly at the deluge of memory. 

“If this now is the cost of finding you, I’d gladly pay it. A thousand times, Scarlett O’Driscoll.”

“Don’t call me that.” You swipe away fast tears with the heels of your hands.

“What should I call you.”

“What you have before, dummy.”

As if it helps him think, he calmly kisses the cartilage of your ear again. Then his lips form the reverse of his kiss as he says, “Red.” 

He moves behind your ear, leaving another kiss like the mark of a postman’s stamp, “Nell,” finished with the lightest lick.

A quick peck at a place beneath your hairline. “Missus Kilgore.”

You snort and have to wipe your nose on the towel, you blubbering mess.

“Troublemaker.” 

With his middle finger he hooks your hair aside over your left shoulder, “Partner,” and kisses down the right side of your neck in the same serial fashion, then pauses - you can feel his working mind - and backtracks the captivating path he’s made until he’s at your ear, now taking a couple of slow breaths, exhalations shaking, a dry swallow, and he faces down, cheek scratching your cheek. 

“I never called you my wife.” His voice is hoarse, nearly a whisper. He waits a moment, as if he detects your racing heart.

With a great deal of care, his hands set you back and hold your sides; were you not between them, they might clasp, and this man before you takes nothing for granted, facing you forthrightly.

“I would like to.” 

He is not sorry in the slightest for the tears he’s set loose from you, as you bull your forehead hard against his, unable to kiss him like you would, and grit your teeth at that vexing obstruction. He takes your jaw again, holds the flat of his thumb against your quaking chin. His eyes gleam, perhaps the glaze of illness, perhaps a sheen of tears, and despite the edges of red they shine prismatic blue and bright as mountain sky. The uncertain creases around them you swore you would trade sunsets for.

“How about it.”

You take his wrist and press your lips to his warm, dry palm, the lines of it, the cup of it, his fingers each falling lightly to your cheek, his thumb wiping your tears. You bring his head closer and kiss his right eyelid, the hacked-up bridge of his nose, the lines of his forehead collected and waiting. Then you wrap your arms around him and rest your chin at the crook of his neck. 

“I would like it very much if you called me that.”

His arms fold around you, strong and certain. You can feel the effort of his breathing, the ligaments of his neck tightening. Yet also the warmth of him against you. The throb of his pulse as constant as your own.

“I ain’t done a thing to deserve you.”

“Me neither.” You hold him just as tight and his head rolls heavy against yours in near-reflex at your touch. “But long as we’re both down here with the worst of them, we might as well be together.”

He smirks.

“What?”

“You sound like a nun I met.”

Over his shoulder you try to freeze this picture in your mind, this place that is yours for just one more day, the light, the few places you have sat and worked and shared. A moment balanced on the point of a pin, the knowledge in your soul that you could never have something good without its cost in kind, that a heart beats in defiance of its own fate.

“I want to stay here with you forever. Just like this,” you whisper against his shoulder.

He stretches his arms around you tighter for a moment, but then leans away and stares at you in exaggerated amazement.  "Did you just say somethin sweet to me, Nell Riordan?" 

“Shut up.”

“Did Nell Riordan utter a sweet thing in my ear? I might fall over if I hear it a second time.” He holds you again so tightly that your voice is muffled in his shoulder.

“Well it’s a good thing that won’t happen.”

He clears his throat and stands back from you some, and fingers the notch of your throat as he glances around the room, at the hearth, at the door, the windows uncovered, and seems to listen for a moment, eyes to the side. “She really gone?” He pinches the first button of your shirt, slowly angling it through the hole anticipating your answer. His glance at you is one step into temptation.

“Said two days.”

“Your Pinkterton friend?”

“Thought I saw him camping on the hill.”

He’s already undone your buttons down to your beltline and plows the plackets of your shirt apart with his hands running over your chest and shoulders. He kisses the knob of your collarbone, following that ridgeline to your shoulder, where he takes the strap of your chemise in his teeth and teases it down your arm. He rests his forehead on your collarbone and you feel a rush of his breath on your stomach as he seems to reel from the realization of everything that was just said, before he does the same with your other strap, your arms fully pinned. He bends a finger over the collarline and loosens it down, unveiling your breasts with attention paid to each in turn. When he pushes your left breast up with a squeeze, looking up to kiss your mouth, he has to veer to your neck, this dance you will never quite learn. He brings your hand to himself getting hard, and with your hand governs a few effective strokes through the cloth of his trousers while he tongues and sucks a light bruise on your throat.

You help each other shed your shirts, and you sense how drained he is as you pull off the sleeves of his union suit, and the depth of his determination as he fusses with your cuffs. 

“You sure you want to?”

“I always want to.” Slipping your chemise over your head, he leaves your arms bound up, your eyes covered for a moment as he sucks your left nipple and releases it with a nigh-on apology of his departing tongue before freeing you and embracing you chest to chest. The heat of his skin on yours, the hard squeeze of his muscles around you, has always driven you mad. Now without the distraction of his lips on yours you curl into him to feel his mouth occupied on your neck, and when you are able to think, you continue to stroke along his ridge. Then for a moment, he can do nothing but stand, eyes closed, slightly agape at the sensation of your firm grip.

When he regains an ounce of sense he sweeps one arm under both your knees and lifts you (you make no comment as to how he does it when you can feel the upper border of his shoulder blade), and sets you on the table. He sits on the chair before you and discards your boots and trousers to the side like he’s rummaging through a trunk, and smiles to himself as he runs his hands up your thighs to the waistband of your drawers.

“What are you smiling about?”

“Thinkin of where to set in.” He tries kissing your knee, but shakes his head as if that wasn’t right at all. His fingers inch your waistband down over your hips, and down your legs, and he stands to turn you on your side like a slab of meat, and kisses you in the middle of your ass cheek, taking a bite of your flesh for himself in the process, and you shriek and swat at him behind you. He kneads you there more thoughtfully, his thumb running along the crease of your upper thigh, spreading you a little, giving you a quick smack before rubbing that spot. 

You twist around and with your eyes suggest that he sit, and he obeys, arms hanging down, and he lifts his face to you as you slip down from the table, steady yourself with one hand on his shoulder, deliberately step over one leg and then the other, perch lightly on his thighs, lean down and tease his nipple in your teeth just to hear the light break in his throat. Holding yourself steady on his stomach, you feel his breath come harder when you begin to unbutton his fly with one hand. He watches quietly and you still blush to slip your hand around his desire with his eyes on you as if you have seen his soul now, and there is nothing he keeps from you. You think perhaps you’ve never allowed yourself to see the way he gazes at you, and so for the first time, heart pounding, you let him see the same unhidden love. Which is almost too much for both of you, and his stomach tightens and he gives a silent whistle, a puffing grin as he gently holds your wrist.

“Before we’re married?” you say, in scandal, easing out his full cock, stroking him toward you, and he starts to smirk but quickly turns his head to cough. His whole chest constricts with each one. His lip curls with sudden regret as he catches his breath. 

Before he can dwell on it, you reach up to touch his face, and he seems to find it hard to look at you. There is pain evident in the creases by his eyes, the rise of the cords of his neck as he works to control his breath, on the edge of thinking he will fail you. For one blink, an unbearable weight. You notice his thoughts linger on a small picture of the Balfours that hangs on a nail over the sink.

“Hey.”  You lay your hand on his chest and breathe slowly, quietly with him, and smile a little as you pull his attention back to you. “It’s just us, here, now.” 

You bring his right hand up to your breast and grip yourself with him, and look him straight in the eyes as you roll against him, pumping your light grasp on his cock between you.

The cabin holds a glow that part of the world has not seen for some time, and were a person to glance through one of its golden windows from out in the dark rain they might spy a scene and not know even half the meaning of what they see, only bearing mistaken witness to a physical act, not feel the galvanic heat that accompanies such light, though it might stir them; only hear the dampened strains drawn from the primal yoke of two bodies, not the holy subject of their sighs.

“Will you wear a dress?” He pants between your breasts as you hold the back of the chair and grind hard into him, his grip on your ass so strong there will be bruises he will travel with his idle fingers in the morning like a constellation.

“Why, so you can fuck me sooner?” Your neck will be slightly raw the next day from the scruff at his jaw as you speak in his ear.

“That is exactly wh-why.”

“You have to wear a suit.”

“I’ll wear a suit. I’ll wear the prettiest suit you ever saw.”

You start to laugh, but accidentally yank on his hair as he hits you so deep you gasp, and he has to turn his head away and cough, and you slow your pace to a languid roll. He turns back, eyes watering, trying to get back to where you left off.

But you are both still unpracticed in this art of forgetting; the sudden knot in your throat aches, and he sees the brief dimple of your chin. He brings you close, his forehead against yours still in your slow undulation, and with him you can lure yourself back to this understanding, nodding in silent agreement, your steadfast gaze. He brushes your cheek with the backs of his fingers, and as your breath quickens again his hand returns to your ass and he begins to steadily jerk you on him, his eyes rolling closed at the feel, head on the chairback.

“You want a place like this?” he asks, and you run your hand lightly up the hardness of his throat to feel his Adam’s apple jump with a swallow.

“Bigger hearth. Bigger bed.”

“There’s a bigger one in the other room.”

You swat his arm one second before he forces your hips down onto him and you claw his shoulder as you go weak and slump into his chest. With that, he lifts you and stands and nearly slams you onto the table with your legs up on his shoulders, slicking his full length against your clit until you stare at him with furious need, and then fucks into you so hard you have to grip the edge of the table and its feet softly screech on the floor with every thrust.

Our bed. Like you said you - oh fuck, Arth-

We’d never leave it.

You writhe up as you come a gasping strand of curses and he slows, control like heartache on his face as he glides inside you, his hand lovingly kneading your thigh as he finishes you, and your sounds, they finish him. The moment he has to pull out, you sit up, take him in hand and stroke him hard and slow, spilling him on your thigh as you kiss his throat. He holds you close with one arm draped heavy on your back, dragging breath, and then he steps away to cough several times but it is no fit this time, and you will always strain to believe that hopeful lie.

The fire crackles, the light doesn’t change. You kiss each other on the cheek and you send him to the bedroom as you dress and clean the table. The stew hasn’t burned; you scrape and stir it, thick and savory by now, and he’s asleep by the time you put on your boots and coat and ladle a good portion into a bowl. It is raining still. Unmindful of it, you walk across the rain-pattered yard, down the hill to Orly’s tent. He’s built a small lean-to to keep a fire dry, though it isn’t enough to give heat, nor much light. You find him inside, huddled on his bedroll. When he sees you, he scrambles up to sit. You hunch a bit to see him.

“He’s sick, if you have to know.”

Orly looks down and his hair falls forward. He’s balding on top, and he doesn’t have someone looking after him or he’d keep the rest of his hair close-cut and his collars better starched. The cut at his throat has scabbed into a long welt, puckering and dark in some places as it heals.

You stare down at the bowl of stew.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says, his hoary tenor voice somewhat kind. “I could put in a good word -”

“I don’t care what the fuck you do.”

His eyes grow round. You hand him the bowl but keep your side when he starts to take it, and he is forced to look you in the face. He is forced to see your tears and your fury.

“I'm getting him out of all this, soon as the timing is right. Now, being warned, if you get in the way of that, I'd say it's your fault what happens to you.”

You push yourself up to stand, and in the light cast off the cabin and Orly’s little fire, the trees around you shine wet and beyond them the night is so black it is like a body of water, a vast and empty flatness.

“There’s a stable up by the house, horses stay dry there, I expect you would too.” 

Then you leave him there in the rain, and somewhere in the surrounding darkness, a prowling predator leaves its tracks all around for you to find.

When you leave two days later, sheaves of herbs are tied to the rafters like a hanging garden. Laundry dries on the line. Firewood lies in a neat configuration beside the hearth, enough for a week or more, with Orly’s help. The back step that tripped all of you is repaired. Perhaps one book is missing from the shelf, but that is all. Charlotte stands on the porch and lifts a hand when you look back, and the three of you head down the hill.

At the bottom, though, he stops Georgia, and you stop. 

“Can you promise me somethin.”

You see him giving not his final thought to the mound of dirt settling there. 

“No matter what happens, you don’t finish my business. You don’t pay my debts.”

And because he needs to hear it, you promise. 

The widow of Annesburg appears in the shadows of the overpass, pale as a specter of his mind’s own guilt standing as if dressed in new skin, scabbed and sick, telltale sores about her mouth that every man knows or should know hints at what lies beneath, concealed by telltale powder. Ahead of him, Nell doesn’t see her, and so she doesn’t see the murderous glare that seems like to cut him through. She’s focused on the gathering crowd over the train tracks, and the feel of something brewing. When she slows, he comes up alongside her. He tells her he has to pick something up, the insinuation being it’s for Dutch; she should go ahead, he’ll be along. When she takes off, he watches until she’s away from the crowd.

A man stands on the flatcar, and he speaks with such passion the crowd shouts back in response to his big questions, his enthusiastic slogans, as the guards standing by the overpass nervously grip their guns. 

“Do not strike out unless struck first - yes this is the peaceful man’s way, but we have been struck already, struck with hunger, struck senseless with injury, struck powerless by wages inadequate for basic means!” 

They shout in response, they clap, some men near the back of the crowd pretend to box near a guard holding his rifle across his chest who can only glance sideways at his partner across the street, and the men edge closer and laugh. 

Signs and banners are lifted high to declare their purpose to the men surveying them from the windows on the hillside and in the offices overhead. 

Wages in currency not company script!

Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

“An injury to one?” shouts the man on the flatcar.

“An injury to all!” They answer in unison so loudly now it takes him a moment to realize that a train is slowing on the tracks along the riverside.

Arthur makes his way behind them on the boardwalk to the office next to the gunsmith, and inside the commotion from outside dims by half. 

Inside the darkened space, shelves lined with olive green, amethyst, and amber bottles rise to the tin ceiling. The fumes of something chemical are strong enough that it sets off his lungs for a bit, amplified in that tiled space, and he tries to muffle the sound in his sleeve. He prowls along the shelves, reading the printed latin names on some of the larger jugs at the bottom. He stares at a chart of a brain for some time wondering how on earth they know that little spot has to do with Kind-Feeling or Grandiosity, and thinks of a man he knew who had been shot through the Alimentiveness, whatever that was; he didn’t need it anymore. 

“Wie kann ich Ihnen helfen?” calls a man approaching from the back. Small stature, slim, steel-colored hair, and small octagonal spectacles with dark lenses. Brings possums to mind.

“Oh, I, uh, don’t -” he says, clearing his throat as he straightens up from the chart.

“It is fine, sir,” he shouts, and he can’t tell if the doctor merely speaks that way to be heard over the noise or is annoyed at his presence. His black glasses glint like enormous button eyes. “I think you are here for the cough, yes?”

He nods, and checks behind him as the shouts outside grow louder. The doctor sets a number of small vials on the counter and begins to explain as if to a child how many drops of each one, miming dropping them on his tongue, and shouts what sounds like ten dollars, and he is about to walk out empty-handed for that price when there’s a sound from up on the hillside that stops him. Distinct enough even over the shouting that some heads begin to turn. Voices, sharp bellowing calls. The tone of dead seriousness, of emergency. 

Across the road, the tops of heads move apart to make way, and the crowd separates as four men carry a large canvas sling, a man’s body within. Blood soaks through one end of the canvas, and they barge through the door, the glass cracking as it bangs against the wall. Arthur backs out of the way as they hoist the man upon the counter, and as the doctor inspects him, he gets his own look at the man. 

Young. Twenties. Blond. Coal dust and dirt cover him. Blood coats him. He would have a kind of friendly looking face were it not for the part of his skull stove in. The kid’s left foot twitches in a constant, unnatural cadence, and his throat gurgles with his breath forced out by his shuddering chest. The men who carried him stand back paralyzed, catching their breaths, greased in coal and sweat.

Another sound follows outside, this time a shriek, again unmistakable, and one of the men inside removes his cap. Someone catches the woman before she reaches the door, and the man at the window lifts a hand in warning. The doctor shakes his head. Jack Sweet, one man says. 

Another man watches out the window with his arms at his sides, fists burled. “Won’t forget your name after today, boy.” Grave futuretelling in his voice. He glowers at the guards.

“Gonna be hell opened up,” says another.

“Hell opened up a while ago. Just took that time for the fire to get here.”

Arthur takes the handful of vials, leaves ten dollars on the far end of the counter, and backs out the door, and there his heart stops like a struck bird.

It is silent in the street. Hundreds of eyes watch the doctor’s office and now follow him as he exits as if he will announce the news, and he pulls his hat brim down against their leaden stare. His boots drum loud on the boardwalk. The speechifying man stands silent. Guards glance at one another where they stand conspicuous under the tall letters of the Jameson Mining Co. The waiting train discharges its steam in dampened puffs like the last puffing breaths of the kid or the first courage-giving breaths of something unstoppable. He takes care to lead Georgia out of the way of the crowd without attracting too much attention, down the street a ways, whispering to her, before he mounts up and gets away from there as fast and as he possibly can. You respect a primed charge when you see one. 

 

 

 

 

Notes:

Thanks for reading/commenting/chatting along the way - it means a lot! I couldn’t have finished or posted this chapter without bruisedambition’s help, close reading, and gentle asskicking throughout. The shortcomings here are fully mine. 🖤

Fun fact: Pinkertons have a history of infiltrating pro-labor organizations and trying to subvert strikes and union formation, infamously Jack McParland, who infiltrated a faction of the Molly Maguires, an activist pro-union secret society with arguably one of the cooler names in the history of labor organizing.

Chapter 22: The Fuse

Summary:

The whole world a powder keg.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

The boy Enapay lays more sticks on the fire. Sparks churn up into the white hands of the trees and in his head like the stories he knows. A man daring into danger, under the nose of danger, and riding away into the night with a rumble he can feel in his chest. Twenty shod horses follow, casting up storms of dust to conceal him. The old men, and now to his disappointment Paytah, talk of giving in. What use is there in bloodshed? Everything they thought impossible has come to bear. Whole forests cut to the ground like a picture of their cut-out hearts before them. The prints of the old men’s shoes fall on the packed ground as dry leaves, and they frown in muddled contemplation at the fire finding no answer to senselessness. They are not stirred anymore by stories. Not since Crazy Horse have their hearts stirred up the same, and that was long before his birth. Even Eagle Flies cannot turn their minds. But Crazy Horse saw visions. Now he sees visions too. Ten Crow sits with him at their small fire down below the falls, listening as he tells him.

A world away, the Malvina plows low in the dark water from her dock in Newport, her nine steam-powered propellers taking her up to 34 knots. She will dock in the port of Saint Denis before she makes her way up the Lannahechee. Her gilded cabins, saloon and parlor fade to plain steel at the upper decks. She smuggles along the coastline unassumingly, as if cautious of prospecting takers signaled by her mere arrival, considering who she carries.

Deep underground, somewhere in the network of tunnels, a barrel rolls over the tracks, its attendants with kerchiefs over their noses and mouths guiding it careful and uncompromising, for it has all come to this.

In the beer hall, the windows boarded, the crowded smoky lowlit room, in all the heated talk, a woman sits on the steps with her boy and straightens his collar like she can’t help it. At the far end, sweet Jack Sweet lies on a door propped on saw horses, and respects are paid in slow file. The girl sits by his shrouded head, staring away in time. 

Edith pinches the ends of Archie’s hair like she would to trim it. Smooths it down behind his ear. “I want…I want you to bring the big coat with you.”

“Yes ma'am.”

She turns her face away from the men who cross in front of her, their leering recognition witnessed by her boy. He hooks her arm and pretends he didn’t see. 

“You’ll be safe?” She ponders his hand. How unnoticeably, breathtakingly fast the child in him has vanished.

“I promise.”

“You can’t promise that.”

It is the 17th. November. 

The leaves are slow to fall from their branches, already an oddity, a distorted signifier of time. There is no wind to strip them. A dry late-season gloom hangs over this part of the world trapped beneath the cloudstain that grays all light and lets through only intimations of a sun and moon. 

You are in Van Horn. You are not, as your dream told you, at Hanging Dog, where the sun at elevation feels like you are walking too close to a flame until you slip into the chilling splash of a shadow. But the voices still jumbling in your ears like noise in the saloon convince you a moment beyond waking that you are still there, in two places at once, and you have failed to shoot the hawk. The clear panicked chirp slipped overhead before the gust on your face of the racing hawk. You were not fast enough. You can still feel the gust on your face.

These dreams encroaching on your consciousness are the first hints, when you look back, that something was approaching. But in the moment, it is all disorienting lapses of consciousness, small terrors, unreality in the shapes reflected on bowled surfaces, waking tearful not knowing you had cried. You did not really know. Or, if you did, it was with the time-blindness of anticipation and reflection; looking back, you could not recall what you had once imagined of the present world around you.

There is a crack in the ceiling shaped like a backwards K. There is a man beside you. The windows stay open all night at his insistence, and the cheap curtains flap with each fleeting breeze like they are giving up. He sleeps on his stomach with his face to the wall, and so far the depth of his sleep means he can breathe without the spasm that sends him into fits. You let him sleep.

Now awake and in one place again, you sit up without disturbing the springs, letting your feet down to the floor like you are dipping your toes in cold water, and standing in silent increments, as if you were never there. You dress with similar silence and pull up on the door handle to keep the hinges from creaking as you slip out with two mugs in hand. 

Josie is at the bar in the Old Light and wipes your mugs for you, and for five cents you fill up from the coffee pot. A couple of men are still at blackjack. A whore sleeps with her cheek mashed on her fist at one of the tables. Your knuckles burn as you grip the handles of both mugs with one hand, and you’re saying goodbye to Josie as you step out the door, and almost run into Orly, rising up on your toes, half-bowing to steady the sudden tempest in your hands. 

One of the regulars spots Orly and cackles on his drunkfooted way past you, pointing, and Orly glares, neck reddening under his collar. You smile at the man, Silas or something.

Once the waves have settled, you can move, impassive to Orly’s tired appearance as you turn up the boardwalk. "Morning."

He walks beside you a few paces. “Came to tell you I won’t be on your detail for a few days."

You stop abruptly, and this time the coffee splashes back and you curse, and decide not to waste a handkerchief on your hand. “Who, then?” 

“Maybe you’ll just have to behave for once. They’re calling us in for something.” He waits for you to catch up.

A spark of panicked opportunity flares up inside, harder to contain than the sloshing coffee in your hands.

When you hold out the mugs, he takes them, and you unlock the door but stand there stuck as a dozen other thoughts gust through you, and that flicker of hope clings to its wick and dies.

“I haven’t forgotten the twenty-second,” he says, giving the coffee back. It’s an odd way he regards you, more often. Hesitation in his mannerisms, a fog of inner quandary. An understanding of new things, hard come-by.

You accept the cups of coffee from him, and almost forget your own hostility in the face of his supposed not-forgetting, which is not the olive branch he means it as, but instead a heavy chain. You look up, unfeeling. “You best not.”

As you slip into the room, Orly turns back to get breakfast at the Old Light, where they now tolerate him, more or less, and he endures only periodic harassment.

You set the coffee on the table and sit there drinking yours, as long as Arthur is still sound asleep, and you pull his journal over. Spread over the latest pages, his account of recent days. A pelican flying in clouds. Jack’s cornflower seeds. A long vista and a waterfall far to the left, and a rough sketch of a man hunched at a camera. Winterberries. Wild thyme. A cabin. His words you trace your finger over, imagining his thoughtful hand as he wrote them. A sketch of you, sleeping, which must have been from last night, which means he was up for some stretch of time, and you can tell by now how he was trying to lose himself in the strokes, the lightness of his hand required to shade those degrees of softness into you, the detail in your hair and the rumpled sheets requiring such concentration that a mind could not allow, at least for a while, the invasion of other thoughts. You pick up the pencil, so many times sharpened it is the size of your little finger, and write along the bottom of the page.

You were up in the night. I love you. I wish we could run away. I love you.

The first few waking coughs sting his form to life. You take the vial of morning tonic and his coffee, and stand with your back to him as he slowly turns over on one elbow. You casually set the tonic and a towel on the bed and the coffee on the nightstand, and go wait by the window with your own coffee as if you’re enjoying the view of that greasy rotted harbor, as if you don’t hear him coughing his lungs clear into the towel, as if it doesn’t drive spikes through you every time. The clink of the dropper against the lip of the vial. The silence of his bitter squint and swallow. The tight tentative breathing until the fit has abated and the medicine has begun to calm the spasm and he hunches on the side of the bed recovering. 

When enough time has passed you set down your coffee and walk to him. Without looking up, he catches your wrist and his thumb runs the length of your veins there. You climb behind him on the bed on your knees and massage the muscles of his broad back, the sides of his chest that make him jump at first touch. He is rocked slightly by the slow strength of your kneading, head heavy, and he gropes behind him for your hips and pulls you tighter to his back, which is one of the ways you can tell the medicine has begun to work and he has the energy to consider what he’s considering. 

You pull him backward until he’s lying flat, and he gazes at you upside down, his head between your thighs, his eyes bright, gleaming, the azurite intensity of his irises mere rims around the chasms of his pupils, which is another way you know the medicine has taken effect. He squints slightly, even in low light. For a moment he pushes his palms into his eyes; he never complains, but has admitted he hates the stuff, both the floating peaceful feeling that subsides like stepping off a cliffedge into melancholy when it wears off, and the veering sensation he gets, a heart-racing tremulousness beneath an unearned swell of confidence, the headaches. The nightmares. 

The other night, a hard crack across your face shocked you awake, and you sat up in the pitch dark swearing and seeing color, and he was up on his knees beside you in an instant.

“Ah jesus, Nell -” He tipped your head back, and had to reach over you and light the lamp.

“Dammit, Arthur -”

“Christ I’m sorry.” He knelt beside you on the mattress and inspected the damage, as worried as he'd looked one time as he held a handkerchief to your bleeding head with a year's worth of remorse in his eyes.

He wouldn’t stop fussing over you until you knelt up, your knee between his, and you took his face in your hands and said you were fine, not so much as a bloody nose. Still, he lay down, with you at his back, and did not sleep until his own exhaustion took him.

“What were you dreaming about?” You kissed the back of his neck.

“Nothin much.”

“Felt like something.”

He lay quiet in your arms as he toyed with your fingers. 

“Arthur.”

“The feller at that ranch, pale kid.”

He’s apologized many times since then. Makes a point of checking the bridge of your nose, looking as guilty as a boy having committed his first grave mistake. 

Now he lies between your legs, and once he's adjusted to the sensation of having all his senses chemically spurred, he smiles a little. A certain amorousness does seem to accompany the onset of the tonic. His hands run up the sides of your thighs as he gazes at you, and you watch it come over him like light spilling into a dark room.

“Sleep alright?” you ask, combing the backs of your fingers through his hair.

“Don’t remember.”

“You were up for a while, I saw.”

“Well that part I couldn’t sleep for.”

“But after that?”

“Out cold.”

“Good.” You trace your finger down the bridge of his nose, his lips and chin, and he presses his cheek into your palm, kisses the heel of your hand. You let a shred of worry flutter by and smile when he glances up.

He turns further and nips at the inner seam of your trousers there, and he twists himself onto his stomach, his hair sticking up wild from your doting. Slowly, he crawls you backward, butting his head into your chest as you scoot yourself back and he makes a sincere effort to unbutton your shirt with only his teeth before he gives up and makes quick work of it with his fingers.

“You got dressed too soon,” he admonishes as he glances up, about to gingerly vise your nipple between his teeth and flick you with his tongue.

“You need to be in Annesburg in a couple of hours.”

“That’s one hour I can spend on my intended.” He kisses the underside of your breast, adoring the feel of you nudged by his lips, prompting the slight swell and fall with private gratification, and at which you shake your head until he slides his arms under you, drags your hips toward him, and wastes no moment of that hour.

You forget the windows are open until you both stumble out of the room and find Orly waiting across the street.

“Bird could build a nest on that pout, Orly,” Arthur calls, with an indiscreet clap of your ass before he heads down the boardwalk to the stables. His mouth and chin are still rosy under his scruff, and he looks love-drunk strolling away, with a good-natured greeting at a couple of the regulars outside the saloon. When he returns with Georgia and Apollo, he dismounts unnecessarily, as if to help you get up into your own saddle. Then standing between the horses, he speaks in your ear like the devil himself right before he boosts you high, and leaves you blushing harder than a peach as he swings up on Georgia and heads north to meet Dutch. You can’t even look at Orly to see what he heard, but as you lead him south you can’t help but think you might like that tonic more than Arthur does.

South of Annesburg, the saw horses, sand bags, and uniforms are enough to make him guide Georgia along the river banks to head in by the roundabout way before they take notice and come questioning. The screeches of seagulls overhead seem strangely out of place as he comes to the train station, and it takes him a minute to realize why. 

The town is silent as barren countryside. No trains, no whistles, no engines hissing or steam hoists grinding to overpower them. No men working. Just the plaintive piercing calls from the dockside. He hitches Georgia at the station, where he tries to keep himself beneath the notice of the guards, head down, walking purposeful but without haste, though it is quickly clear that every eye is trained on only one thing this morning.

In the thoroughfare, the pine box progresses at a pace that forces the few men in black suits on the balcony of the overpass to watch. They stand there for appearances, stiff and tolerant; one leans to whisper to another, who holds his hand up to stop him. Six men bear the coffin high between them, their arms clamped stiff and brotherly across the other’s shoulder. They walk heel-toe in their old and polished boots, their free arms swinging as united as the oars of warships. Behind them, the girl in black, more sweetheart than wife, wears her borrowed weeds and shuffles in a spellbound stupor. She mourns the young, unwitting martyr, who probably would have avoided such an event to spend the free time fishing. But geologic forces and cut costs and a ninety-pound fall of shale have conscripted him to the cause and his coffin stops before the overpass, where the guards stand severe and expectant and the crowd faces them, and fists ball and jaws set and faces dare the guards to question their seriousness. 

The priest holds his cross up, the nailheads of the box all stamped with crosses, the people in the thoroughfare making the signs of crosses on themselves.

A low voice utters Arthur behind him and he turns.

In the morning shadow of a stack of crates, Dutch and Micah stand with their arms crossed, watching the entire spectacle like bookies keeping score.

He steps backward, with an eye on the military-looking types near the roadside. “Payin your respects?”

Micah draws on his smoke and sucks it in deeper through his teeth. “He was a dear cousin of a cousin.”

Dutch chews a toothpick into pulp with his eye on the frontline. His calculating stare is neither amused nor annoyed but somewhere in between, where it’s possible to get trapped in one of his twists of logical manipulation and come to your senses in the middle of a firefight or breakneck chase. 

“Slight wrinkle in our plans,” he says, calm, under breath.

“Thought you’d be enjoyin the sight of hell about to break loose. All your dreams come true.” The funny notion of Dutch’s dreams spilling like bats from the mouth of hell spreads vivid through his mind and he blinks hard to try to pay attention to what Dutch is saying to him with that annoyance in his voice. Something about schedules.

“The problem is the ones upstairs read the tea leaves too. That ship won’t come in until there’s some assurance this theater calms down a little. You tell that piddling revolutionary to pull his pitchforks back or they’ll light the bonfire without the witch.”

He turns slow. “What the hell are you plannin?” he whispers.

“They just want a chance to talk things out, cowpoke.”

“Sure, witch-burnin sounds like talkin.”

“We are mere facilitators.” Dutch keeps his eyes on the crowd abstractly, foreseeing. “And if you can’t get them to see reason, there won’t be any talking going on, I can tell you that much.” He pulls out his toothpick, mashed flat, and eyes him. “Unless that’s the point.”

“Why do I have to go?”

“Because against his better judgment, Arthur, he trusts you.” Dutch pats him on the chest, and it almost sets him off coughing. He clears his throat.

“What’re you doin then?”

“Watchin. Waitin. Plannin, which no one seems at all inclined to care to do,” Dutch says, with rising grit in his voice as the crowd before them budges forward at some provocation before the dam of soldiers lets them pass by. “There’s one benefit, at least, as I see it, to all this hoopla.”

“What’s that?”

“All them guards got clubs now, brother. Can’t speak for any Pinkertons with their purse shooters, but no one wants a massacre in the headlines, so the orders is, sit on your fuckin hands, boys.” Micah chews his chaw into better position, delighted at turns of fortune, and spits brown.

“You finishin each other’s thoughts now?”

“Calm down and get up there before this all turns into a circus.”

He wants to wipe that shit-dribbling grin off Micah’s face as he passes, but gets such a harsh twinge of pain through his sides he has to look away to hide it as he leaves.

He rides up the hill and west of town, and on his mind, a vague crept-up-on feeling, not sure what to make of it, the drug makes him feel funny that way, and reflecting on Dutch, the way things were and the way things are now, and what’s the difference spending time on any of this nonsense? 

With another sharp stab in his side, he reaches for the tonic, and then Georgia softens under him and slows as if she knows what he sees.

A buck, trimmed in sunlight, its clawed rack like nothing he’s ever seen. Any guilt he begins to feel at the thought of reaching for his Springfield dwindles like a trifle dismissed and it’s as though he’s allowed to watch this creature drink from a stream and raise its head and seem to glance at him. With a query of recognition in the tip of its head.

Then it bounds away, first rustle of a squirrel it hears in the brush. The damn tonic gettin in his head. He’s left with a wisp of sadness in his gut somehow. 

There’s a rider up ahead, near the split to Beaver Hollow, Charles, judging by his braid, going north on the road from camp, and he clicks Georgia up to speed until he catches him. When Charles glances over in greeting, it’s with a smile, such a rare sight it’s hard to resist needling him a little.

“Where you headin all chipper?”

Charles scorns him slightly, as if reminded to be surly. “Up by the reservation.”

“Ain’t it dangerous up there?”

“Not for us.” That look he gives when he’s said something stupid. “It’s the army trying to provoke them. Nothing has happened lately, but your attack on the refinery didn’t help anyone.”

“I was just doin a job, and it was for one a them.” As he says it out loud, the excuse sounds weak and transparent, as though he should have seen through it back then.

“Well think first before you do any more jobs.” 

There’s the feeling, more familiar lately, of realizing he’s in the middle of a garden, having crushed delicate things underfoot, and now can’t see a way out of it without ruining more. As if Charles stands ahead of him waiting; just open your eyes, you oaf.

But Charles lets it pass, that tired endurance in his tone. “It’s a powder keg up there, and the government is deliberately sending in their worst soldiers to be the flint, the ones with disciplinary records. One strike and it goes up, I’ve no doubt. A desperate person can only restrain themselves so long.”

“They’d still fight? Been over for a while, ain’t it, all that?”

“Someone takes over everything you know and cherish, and makes himself at home and tears it up before your eyes without any care at all. You’d fight too. It’ll never be over.”

He shrugs, supposing. “Why you spendin so much time with them, then?”

Charles gives him a knowing raise of his brow, but obscures it in his usual steady survey of the area around him. “Why does anyone do anything.”

“You are tellin me.”

They split by the state line, where Charles unpacks his coat as he prepares to head into the foothills, seeming more eager for it than he has before, heading into snow, but Arthur keeps his trap shut.

He tracks back a ways toward the odd building and this whole matter becoming a bigger problem in his mind. The brutes at the door let him in too easily. The chamber in the basement is more lively and swarming. The welcome of the nitro fumes hits like a burst of steam and it takes him a few blinking, eye-watering moments to get his wits back, struggling not to cough, before he locates the big rusty-headed one standing with several others around a table. The map in the center a sprawling misshapen grid. And nearby, the kid. Downes. Glaring but restrained like a growling dog that ain’t gonna be bothered further but don’t know it.

“The heartless cowboy,” Fincannon smiles in his somewhat boisterous way, taking a couple of limping steps toward him, seeming stronger in the energy of the room. His meaty mitt grasps his hand, and a few eyes from the table glance up with preoccupied annoyance, nothing more.

“Still like a bat to the head is it?” He swirls his hand in the air between them.

Arthur’s shoulders shake with light coughs as he shakes his head, and he gives him Dutch’s message as soon as he can get a word out. 

“Is your boss telling me how to run a strike?”

“He thinks you’re gettin ahead of yourselves and it’s turnin into a problem.”

Fincannon blinks, unimpressed. “I’m not sure we share that belief.”

He shrugs, trying not to wheeze outright. “Look, where we stand, there ain’t gonna be any talkin if shit gets out of hand.” 

“And you, wanting explosives, you’d prefer shit remain in hand.”

“What’s he talking about, Roy?” The feller over at the table, looking just as skeptical as the last time, glares at him feeling no need to reserve his suspicion. Compared to the rest of them, all in stages of wearing out, their faces unshaven, their sleeves rolled up, he stands there with less than a day’s shadow on him, icy eyes clear and unflinching.

Fincannon shakes his head with his smile that spreads all the features of his face apart. “Mister McElroy is very protective of operations. Wrinkles in a plan do not amuse him,” he adds, with a conspiratorial tip of the head and well in hearing of Mister McElroy.

“Maybe you haven’t been down there to see it. But those guards are startin to get nervous.” He tries to ignore all their eyes on him. “Don’t matter who acts first. Folk are gonna get hurt.”

“And once again those without a voice are the ones who must use restraint.”

“Reckon if you’re in a pen with a bull, until you get help or grow horns you’re an idiot to piss him off.” And there’s a way to look at a gunfighter when the guns aren’t drawn yet. Unafraid but not careless. “Unless pissin him off is the point.” To borrow Dutch’s skepticism. But at the same time he says it, he gets the itch of a feeling he’s missed the point instead.

As Fincannon sizes him up, he has to stand bold in that brittle unbreathable air, under the glare of them all, having spoken plain. The ones at the corner table wrap tape around fuses busy as farmwives at their skeins. 

“No. Pissing him off is not the point.” Fincannon finally nods in a humoring truce, before he swings his arm around Arthur’s shoulder and brings him closer than he has ever wanted to get to the integration of nitroglycerin and black powder, wood pulp, blasting caps, and a growing length of precisely packed fuse. “Castration, maybe.” Smiling, he picks up a fresh stick of dynamite from the table and lifts it horizontally between them so that Arthur is forced to look him in his irascible eyes that rapidly twitch side to side like he reads his own feverish thoughts in the air. 

“The new seam will earn out millions. An expert can blow the access, precise as picking an eyelash off your cheek. If demands aren’t met.”

“Will they know the difference between a threat to their money and their balls?”

“They never do.”

“Just keep your people’s heads cool.”

Fincannon nods in their understanding and lumbers back to the table. “Not so heartless,” he says down at the maps as he sorts through books and papers.

The other men slowly get back to their work, and if he didn’t notice their solemnity before, now he sees it in their hard-worked faces, their nervous hands, the silent encouragement of each other.

“Have to delay your payment,” Fincannon calls from the table.

“More than one way to get fireworks if we have to.”

“I won’t tell your boss you said that.”

While Arthur fights another round of coughing, Fincannon tears a sheet of paper out of his book and spends a moment staring back at him in thought before writing. 

“Two days,” he enunciates as he scribbles a couple of lines and folds it with care. “Archie,” he calls behind him, and the Downes kid approaches. He hands it to him, along with another letter, that one sealed. “You might accompany him directly, Mister Morgan. A little protection for the favor.”

Whose favor he thinks it is, it’s a bit hard to say.

“Take it to Didsbury. Carthage seam, two west, twelve north,” he tells the kid. “And you’ll post up there on the…twentieth now, it seems.” Smiles at Arthur, cooperatively.

The kid refuses to look at Arthur as he heads past him, and that kid can shun him any way he likes as long as he can get out of that chamber that reeks to high heaven of burnt syrup. The ride out is quiet, and Georgia takes lead over the kid’s nag, so he doesn’t have to watch those shoulders despising him, that head filled with hate. 

North of Annesburg they pass the gathered mourners, and he lets the kid take front as they get nearer to the town, where the thoroughfare is empty and the hillside silent. First they ride the tracks along the waterfront, then circle back up into the hill to the south, slowing as they come up a small rise and stopping at a platform of boards there laid out four by four, two legs of a ladder sticking up a few inches from an opening. So unassuming a man could step into it and disappear. The kid dismounts and hitches his nag, and gets to the ladder, and glances back. They have no words to say to each other.

The day after the funeral, the men return to work without complaint. No sullen looks at the bosses, no feet dragged, no wayward glances or spitting. The menace in the air: simply gone. The women are back to their chores with renewed industriousness. Laundry hangs on the lines like faded bunting. Workers in the street pick up the fliers and the discarded placards, sweep the boardwalks, wash windows. A manager in the red tower overhead might congratulate himself on allowing the day off and make logical comparisons to all steam-powered contraptions, and the necessity to let some off at intervals, as a lesson reapplied where any kind of pressure builds. He considers granting a half-day off the following year in remembrance.

The 18th passes uneventfully. And the 19th. The harbormaster is noticed on the docks with his crew. Small vessels ordered redocked to the south. Crates moved. A board repaired. Seagull shit cleaned from the pilings with wire brushes.

 


 

It is the 20th. Two days, still so much to do. And Leviticus Cornwall is dead.

You can hardly keep your mind on one thing at a time that sunny afternoon as you hitch Apollo by Georgia at the Annesburg station and give them both a distracted pet on the nose. 

For you have never seen such a sight as the one in this town. A throng of hundreds. Shouting, singing. Placards declaring workers’ rights. Placards declaring fair wages and better conditions. Leviticus Cornwall Fraud!  Jameson Pay Up Or Get Out! A dummy with a cravat and watchchain, tarred and feathered as a flustered chicken, sits propped up on a rail and paraded through the crowd. A sheet hangs with a guillotine painted on it hung from the gallows. Men straddle the crossbeam, proud of their display. It puts a trill in your chest and you can't quite understand why, except that you are welcomed among them, handed a flier on some Jack Sweet’s behalf to support the union, and they might as well have handed you a party hat while they were at it. 

When you slip inside the station to post a letter, everyone stands at windows, craning. Not talking. The clerk hardly gives you a glance and you pay the two cents and watch until you're sure he sees the letter before you back away.

It's only then, in that troubled observatory, that you hear the gunfire, faint as distant carpentry, and out in the crowd a current of chaos begins to churn. Word spreads fast as an electric fuse. 

You exit through the back and run along the dockside beneath shirts and quilts on clotheslines and dodge the people trying to hide there, and in the distance you see the black hat of Dutch, where he holds his own in the cover of the red building. When you feel your opening, you sprint, head down, from crate to crate until you reach him.

“What the hell did you do?” you pant as you get your back to the wall beside him, shoving a box of .38s into his chest, which he accepts with a huffy exaggerated thanks.

“Oh the cavalry has arrived.” He flinches when a bullet thwacks the wall between you and you both crouch lower and you squeeze off several rounds in its direction. 

“I’m not gonna ask what part you played here.”

“Well then I suggest you don’t. But my boys are pinned down by the cargo shed if you want to be useful.” He fumbles the new cartridges like an abundance he doesn’t know how to accept.

“Oh yes, boss,” you say with a spit of vigor, and he can’t help but chuckle and shake his head as he loads. 

“Could've used you ten minutes ago.”

You sprint headlong down the docks as shots clap behind you, past the ship at anchor. One round lodges in a piling to your left. Another splashes into the oil-slicked water to your right, detached from the bang of it firing. You slip behind a stack of crates and almost tumble over Arthur in cover there, catching his breath and grinning in spite of himself.

Crouched side by side, you take his Schofield in one hand and pass him the tonic in the other. He tugs your collar up under the bandolier where it’s rubbed your neck raw before taking a dose. As you slip bullets into his chambers and hand it over for the other one, you catch the derisive chuckle of Micah watching from the next crate.

“Aw take care of mine too, honey?”

“Wait your turn, Micah. I'll be glad to fill you full of lead.”

He laughs down at his chest, plugging his own chambers. “Where was you on Guarma. Would’ve been a treat over old black lung there.”

“She was busy bein worth a damn, Micah.” He feeds rounds into his bandolier with rankled sharpness, and passes the tonic back to you.

Micah rolls his eyes. “Aw come now, Arthur, your sense of humor the first thing to go?”

“Always somethin wounded about you,” Arthur says, and you turn to him, surprised at the provocation, and so does Micah, but he’s got a steeliness in his eyes fixed on Micah and not for one second about to let him slip off with the last word. “Whole world owes you some apology.” 

“You tryin to get under my skin there, Arthur?”

“No, Micah, just tellin you what I see plain as day.”

You aim up and fire at two soldiers barreling your way and they fall one atop the other like a vaudeville act. “Christ’s sake, we gotta get off this spot, quit bickering and help.”

“I’d listen to the one with some sense between you.”

You take out an agent at the top of the stairs. “Only sense I got is the smell of your rotten hide. Get your ass over to Dutch, we’ll cover.”

He runs like only a lizard can, flat and low and evasive, and you take a discreet shot to pick off a soldier by the overpass and give them both an opening. Micah throws up a hand in salute. You grant there’s a certain charm about nerve like that in the midst of a firefight. 

And you discover the upside to a little bullet exchange in a company town at its wits' end is that it’s not easy to focus on where a shot came from in all that noise and confusion, and folks learn pretty quickly how much the company wants to avoid the blood of a bunch of unarmed miners on their hands. It takes minutes for them to swarm the company buildings. Break the storefronts of company stores. The ones you pass as they rush along the docks nod approval on their way to the ship; some of them are already running off with chairs and lamps and cigars and gilded picture frames. All that early enlivening spirit and camaraderie. The crowds hide you and let you ride the current through them, and you can’t help but feel explosive with the righteousness of their anger and pride. 

Behind the beer hall, Arthur sways back against the wall, hand groping in his satchel, and he wipes his brow with the back of his other sleeve.

“You okay?” Winded, you prop yourself on your knees as he takes a sip from the vial.

He nods and puts the stopper back, and digs at his satchel to put it away, but you swipe it from him.

“Give me that." Before he can say anything, you steal a bitter drink for yourself, eyeing him over the bottle, and in a kind of tired afterthought you shrug at his surprise. He watches you with a good deal of interest now as he stashes the vial away. His brow flinches up with a slight grimace when you gag. The numb chemical trail it leaves down your tongue and throat feels like a timed fuse, and once the acrid sear dulls, worse than homebrew whiskey, you manage to smile at him, come what may. He shakes his head at you, a little prickly at first, but finally tugs your hat brim down over your eyes. “Alright then, see what you done.”

He takes your hand and pulls you behind him along the docks, and when voices approach from the other direction he turns back and yanks you into an alleyway. A brief headache zings through your temples and you bring your fingers up to press there when the sound suddenly begins to dissolve in your ears somewhat, and your cheeks flush hot, and with the round wavering fall of liquid you splash back to the wall, a pool of pure warmth, energy slowly coursing like light in your veins, your heart pounding, a laugh you can't hold back. He grabs your arms and leans in to hold you steady.

Fire bells clang their high insistent toll over the town. Smoke begins to crowd the setting ruby sun and take over the sky. The blaze of the foreman's office heats the world below with a fearsome nighttime radiation, and the field of broken glass in the thoroughfare catches the light like a glistening orange sea, while black warship steam engines lie oddly still among the waves. In an alley, unnoticed by the rioters and the guards who fear them, heat spreads in the shadows too.

“Christ, watchin you shoot, Red,” he gasps into your neck as he shoves you up against the wall between crates in the alley, and then sinks to his knees in front of you.

“Call me Missus Morgan,” you stutter, nearly slipping, and grappling at his shoulders for balance as he strips your boot off and your right pant leg. 

He straightens up into you, his nose nudging yours a little too hard, your head bumping the wall, and he doesn’t care. He goes for your neck, and kisses you there with such a ravenous groan as you feverishly unbutton his fly, to feel your hand on his stunningly hard cock, that you recoil in confusion when he rasps a harsh No against your throat. He breaks away long enough to spit in his palm, and primes himself, rounding his head with two strokes you can hardly look away from before he heaves you up with one arm, your legs around his waist. So close you could bite his lip, he watches your suffering face, his teeth slightly bared with ache and satisfaction as he pushes into you.

“Why not?” you manage to ask, but the word is broken off as you cry out, stretching with his thick thrust, and you grab the back of his coat, utter bliss gushing through your chest as you take the full length of him. Spreading your hand on his hollowing cheek as he kisses your neck, you feel the strength of his jaw, the reaving intention of his head. The chill following up the light trail he tongues to your earlobe.

“We ain’t married yet ahfuck - ” he groans, a note of pure devotion in his voice, and jerks you roughly as he gets his grip, withdraws, and glides in again so deep you feel about to fall and you fist a handful of his hair. You rock against that wall like he will ram you through it. When he cups your cheek, you bite his thumb and suck hard, and his darkened eyes shine vehemently with the light of the flames. He pulls hard against your cheek enough to hurt, slowly marking you with the streak of your own spit, leaving you gaping, wanting more. The look of you so hungry and depraved overcomes him, and he has to hold you back, his head down, thumbs digging into your flesh before he grits with the need to take you faster.

“When did you get so formal?” You dig your heels into his ass to wring him close, and force a laughing gasp from him. You flag against the wall, bucked by his vigorous thrusts.

“Since I asked you.” 

An unstoppable arch bends you into him and you grip the back of his neck. “Did you ask me?” 

“You serious?” Voice breaking, he pulls back in half-stunned perplexity until he sees your teasing stare. From the snarl in his lip he seems to feel that you deserve the punishment of him pounding you into the wall. 

“Course I asked you.”

“Ask me proper.”

“Marry me.” He glares with effort.

“That’s not asking!”

He eases up, breathing hard as he fucks slower and deeper and leans his head against yours. “Now who’s bein formal.” He grins when you sulk. The musk of his sweat makes you ache to kiss him, and you scrape your lips on his whiskers as he swings his face away. Each time, still a sting of separation, and in the fog of your awareness, you feel a sudden stab of gloom, like a dagger sharp as glass quickly driven down and up again behind your shoulder blade before you really notice. But he murmurs something you can’t make out over all the noise, and just the heat of his mouth, the growl of his voice, relieves what sting remains. His thumb guides you back to him.

“I haven’t told you about the church wedding we’ll have,” you manage to say, though the air around you shudders with the vibration of your voice.

“Ain’t a church that would take us.” His voice an echo.

“Then right here.” 

“At the end of the world?” 

“Damn the world.”

He crushes you again and again, holding off as long as he can before he loses control. His hand smacks the wall by your head, and you feel the pulsing weld cleave straight up his spine. A sound escapes his throat like the moment of rescue. On the warm flood of his cum you buckle, pleading helpless ohs as he rocks you through your high. His neck linked with yours. Your legs belted around him. His hand cradling the underside of your thigh. Your fingers in his hair. You breathe together in the quiet vault of each other before your senses rush back somewhat foreign.

“Sorry.” He is slow to draw his cheek away from yours.  “I wasn’t -”

“No, I’ve missed it.”

A couple of men sprint up the alley and one of them hoots as they go past. Arthur smirks, still panting, and rests his head on your shoulder one more moment, then glances up to see they’re gone before he unhitches himself from you and lets you down, noticing, as he does, the white measure of his spend drip between your legs and the small quail you feel as it spills. His thumb still stroking back on your cheek. He fastens himself up while you try to get your pants back on, and holds up his bandana to cough.

“Hurry up,” he rasps, glancing around, shielding you as well as he can.

“You got it inside out.” You totter on one foot, off kilter from the tonic, and he steadies you, then sits you on the crate, and his eyes crinkle with a smile while he unsleeves the leg of your pants and tugs it up your leg and you lie back to pull them on. He hunts around for your boot and tugs that onto your foot, pounding the sole flat before you stand. He pulls your gun belt around you and feeds the leather through the buckle with his eyes only on you, enjoying you jolted into him with unnecessary brusqueness. All the bedlam around, but this quiet tunnel between you. Damn the world.

He shoulders her around the corner, feeling high from the fuck and the holy mess around them, can’t believe they done it out in the open like that, maybe feeling a bit proud, when he sees Orly standing by their horses.

“Always seem to meet like this, agent. You peepin?”

But Orly looks like he’s about to be sick, even puts a hand on Georgia’s neck like he needs the touch.

“You have to get out of here.”

Leaning heavily into him as he boosts her a few inches up to the boardwalk, Nell grabs a handful of his ass and he has to stop himself from laughing in that worried little bastard’s face.

“This place is going to go up.”

“What?” He snatches Nell’s sleeve to steady her as she stumbles a step away from him.

“That’s the plan.” He shakes his head. “From up top.”

“They’d blow their own mine?” He turns to look up at the towering hillside, all the houses clinging to it like mushrooms on a tree trunk.

“It makes the men look violent. Incompetent.”

Arthur turns back, and has to look down to Orly, standing so close. “What area?” He scrambles to think of the name Fincannon gave. “...C-Carthage seam?”

Orly’s face goes drawn and serious. “Whole goddamn thing.” His eyes flick up to the hillside and back, newly concerned. 

“Folk are in there -”

For once, the sonofabitch looks him square in the eye and there is no side of any law. “There may not be time -”

“Are you okay?” He turns to Nell and bends his knees a bit to see her better; her eyes blink slow from the tonic, and it puts him in mind to do nothing more than get her away from there until he sees her check her weapon, hand steady. 

“I’m fine,” she says, and another shout from the crowd turns both their heads. He squeezes her hand on his chest. “Arthur -”

“Meet me, crossroads south of town, where you find Georgia. Do not get closer to that hill.” He kisses her on the cheek, and though it seems to stun her in the moment, her eyes are clear when she nods and he breaks away and mounts. “Look after her,” he calls back to Orly.

Georgia gets up fast at the squeeze of his calves, her restraint exhausted in the chaos of that place, embers floating around them like hellish snow, shadows racing past, whistles shrill enough to make him wince and her ears to flinch back flat; there you go strong girl, let’s get.

The road up over town empties and he rides alone in the moonlight diffused in the smoke like cream streaming through the arms of the trees. He can hardly remember where to find the entrance, a plain wooden flat on the roadside, until he sees the kid’s horse ahead hitched up and skittish. He swings down from her, despite the shock to his chest, loops her reins over a low branch, and begins the long descent. Ladder after ladder sinking into the rock of the earth, deeper than it seems possible to go, a pit plunging so far into the rock he feels the chill encroaching, he feels the years of men at work, and the weight of the earth over top increasing. 

He slips down the last few rungs but his boots hit rock, and he reels back against the mine wall on the scattered coal and rockfall, and then on blind faith he heads to his right where there is a hint of light, or is it his eyes trying to make sense of the dark? He wonders, should he fail, how painless it would feel, to die so. Or if it is really as instantaneous as it seems, the shock of incineration. Or if time, as in the worst moments, slows and reveals everything, as if time has always been beside the point. 

And when he finds the boy standing with the others as he was told, obedient as a lamb, no comprehension of the hardened cynical souls of powerful men, he doesn’t wait to explain, he doesn’t let him argue. The kid is tall but has no ability to resist him. Arthur shouts for the others to get away from there, and pays no mind to whether they listen, simply grabs the boy by the vest and hauls him along, back through the tunnels as fast as he possibly can. There’s a rat here, boy, whole mine’s gonna go, we’ll be lucky if we make it out. The kid demands to know who, how he knows, but he can’t explain; just trust. That word, it’s like reins pulled hard back to that kid, and for a second he twists out of his grasp, saying he has to warn the rest of them, but Arthur hooks him back and has to drag him fighting, beginning to stagger in his steps. He coughs facing away while he snags fistfuls of his shirt and hurls him forward.

Many miles from the glow of the fires, in the light of the Moon of Falling Leaves, two boys rush forward, low in the grass and soundless as snakes. Their paint streaks their faces in white branching lightning. In their heads, the promise of the envy of their brothers. The revived spirit of the elders. They run with the courage of lightning, and they will strike as silently, one soundless breath before the thunder. 

The outlaw with the scar spidering his cheek walks back in the night with the man named Paytah. They approach the ones gathered at the fire. The boys have been gone too long. Ten Crow. Enapay.

The guards of the stables at the fort are fools. They do not watch the low ground, and the breeze in the grasses conceals the movement there. Their ears are dull from gunfire. Their eyes fogged and weary from whiskey. They do not hear the latch lifted, they do not even hear the first horses led out. The thunder of hooves begins as deep rumbling in their chests, and when the horses are loose Enapay jumps up on the back of a bay stallion and calls out to the night sky. 

In the northern town, soldiers pass clubs down the line. They are told to stay well away from the mine and they are trained not to ask questions. 

Hands grasp the bar of the blasting machine. 

A man and a boy run through dark tunnels trusting the memory of the distance they track back over. Shadows of others sprint by them little more than footfalls loud then fading.

All plans laid out as carefully as a fuse strung and connected. Whose precise, considered timing has brought these machinations to fruition, after all the urged restraint, patience, and tolerance beyond what a man can endure? A single flash will set it off.

A boy tumbles into the grass.

A tycoon sinks to the river bottom. 

A door is broken in.

A bullet pierces flesh.

A current zips down the fuse. 

Those above ground who witnessed the explosion say the entire northern hillside seemed to inhale like a great expanding chest, and fall in exhalation before they heard the boom. Before the north wall caved in and the plumes of black smoke coughed in chorus from the many mouths of the mine. In the wake of the earthen rumble all was silent.

The tycoon lies dead in the harbor. His ship, docked there, burns high as a signal fire.

In the suffocating smoke, the kid squirms under him as Arthur comes to. He pushes himself off him, choking, unable to get breath just to cough, when hands grasp the lapels of his coat and drag him to his feet. He breaks the kid’s hands off him, staggering back, trying to tell him Get up there, go with the little air he has, but the kid shoves his chest into the ladder and forces him up ahead of him. His hands are slick with sweat and grease, eyes blinded by the smoke. Smothering. Each rung is paid for in breath. His chest seizes up in pain like he’s been run through by a spear and carries it sticking sideways out of him. He is on the verge of breaking down, his legs going weak, his hands tingling and dumbly not taking hold, boots slipping, bruising shins and forearms. The kid’s voice, Keep going, Sir, forces him to the next ladder and the next, faster. He will not let him stay, and throws his shoulder into his thigh as they get near to the top and they burst into moonlight and air.

He’s on his elbows and knees on the road, heaving. Blood spattering the backs of his hands as he coughs and struggles not to collapse. Little by little, he can pull breath again, a pathetic crackle in his lungs. The kid has gotten to his feet and stands there over him.

Like a man stands over a result of his doing. Uncertain of it.

He pushes himself back to sit on his heels, surrounded by flashes of light, sucking air like a goddamned stuck pipe. His voice broken into pieces. “That was real brave of you, kid.” He spits away from him. “Doin that.”

The kid’s boot digs into the dirt as if he is planting himself to fight, but he turns away, kicks a stone with such force it ricochets off a tree. With every cough, Arthur hears himself the way the kid must hear him. He has to prop himself up, hands on his knees. 

A despising turn of the head toward him, and away, as if turning to look has accidentally wrung the resistance out of him.

He wipes his mouth. “But you wish you hadn’t.” 

“I might.”

The mangle of rage in that voice. All confusion and woundedness and murderous anger.

He smirks, coughs, and glazes over at the sight of that incomprehensible smoking hillside. “Yeah I might too.”  The pain in his chest, it’s deeper than the sickness, a pain eaten in like rot. He can’t look at the face of undue salvation, can’t figure any reason he should be alive there now, and barely summons the power to speak. Shame weighs on him black and heavy as Dutch’s bearskin coat. 

“But thank you.” He shakes his tingling hand and clenches it.

Then he sees, in the rut of a wagon track between them, his Schofield lying there like a rib washed free from its carcass. They notice it at the same time. 

He watches grimly as the kid takes a step toward it and picks it up, as foreign to him as a sword or a pickaxe he should have no business holding. At first, he lifts it three-fingered by the cylinder, heavier than he expected, and almost drops it. Now holds it two-handed. His right hand curls around the grip. Thumb tests the reach to the hammer. Pointer finger rests against the edge of the trigger. The thumb ratchets the hammer back one click like a dry swallow. Another.

And go on kid. A barrel aimed is a tunnel to somewhere. It could easily be swept aside, or answered with his offhand gun. He could let it happen. He breathes and waits, understanding himself in his eyes, the body and soul of evil kneeling. Images in the back of his mind breeze sweetly by. 

“All you got to do is decide if you want it on your conscience.”

The kid fumbles the revolver toward him as if a snake has slithered up the grip. Arthur snatches it by the barrel and swings it away, uncocking it, sliding it home. 

With a lurch to the side, the kid bends over and pukes himself hollow on the road, enough to make his witness wince in sympathy at the duration of it. He finally spits and hangs over his own puddle, shaky. Wipes his nose on his sleeve.

“You done?”

The kid sniffles, lets out a shuddering breath.

“Come sit down.”

The kid obeys so readily it brings Jack to mind, sitting down on the roadside without more reason than being drawn to you. Arthur eases painfully back, keeping a little distance between them.

Overlooking the town in the light of the fires and the moon, they feel the wash of silence. Calls bellow sparse as shiphorns near the mine as men begin to pull apart the rubble and unbury the living. And pick apart their failing.

A four-year-old boy first watched a grown man fail the day Lyle Morgan tripped off the boardwalk dead drunk in broad daylight and pissed himself in the thoroughfare. He imagines the kid here, gentle as he is, first saw it when a brute showed up to collect a debt his dying father couldn’t pay. And today, sees the evil ways the powerful keep their power and the failure of decent men.

“You’re a good kid.”  

The kid wipes his eyes and sags on his knees.

“Bet your daddy was proud.”

The kid’s back stiffens. He faces away, shrugs. 

“Don’t you shrug that, you know it. He was one of the good ones. Did for others.” 

“Then why’d you beat him. Should’ve known what it would do.”

He nods. Something he’s asked himself a few times by now. Hoping for a different reason than the truth. “It was a job.” He takes off his hat, swipes his hair off his face. “Used to think what’s the difference, three more days or three more months. Like I even done him a favor.”

Hooves on the road make them both look up as Nell rides over the hilltop to the south with Orly. As he looks watches, he catches the magnitude of sadness in the kid’s face, and confronting it all, here he is, a man rightly fallen in the road, reminded in every strained breath of the wrongness of his life, how little he deserves of mercy. It grips his throat so tight he can hardly speak.

“I’m sorry I stole that precious time. And gave you more pain besides.”

The kid struggles to hold in his tears, sniffing, turning away. It seems a further desecration, being so near to the wreckage he caused of a life.

“Now go on. Find your momma and get out of here.”

The kid only slumps more permanently in place, settling like an old man in his lost hope. 

“I mean it, before they come by.” 

“We haven’t got a place to go. Whole town is burning.”

“Quite a sight ain’t it.” Though it stabs him like a fractured bone, he twists to reach his satchel, feels around for his stack of cash and cuts it. “Here.”

He doesn’t count it. Feels like half. Hands it up without looking. 

“We don’t want -”

“Just take it.” He coughs into his opposite arm. “Stay off the road. Emerald Station’s your best bet. Don’t stop for no one.” What more he could say if he had the breath to say it, he isn’t sure anyway. He grabs the kid’s arm, slaps the cash in his hand, trying not to balk when he sees it’s three hundred or more, and shoves him away by the shoulder. 

The weight of his stare and Nell and Orly watching is enough to flatten him as the kid mounts up and gives him one last look, as anyone would do, in sight of the beast that changed his life irrecoverably. 

He stays on the roadside. Arms hanging out off his knees. His chest so painful he dreads each unavoidable breath, and then he coughs a harrowing fit, until he fears he will spill his guts or pass out. Her hand touches his shoulder. A vial in her palm. He takes it from her like a coin. Drinks a desperate dose and then some, sour as pine pitch on his tongue. It numbs his mouth for a spell, and each time there comes on that strong qualm, the flush of spit before the fit calms, the bitter clarity of his fault in life, like melting ice. Then its reverse approaches, first in his stomach and then dull warmth in his spine, his brain, that makes him want to fall backward. It smothers the shame in his chest like a blanket; he knows it is there, he feels it vaguely, but it is out of his sight now, overtaken by this powerful false clemency. It is not real; that much is clear. It is a stick of driftwood to a drowning man, it is a dash of air in his lungs again, it is enough to feel sick and on the fluttering brink of weeping and laughing at the same time. When her hand rests on his back he jumps, realizing she’s sitting next to him. He spits between his boots, wipes his face on his sleeve. 

“We should go,” she says, softly. 







Notes:

The Annesburg doctor is basically giving Arthur a speedball here; a laudanum cough-suppressant with a tincture of cocaine, which also has topical anesthetic properties. Because 1899.

Also owe a thanks to actual miners on reddit for breaking down some basics in a way a very dense writer might barely understand them. They are definitely not reading this fic to know whether it helped, but it did.

Chapter 23: The Death of Colm O'Driscoll

Summary:

As in the beginnings of all things, the night you first came to Hanging Dog fell on a tranquil scene about to be disturbed. Mountain snow accumulated soft in the snowbright sapphire night, uncrossed by the tracks of any animal, unstirred by wind. Large flakes floated aimlessly like dying stars coming unattached from the milky sky and drifting nightlong over that serene valley until the breath of a rider flustered them.

Notes:

Minor spoiler-related TW/CW in end notes

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

By the order of the State of Texas and the authority of the Hon. Judge Marlon Caldwell, on the 30th of March, in the year of our Lord, 1893, in the city of Fredericksburg, the outlaw Colm O’Driscoll was hung by the neck until dead. (This turned out not to be true.) He was also, later in that year, shot by lawmen outside of Rapid City. (The corpse was a vagrant by the name of McTeague.) In 1896, he was shot in the head playing faro in a place called Antioch by a bounty hunter of some renown, but he had never played faro and had never been to a place by that name. He was arrested, inexplicably the same day, in Cholla Springs, and that was also untrue. 

By the accounts of The Austin Weekly Statesman, The Blackwater Register, and The Jackson Herald, he had been sprung from the gallows three times by his men who had cleverly hidden among the crowds or insinuated themselves among the ones carrying out the official duty. In actuality, it was four times, the fourth, in Wichita, such an embarrassment to the town it was never mentioned in the papers. The hangman swung instead.

It was enough for a person to believe he might never see justice done by god or man, slippery devil that he was, with some kind of gift or unnatural luck on his side. They never did seem to learn there was very little luck to it at all.

As in the beginnings of all things, the night you first came to Hanging Dog fell on a tranquil scene about to be disturbed. Mountain snow accumulated soft in the snowbright sapphire night, uncrossed by the tracks of any animal, unstirred by wind. Large flakes floated aimlessly like dying stars coming unattached from the milky sky and drifting nightlong over that serene valley until the breath of a rider flustered them. His horse’s hooves churned through deep powder. Men on horseback followed in his tracks, their hats pulled low. A carriage behind them groaned, drawn hard by two draft mules. 

You sat under a bearskin blanket beside Gus, his dark beard shocked to woolen white at his chin. His face was grim as he regarded Colm sitting across from you, who, in his thinness, rocked side to side by the lilt of the carriage springs. The skin of a diamondback encircled his hat and shone in the lantern light as if it moved in constant coiling. He eyed the world through the narrow slits of his own differing plans. 

There had been an almighty debate about whether you should be brought along. Colm gave loud, absolute assurances to Gus you would remain safe in the carriage. 

The horsemen, then the carriage, approached the sign at the crossroads and passed it one by one, its arms spread like a roadside shrine offering little more than weak courage to the faithful.

“You’re goin to see an event, tonight, Scarlett.”

He chuckled at Gus’ loathing grunt.

“An event of, some folk need to be reminded of their place.”

“Ain’t worth the trouble, Colm.”

“I think he’d see my reasons.”

“Ain’t worth the risk just to make a point. What d’you need a ranch for anyhow.”

“Greater risk in letting him walk all over you. Makes you look weak.” 

Gus faced away.

“When folk go behind your back, they need to be taught a lesson to bring em in line,” Colm said to you. Although his voice had a teacherly pleasantness to it, there was nothing but hate underneath. Even then, you knew the sound of danger lightly withheld.

“So this is about Plainview too.” Gus, when he was upset, brought grizzly bears to mind, all the more so when he took up half the space in the cab of the carriage.

“Far as you’re concerned, everything is about Plainview now.”

“It was a bad deal, Colm, I gave you my reasons, there weren’t no goin behind. Seamus would never go that way, neither.” Gus always did think he could appeal to good sense. It blinded him to senselessness.

“My brother’s off whorin in Saint Denis, you can see how greatly it troubled him.”

“More chances down south for better scores, anyways. Better chances of gettin out alive, too.” 

“Why, I thank you for your advice.”

With a deadly glare, Gus pulled long from his flask and faced out the window. In the two months you had been his pet, for lack of a better idea of you, the various ways he took his drink had become identifiable, and something was on his mind that night; he drained it dry long before the carriage stopped.

When the procession stopped on the road outside a moderately sized ranch nestled in the piney mountains on the northwestern side of Big Valley, the men dismounted. Colm stepped out of the carriage in his buffalo hide coat. The entire cab pitched sideways and sprang right as Gus squeezed out the door. Colm spent a minute taking in the sight, his hands gripping his gun belt, and sighed hugely as if he was home. The big house glowed bright, a kindled light that overflowed onto the snow. The bunkhouse too. He had heard to expect fourteen. He always counted on more, and brought ten of his own men. Catching a target unawares usually afforded an advantage of several kills. 

He turned to look back at the cab. “C’mon.”

Gus, loading his rifle, looked up wary, spoke wary. “What’re you doin, Colm?” He glanced back at you. And you didn’t know yet all that was loaded in that glance.

Colm shook his head. “You so keen on her stayin, ain’t you? Then she pulls her weight. You know good as I do how to break a gun dog. C’mon now.” He beckoned with his gloved fingers. “Get em used to it first thing.”

When you stepped out of the cab and hopped down into the snow, Gus took a big fist of the back of your coat and dragged you next to him. He seemed to gauge you in his head for a minute before he dug in his coat pocket for a handkerchief. He ripped it in half, and half again, and handed you two pieces the size of oak leaves.

“Wad them up in your ears. And stay by me.” He pulled you closer still to his leg. “You’ll be alright,” he added, looking away, telling the lie of consolation. If he had known what he’d ignited, he would’ve hid you, would’ve put you on a horse’s back and sent you riding as far as you could go. He should have known, but then, until that night, even an outlaw like him, having seen all he had seen, had assumed no man was truly evil.

Dark figures spread out like ravens on a rail and began to trudge forward in the peace of that night. The trees would muffle the screams though there was no one nearby to hear them anyway. The valley would hush the gunfire as if it held shut the door. The snow would fall as constantly over the terror as the silence that followed. And the heaving breath of a man stumbling in the powder, picking himself up, running, frosted on his beard. 

A memory keeps coming back to you.

You took to walking with Hosea on the lakeshore in the evening, in the weeks at Clemens Point while Arthur was away. Dragonflies and mosquitoes scrambled in frantic multitudes over the surface of the water, and at the time, going at your easy pace, it felt like strolling through whole days speeding by. It passed the time in pleasant fashion, walking with him. You came to know about him that way, about Bessie, about Arthur as a boy; he loved to tell you the stories he knew would’ve made the man blush. Botched jobs, childhood awkwardness. Or talk about the old days fondly like a perfect landscape painting. This day was different, a day he caught you missing him. You weren’t in much of a talking mood; he seemed to understand.

He carved into an apple and ate slices off his knife. You smoked and tried to keep your mind on your steps in the sand and schools of minnows switching left and right in the shallow water.

“In the end, you think of the beginning,” Hosea mused, after a time spent walking in the lively calm of the evening cacophony. 

You were alarmed to hear him speak so freely of it. “You’re not at the end.” 

“Beginning of all this, then. Beginning of us. Beginning of time.” He smirked at his own theatrical thinking and swept his knife across the view as if he was on a stage. “Did we do right, or did we do wrong, or in thinking we’d done right, did we ignore the wrong?” 

He cut out a thin section of apple and handed it to you on the blade like a clipping of his mind. You ate it, despite memories of a root cellar brought to mind by the faintest smell.

“Original sins and origins of man,” he said, now making fun of himself. “Guess it comes down to first sins or first accidents. Talk of that Christopher Columbus. Or our manifest destiny to come out here and claim what piece of paradise we could get our hands on. Never mind the ones already there in a paradise about to turn to hell."

He spoke as if it were the same as commenting on the sunset blazing through the clouds that spelled a likely evening rain.

“If I hadn’t met Dutch, I wouldn’t have met Bessie. But she would have preferred I’d never met Dutch, so figure that out. I’d prefer Blackwater had never happened of course, but then we would be off in California and never met you,” he said, nudging your arm. 

You smiled at your feet leaving parallel tracks on the sand, your bare feet and his shoes, and the rare pleasure of a few drops of evening sunlit rain that tapped on your skin as if you should pay attention.

“In a way, the ends are all buried where they started. Ash to ash, as they say.” He stopped for a moment. “Huh,” he said, looking out curiously across the lake toward that fiery sunset. “Truer than you think.” He lifted his eyebrows and shook his head at his own realization or the confounding way all things share the same seed if you go back far enough. “But an old man is tempted to think round and round in circles. As if the answer’s been there all along.”

 


 

He doesn’t sleep much now, dipping into dreams of blind chaos and men shouting at each other to run. The shadowed slump of the Downes boy next to him on the road. Juney Rider's waxen face. They’ll take everything that’s precious, son, everything, they’ll make it hurt before you die. And then a black coyote skulks along the margin of a stream, head low, silver eyes sharp on him a while before it steals away and he will never see it again. Somehow he is sure of that, watching it go, and he finally lies awake as the darkness is gradually overcome by early birdsong outside his tent, the sounds of the camp waking, the chuck of chopping wood, the metallic sloop of bringing up water from the river. She sleeps beside him, head on his arm.

The sweet-stale smell of their sleeping bodies has grown familiar to mornings, like they’ve walked through sunwarmed hay. She stirs, somehow each time like a figure he’d only imagined, now waking, life breathed into her from a dream. In part because of how hard she sleeps, sometimes dead as a fallen log, not moving no matter how he’ll shift and turn. But more because when she wakes it is a contentment to him, ordinary as it is. When she feels his hand move on her stomach, its contours of rib and muscle and flesh, she seems to wake from the very point of his touch on through, and the lingering stain of his thoughts begins to wash away like blood in a stream. 

Her fingers crawl between his. “You get any rest?”

“A little.” He settles his forehead against the back of her head.

“What are you so busy thinking about?”

“Who says I’m busy thinkin?”

She flutters her fingers exaggeratedly over his.

That old warning. You got no idea what’s comin. Close as a phantom face at his ear.

He peels back to cough away from her, and calms that raking crawl in his chest. “Nothin much.”

He’s sore from yesterday, but she presses back into him, riding up his morning stand, and when she moves like that he doesn’t have the heart to tell her he’s exhausted, not when she reaches back to stroke him once and by his hip pull him in so they lie close-fit as tree rings to each other and she spreads her hand over his hand and steers him lower. There is something more insistent in her wanting lately. He nudges his fingers under the waist of her drawers and through the heat of her hair. She turns her face down, her mouth seeking his arm; he shifts to make room for her to lie back, and the weight of her against him makes him so hard he aches. Testingly, he wraps his left hand over her mouth as his right middle finger slides over her clit and her whole body softens into him. But silent now. Clamps her to him tight such that the firm flex of the muscle in her seat treads up his cock and rolls his eyes back. He shushes low in her ear, knowing it’s cruel to touch her at the same time, but to make her writhe a little, one of his personal spurs. 

“Surprised you ain’t bone-tired,” he says against the nape of her neck.

"Hmm?"

“Wild as a caught cougar yesterday.”

With a sly smile swelling under his hand and her eyes still closed, she reaches down and takes a firm clawful of his balls and he grunts from the dart that shoots through him.

He can forget his chest a little while to hold her like this and feel the damp gusset of her drawers under his knuckles, and ignore the creak of the cot and rub a slow possessive gyre around her bud, but slower than she likes, to make her bear into him and finally put her hand over his and fight him a little to work faster. And as he grins into her neck and kisses her under her ear, she begins to arch, but instantly jerks and cries out.

“What?” He rips his hands away. “Did I hurt you?” She tries to sit and has to push herself up with both hands, which is when he sees the hand-sized stain of blood on her shirt stuck to her side, its match soaked into the canvas of the cot. 

“Jesus -” He pinches the hem of her shirt, but she swats his hand and spins away from him.

He tries to ask again as he sits up, but he’s coughing now unavoidably, groping around himself for anything to capture the effects, and finds an old shirt. 

She grabs the tonic and hands it over without looking. Hates the sound, the way she keeps herself busy counting cartridges, washing her face with cold water, searching for her things. He doesn’t bother with the dropper anymore and drains the bottle and lets it fall empty on the ground, holding the shirt over his mouth while he tries to get her to turn. 

But she keeps her side away from him, trying not to act as if it hurts just to pick her trousers off the ground. When the fit is over and he’s sitting there testing the depth he can breathe, she withholds her troubled cringe, eyes bright to the point of glinting. 

“I wonder if Pearson’s made coffee.” 

“Hang on, there,” he rasps, pulling her back by the wrist, but she shakes her head, still keeping that side away from him. 

“It’s nothing.”

“Red, turn around -” He has to stand and chase her in a tight circle to see, finally wrangling her with an arm across her chest so he can get a look, and holds her firmly. When he starts to peel it up, she elbows his arm and he backs away.

“When the hell did that happen?”

“Yesterday,” she says, her voice somewhat feathery. “It’s only a little graze, didn't even notice.” 

“Just hold still -”

“I saw to it last night already,” she says to his unfooled face, but she dodges him again and starts to step into one trouser leg.

“Nell, you gotta get that cleaned up -” The glimpse he got was of a bandage dark as mahogany.

“I will,” she says, but her attempt at an airy dismissal crumples with the touch of her waistband. And she reinforces her gritting smile as she firmly buttons the top button of her trousers, refuses to wince as she bends down to get her boots on, and rummages around for her jacket and her gunbelt. All the while, he watches, in pain for her, and about to call a stop to this nonsense of acting all right. She seems to notice him losing tolerance and turns, composed, and presses on his chest, forcing him to hobble back on his heels until he sits on the cot. 

“I’ll get some hot water. And you need more rest.” She smiles like he’s upset over nothing and throttles his shoulder.

He rubs his forehead, knowing he’s playing along in a farce she won’t give up, and she kisses the top of his head and leaves him there, easing her jacket on as she steps out of his tent.

The tonic starts to blunt his senses, and the light swells and falls dark again with the closing flap. He drags on his trousers, digs in his trunk for a clean shirt, not caring which one, and fights the half-sleep that comes on before the electric undercurrent hits. 

By the time he’s stepping outside into the brassbright daylight, all sounds suddenly blare as if he’s walked into a hall. Nell is sitting at the table across from Dutch, goddamn Micah sitting one hip on the table beside her. Both men laugh at something she’s said as she sips coffee and catches him noticing. 

“But what would Black Lung have to say about it?” Micah drags on his cigarette and blows it in his way as he walks up.

“Have to say about what.” He coughs and doesn’t look at that shitheel. 

“This business, makin hell for the Army.” In spite of all his antagonizing, he has to get his ass off the table and stand aside when Arthur steps in.

She’s still smiling as she turns her face up to him, something dangerous in her eyes or desperate or something he can’t pin down. A bit of that fierceness she gets in a fight. When he doesn’t smile back, she raises an eyebrow looking haughty and turns back to Dutch.

“Capitalizing on the momentum of the day, and we would be fools not to,” Dutch pours her cup full again. “Making our last fortune under the screen of smoke.”

“How’s that gonna work?” he asks, waving away the smoke Micah continues to pipe his way. “Survival money is what we should be lookin for, not a fortune.”

“Careful, son, you’ll cut yourself off from what’s possible. I admit to being pleasantly surprised by Miss Riordan’s talents yesterday, as she turns out to have many. And more than a few enticing ideas.” Dutch sets the pot down and nods at Nell, a glint in his observing smile that says he enjoys her, is amused by her, is interested in her as he is interested in all things that show prospect, that he might use until they are no more use to him. 

“I’m sure she does.”

The look he gets from her could chill a hangman and he stares back, shaking his head in confusion. 

“We have a few blind corners to work out, but all in all, the winds are favorable.”

Blind corners. Nell drinks her coffee and cracks her knuckles under the table out of habit, her mind as far away from blind corners and smoke screens as it could get. 

“You and John move that dynamite we’ve been so goddamned patient about?” Dutch bites off the end of a cigar and spits it away. 

Seeing her opportunity, she thanks Dutch for the coffee and gets up from the table, favoring her left side.

“I was gonna head up there today,” Arthur says, distracted by her walking past him, not accepting his hand. 

“But you’ll be in Saint Denis in time for tomorrow’s events? Miss Riordan is eager for it.”

“Said I would be.” He checks back as she disappears inside the tent and jogs after her. She almost runs into him as she reemerges with her satchel and her repeater.

“Where are you slippin off to?” he whispers.

“I’m not slipping off, Arthur. Just don’t need my watchdog coming searching for me.”

He eyes the repeater, and then her, and she glares as she slings it on her shoulder and heads around the back of the tent.

He catches her arm. “You don’t have to go tomorrow.”

She pulls her arm back. “Yes I do.” Green eyes so goddamn sure, they remain in his sight like spots burned in by the sun. “I’ll see you then.”

He’s about to follow when Javier calls his name from the hill and Dutch lights his cigar and sits up in interest. Javier calls for Arthur again, and they all watch as an Indian, the boy from the refinery job, comes down the hill, Javier’s rifle at his back. 

He’s taller than he remembers him, and he passes through camp knowing all eyes are on him, an unarmed intruder, as though he tolerates their curiosity with a patience they could never understand.

With him, a boy of maybe eleven or twelve, prodded through camp just the same, in a blue shirt, deerskin trousers, a brimmed hat he must have found on the ground, considering the placement of the hole in it. His face was mild and observant, his frame slight, his black hair in a braid that reached his waist.

“Mister Morgan,” the older one says, before Javier can get a word out. Dutch approaches, holding his cigar out to the side like he does when he’s curious.

Arthur squints at Javier, who shrugs with his dry and increasingly unfriendly stare, and goes back to his post. Behind him, Nell strides toward the horses, carrying her saddle. 

“It’s Arthur.” He watches her go as he shakes his hand. “And this is Dutch Van der Linde; Dutch, uh, this is…” He serves his empty hand between them. 

“Eagle Flies. Mister Smith said I could find you here.” 

Dutch reserves his handshake for one severe glance at Arthur before reaching out.

The younger boy explores his tent with the boldness of a raccoon, admiring the tooling of his canteen hanging from the post, boots leaning against the wagon wheel, his shaving kit on the barrel. Hands browsing his effects with unconscious curiosity.

“Why didn’t he come himself?” Arthur plucks the razor out of the kid’s hand and shoos him away.

Eagle Flies stands uncowed by the audience loosely gathered now. “He is scouting at the fort. One of our boys was captured. Your Army stole our horses; the boy was only trying to get them back.”

“That sounds like an unenviable situation.” Dutch trusses his hands on his hips. 

But Eagle Flies is not used to hearing Dutch in the way he dismisses beggars, and keeps on trying to explain. “The horses are being transported; with your help again we can get them. But the boy -”

Dutch angles his head. “Arthur?”

“Look, bad things happen when I get caught up in any of that business.” He watches to the side as Nell mounts up and veers Apollo to the road.

“You been caught up in their business before?”

Eagle Flies raises his chest and his voice. “They have proven they will not honor the treaty -”

“Sure that wasn’t your boy not honoring it?” Dutch draws a couple mouthfuls of smoke and lets them out around the cigar in his teeth, testing him, though the kid doesn’t know it.

“Which they have broken countless times already, and my father’s restraint has only led us to this.”

Micah smirks, and his two toadies over by the table snicker as if they monkey everything he does. Arthur imagines stamping that smug goddamn face onto the tent stake four feet away when Dutch takes his cigar out of his mouth. 

“What happens when something gets broken too many times?” 

It’s not a question. It’s the dawning tone of things coming together, and as soon as he hears it Arthur feels sick. It is the simple solution to an age-old problem. If only someone had seen it clearly before. It feeds on optimism and dismisses the skeptical. He’s been caught up into it himself so many times it sets off a ripple of eagerness even now. Dutch saunters into the clearing, mulling it over. Pieces falling into place as chunks of ash crumble from his cigar. All so simple.

Eagle Flies stands firm, not used to one of Dutch’s good old hypothetical discussions. “We are left with no choice but to go to war.”

And Dutch matches his stance and his grit like a younger man. “And if there’s a better way?”

Arthur steps back until he can reach into the tent. When he has his satchel and gear and heads for the horses, Dutch already has his arm across the young man’s shoulders, leading him toward the cave. Asking about these horses.

“Mister Arthur!”

The younger one runs after him.

“Ain’t a good time, kid.”

“They took my brother.” He tries to stop in front of him but Arthur veers past. 

“Mister Charles said you would help your brother.”

The boy hops out of the way of the saddle as he swings it over Georgia’s back.

He sighs. “Look if you’re around tomorrow, I don’t know.” He tugs the cinches tight and steps up in his stirrup. “We’ll see.”

No telling how much the boy has learned not to trust what ain’t certain. 

An hour later, as he waits at the curious dugout in the earth not far from the road and its ten wooden crates, his morning dose of tonic begins to leave him empty like the illusion it always was. He sits on the lip of the main chamber, its five branches splayed, a giant hand holding the bones of warriors, to judge by the few artifacts there. Could be the oldest things he’s ever seen. His chest is painful from the ride, and here he spends precious minutes watching a rat emerge from the crack between two of the moss-swollen stones in the wall and head through the rustling leaves, on its daily scavenge. Moves without that jittery rodent dread, no poison or traps in these uncivilized parts, just the temples of ribcages, caverns of skulls. With the moss growing thick over rock and bone, the light in the tomb comes up green. Smells of minerals and wet leaves and lichenish autumn, the sunshine at this darker wintry angle falling copper on the forest floor and baking the earthy slough.

He has always waited for John. The spent cigarettes that have piled at his feet while he leans against a wall somewhere, the sticks he’s whittled down to toothpicks waiting for John’s ass to show up, he couldn’t count. The first page of the first journal he ever picked up probably had a sketch of their intended target in elaborate detail and a few colorful words describing his attitude. Nothing had taught him, not punishment or exclusion, nor mornings in the kitchen of whatever house they occupied while Hosea read the last page of the newspaper and Dutch pontificated on the necessity of timeliness to a twelve-year-old with his eyes puffy from sleep, slumped at the table shoveling cold oatmeal in his mouth and glaring at Arthur who ignored him specifically because it would get his hackles up to the point of trying to take a swipe at him. And get his scrawny self in trouble that way too. He smirks now, down at his hands, all the times that ratty kid, still a foot shorter than him, would charge into him madder than hell, so easily provoked by a head turned away or him paying no mind to his whining. How easy it had been to fling him off his back like an old coat, or with a quick smack to the cheek bring tears to that kid’s eyes. Should’ve been nicer to him, he owns now. But could you help a rageful sullen ragamuffin turn kinder by kindness, he wouldn’t know. Kid had been too prickly to get near enough to try. And pissing off everyone around him just by his absence, so the whole world, as John Marston knew it, was already against him by the time he showed his face, time and time again. 

He stares down into the tomb grieved to understand it that way now, and all the other scars that had formed early in all of them that shaped their entire lives.  

All this hurried business now seems wrong anyhow. Get them to safety as need protection, settle matters needing settling of course. And Nell flying faster than he can catch her, understanding in her different way time ain’t anyone’s to keep. 

When he hears the wagon, he moves to get up and winces with the stab in his chest, twisting to get up to a knee, pushing himself up on his other knee, feeling delayed sympathy for Hosea. 

John pulls the reins and rolls his eyes soon as he sees him. “I don’t wanna hear it.” The wagon creaks to a stop as Arthur walks up and holds one of the spokes, and John makes a little show of looking harried as he sets the brake.

“Don’t worry about it.”

John glares and checks around. “You feelin alright?”

“Had a thousand pounds of dynamite to keep me company.” He bangs his fist on the side of the wagon. “C’mon.” Tosses his head back at the tomb. “Oughta show you this thing. You woulda loved runnin around here as a kid I bet.”

He leads him down the earthen ramp and John’s whistle echoes as they come into the pit. “Don’t dig me just any hole when I go.”

“Somethin else, ain’t it.”

“We woulda spent every wakin minute here.”

“We?”

“Like that old dugout fort outside Laramie that summer, set it up like we was expectin a battle.”

“Thought that was only you, weren’t you, what, thirteen?”

“Nah, both of us. I remember cause we repaired the whole east wall and you was so damn upset Dutch didn’t ask you to go on that job. Probably because of that other job you bungled.”

“The fuck you talkin about?”

“Big Timber, you don’t remember? You wired the charge wrong, almost got us killed.”

He sneers at that fool notion of himself, different than he recalled it. “You got me mixed up with your clumsy ass.”

“Like hell I do. Never ran that fast before or since.”

He turns, and sees in John’s scar-streaked face an inkling of that old defiance that would lurk under the skin, prepared at every look and opening mouth to fight back. So when Arthur smirks, and only thumps him on the chest before leading him further into the tomb, John is slow to smile back.  

“Bet Jack’ll like this.” Arthur hands him the helmet he found, old bronze thing tarnished in an emerald plaque, shaped like the ones he’d seen in old picture books, the ones with dragons and kings. 

John turns it over in his hands. “Hell, I’ll like it.” He reaches for the hatchet leaning against the wall and Arthur plucks it away from him. 

“Keepin that one.”

Ten cases. They crate them out one at a time, fifty feet to the wagon. John doesn’t mention it when they have to take a break after every other one and Arthur leans on the altar there and tries to put off taking the tonic, but finally has to give in before he has an attack, even with John watching him take a dose.

Then an uncomfortable stretch of coughing, spent facing away from each other, shuffled steps and shifting. John’s got his arms crossed and is toeing a ribcage further away, gingerly scratches his cheek around his scar, trying his hardest to mind his business.

“I been thinkin.” Arthur clears his throat, searching for the right words to what he’s had on his mind for days now, but the right words seem less and less important. “You thought much of what you’d do if you wasn’t doin this?”

“What, runnin around with dynamite? Just about anything else.”

He smiles back, and hears Hosea telling him to give him room, the boy will say what he means to, once he’s cut the crap. So he lets the breeze expire. Chickadees sing their two-note songs back and forth. A few gold leaves spiral down. John shrugs, eloquent as ever.

“I don’t know,” he says, and scuffs his heel against a stone. “Thought about it a lot more lately, but every time I start, seems like there’s one last job we gotta run off on.” Shrugs again. 

“What if you left?”

“Ain’t just about leavin.”

John digs his toe in the moss at his feet, like the grist of his lifelong misfortune. Born too late, kid. There's no place in this life for your secret hopes to take real form. Raised into a time that wouldn’t take you. Now the prospect of an ordinary life drops him into a melancholy fast as a coin into a well. So deep you only hear its distant splash, and any wishes, like low water, lie too deep to draw up anymore.

“We kept trustin it would all pan out. You thought like I did, Blackwater was a mistake, but then Saint Denis…” Arthur coughs lightly, finding it harder to say this thing out loud. “We've lived our lives servin some other fool's dream.”

John raises his face. 

"And this thing.” He thinks of that whole hillside collapsed and silent. The blood soaked through Nell’s shirt. Lays his fist on the rough grain of the last dynamite box. “It’s serious now. You won’t know pain like what you’ll feel if somethin happens.” He looks him straight in the eye. “Ain’t Abigail’s or Jack’s choice, gettin caught up like this.”

“Yeah.”

“We both gotta do the right thing, however that goes.” He takes the handle on his side. “Time for dreamin later,” he mutters. John takes up his, and they step it up the incline and get it loaded and the gate shut.

“Seen Nell’s been in camp a bit,” John says, heading around to the front, glancing back knowingly. “That was some fancy shootin at Sisika.”

He can’t bring himself to smile. Wherever she is, she’s hurt and acting like nothing’s the matter, and it hasn’t left his mind.

John gets a foot up on the step but sees his face and stops. He backs down and holds the wheel, seeming to check the steel tread for a time before he looks up. “There’s more for you, too. Than this. With her.” He kicks the wheel lightly. “You always been the last man out on every job. Just, maybe once, go first.”

Arthur slaps the side of the wagon and swipes his hand for Marston to get up. “Well who else is gonna clean up after you make a mess of every goddamn thing you touch?”

Marston smiles his awkward smile as he straightens the reins, like he always has last words chambered up but never knows quite how to say them. The wagon moves on, and Arthur follows on Georgia for a while, until he sees John being watchful, driving wary with his load, doing everything he would do without needing the backup, and with a wave he splits off near the state line.

One hazy day in the valley, late in your first summer there, the clouds sank down from the peaks and settled in a low ceiling. The Little Creek River wended dark as a rat snake without the sun to shine on its back, and the grasses it crawled through were blond that time of year and long and seeding. The hawks were not overhead hunting but perched in the treetops watching.

And you, from your perch watching, you could see across half the valley. In the early morning, the pronghorns grazed, and nearer by, you watched a black bear catch a trout, you thought you saw a gray fox.

One of the men emerging from the bunkhouse saw you and called up at you amused.

“Gonna fall down there, scout.”

“She been up there a while, won’t say a word.” Another one sat smoking and yawning on the porch, barely lifted his pinched cigarette your way. 

“Colm know?”

“Ain’t here.”

“Gus?”

“I don’t know - why d’you care?”

“It’s a fuckin kid up on the roof of the barn, gotta be forty feet, you asshole.”

"You a governess now?"

Gus lumbered out on the porch in his big red union suit, hauling the straps of his suspenders up, and his black-streaked hair all sticking out crazy, trying to keep his voice calm and sounding irate instead. “How the hell did you get up there?” 

“I climbed up!”

“What the hell for?”

“I couldn’t see!”

His chin drew back, dumbfounded gape. His sarcastic asking, “Well…can you see now?” drew laughter from some of the men. 

“Yes.”

“Then get back down!”

“No!”

“You fall off and break your neck, I’m gonna dump your corpse in with them hogs, they’ll scarf -”

“I don’t care!” 

“- your skinny ass right up!”

By now, you had drawn a crowd, and some of the men were betting whether you’d fall off the east side or the west. 

Gus growled at you and swiped his arms, giving up as he headed back into the main house, and when you didn’t fall and you didn’t shout back at the men below, they grew bored and went on with their useless preoccupations. Your tears blurred everything together in your view now, but of course no one could ever see far enough to see the past or see what was coming, or see a fix to a problem that had troubled them so long, and you knew it back then too. You propped your chin on your knees and stared out at the valley. The best you could do was breathe a little better up there.

With Colm gone, your punishment was over, until the next time. You had been in the root cellar some days for your backtalk. You refused to call him by that word, but earned a day in the cellar for every other one you called him. Twelve in all. Outside again, you squinted, overwhelmed by the brilliance of the light; even overcast it had a piercing clarity. You called it loud, and some of the men began to think you had gone mad, all those days shut away.

A few hard thumps made you turn, and you saw Gus clambering up the same ladder you had gotten up from the haymow. A man who had no business being off the ground. He crawled along the roof peak, great ungainly bear that he was, skidding as he came around the cupola, and muttering to himself the entire way until he sat like a giant sandbag next to you, sweating and mottle-faced and panting. He held his knees, and his lips were cherry red nestled in his beard, gasping.

“Here.”

He dug in the sleeve of his union suit and pulled out a little brass cylinder that spilled out of itself into a longer baton. He motioned for you to hold it up to your eye as he leaned back on his hands and puffed for a while. 

That little brass tunnel in your hands was the entrance to another world. Blades of grass sharp as pikes and the badger rambling through them, the doe perking up at a sound, the red-tail hawk in the topmost branches of the pine, its motionless glare trained on a vole or a rabbit or a snake out of sight. The pheasants necking forward. The road as far as the valley would show you. The riders on it. The lupines so blue and plump and enticing you nearly reached out to grasp one, and lost your sense of space around you, and Gus took hold of your suspenders like a handle when you started to lean. 

You didn’t realize you had been shaking until you weren’t shaking anymore. And could hardly turn your gaze away from that quiet channel with its perfect clear drop in the center and the soft unfocus surrounding it, a private vision of the near future, and the gift of time, to run or never miss your chance. 

Gus faced out at the valley, but watched you sideways too. “See better?” 

You nodded. 

“Okay then.” He was gruff as he turned back on his hands and knees, swearing. “Need your help in the kitchen when you done seein.” But when he looked over his shoulder at you, his eyes were not so stern. 

“Keep one hand on that roof, you hear?”

Missus Adler sits alone by the campfire and stares into the morphing embers, lethargic dying flames licking the last uncharred heart of the wood. He leans another log against the coals, its fresh-cut edge quick to take the fire and brighten the lonesome circle.

“Mind company?”

“Have a seat.” She gestures in casual grandeur to the log beside her.

He takes up the stick and rakes the coals, more out of habit than anything. “How are you doin, night before all this?” 

She sniffs and shakes her head with a dry smile. “I’ll believe it’s really done when I see it.” She leans on her knees, her fingers loosely knit, and she watches through them like fretwork, silhouetted by the fire. “How about you? Or Nell? I’m guessin we all got something on our minds tonight.”

“She got tore up a bit in the fight yesterday. I ain’t seen her in a while, startin to worry.”

Sadie bats her hand. “Told me she’d meet us beforehand. Someplace north of the city she showed me.”

He wipes his face hard, growls at the fire, all this shit they're losing their grip on. Across camp, the tent sits dark in the mouth of the cave, not prowled late into the night by its inmate. "Dutch know the plan?"

“Already down there. Doyle’s Tavern at eleven.” She flicks her paired fingers in salute toward the tent. 

“Guess we go where we’re told.”

“Long as there’s a man on a rope where we end up.”

He gives her a brief smile and digs the stick in the cinders at the edge. “She seem okay to you?”

“Fine as ever.”

“I oughtta go find her.”

“Let her be. She’d be here if she needed to. I can only imagine what she escaped from, judgin by what I went through, but I’m guessin she wants to be alone.”

In the glow of the fire, she is fierce and she is strong. Sharp-eyed and clear in her purpose. A determined woman, unrecognizable from the stunned, numbed, broken woman he first met on that mountain. Who sat in camp staring away the hours as everyone lowered their voices around her and kept that cautious distance from her radiating grief. She is hardened by her pain. More sure of herself. Less abiding. The woman she is now might never have taken a shine to the man she grieves, to meet him in her present life, and she carries that too.

Whatever experience they have in common, it has not done the same to Nell.  

“I can leave you to your thoughts.”

“Oh I’ve done all my thinkin on the subject. Tomorrow can’t come soon enough.” 

He stands, steps over the log into the chill. “It will anyway. Ridin out in a few short hours, better get some rest.”

But she’s still sitting there as he rolls down the tent flaps, stoking those constant coals.

 


 

ANNESBURG IS BURNING

Cornwall Riots Quelled

Property damage estimated at over two million dollars.

Nov 22, 1899 - Annesburg, Rke. The deadly mine sabotage in the midst of a violent labor strike has left twelve dead, the majority guards of the Jameson Mining Co. and members of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Their families are being notified.  

Adding to his family’s grief, the body of industrial tycoon Leviticus Cornwall remains unrecoverable due to an oil fire aboard his ship, which had docked for his arrival. Mountains of coal awaiting shipment continue to burn uncontrollably. The conflagration will result in losses totalling over two million dollars, insurance companies estimate.

Backers, including Horace W. Leland of the Leland Oil Development Company vow to recuperate losses and redouble efforts to bring discoveries of new and promising ventures to the north and west to fruition, declaring, in the interim, no rising costs to fuel for homes and businesses, and thanking the public for their support. 

Union Agitator Found Dead

O’DRISCOLL TO HANG

Nov. 22, 1899 - Saint Denis, Le. - State District Court. For the crimes of murder, robbery, rape, and arson, Colm O’Driscoll, leader of the notorious O’Driscoll Gang and accused of no fewer than forty murders, the actual number no doubt higher, is scheduled to hang at noon today in Guiteau Square. 

The public should take caution. Mister O’Driscoll has many men at his disposal who have successfully seen to the escape of their leader and would happily endeavor again to secure his freedom. His suspected female associate has purportedly been sighted in nearby Bay St. Pierre, although this publication was unable to verify the details. Judge Guillot has seen to it that security is enhanced by the presence of Pinkerton agents, and Mister O’Driscoll shall be kept in an undisclosed location until such time as he is to be transported to the gallows. 

From the Editor: Though it may be considered an unpopular opinion, the editorial board feels a duty to decry the barbaric practice of public hangings, one that is as un-Christian and brutal as it was in the days of public torture, beheadings, and dismemberment. Future generations will turn away in disgust to think of the bloodthirsty savagery of the citizens who once gathered at public executions. We should resist encouraging both the glorification of the condemned and the morbid interest of the public, and find a more humane and modern solution to the dispatch of those members of society determined to be irredeemable for their heinous crimes. To that end, Professor Andrew Bell, III, has proposed the use of his latest invention, employing the power of electricity to transport a soul to its final judgment with the swiftness and painlessness of a telephone call. A demonstration is scheduled for the following week. Regrettably, too late for Mister O’Driscoll.

 


 

Even in the deepest dark of early morning in that late time of the year, the air of the city is so close and humid you feel feverish, and so the man you see as you and Orly come into town could be a figment of your nerves, all shadows forming the shapes of your fears. Johnson. Same bowler hat. Same shined shoes. That woolen jacket. The figure stops in the bulb of light cast by a corner post and watches you pass, and you turn away. Say nothing. Close your eyes. Apollo, his markings maplike in aspect, trots on the cobbles clear as an announcement of your appearance. Orly says nothing; whether he saw him or not, you aren’t sure, and you say nothing too. So in your unspeaking, uninterrupted arrival, a bubble of protection seems formed around your plan, clear as it is, and, nervous as you feel, it is the kind of nervous you trust to keep you alert.

Orly has done his work in good faith. They keep Colm in a cell across town, thinking they are clever. (They did not learn from Fredericksburg.) They keep him under constant guard, hiring more men for the job, one of them on the night watch named Donal, pale and keen to see a prisoner meet his rightful end. (They did not learn from Strawberry.) 

For you to make your last farewell, a quarter hour in the schedule is clear of every guard but Donal, who could be bribed or distracted, but that’s the best Orly can do. The Pinkerton on duty is a man he knew from his training. He can surely make conversation for that little while. Which should be plenty of time and worth an attempt in any case, you reassure him, and thank him. 

You leave the horses around the corner, by the jail cart ready for the morning’s events. A bay mare sleeps in the stall.

When you appear in the shadows of the hall, quiet and calm, Donal grows a dullard’s smile, half-lidded, and he puts his hands up. “You’ve got some sand, showin your face.” 

“You must be stupid not to expect it.”

“I think that’s you, honey, thinkin there isn’t a dozen of your old boys close by waitin to spring him at noon.” 

“They’re all off getting their pricks polished.”

He eyes your perpendicular gun. “What good will that do you, but summon every lawman in three blocks?”

After a moment’s glare, you shrug, nod in cool concession, uncock and sink your Schofield into its holster, as was your intention. 

He lowers his hands. As was your intention.

“Dozen men?”

“Thirteen.”

“Thirteen men are going to rescue a rival gang leader in Guido Martelli’s town, where he has practically bought the law, at noon from a public stage.” You blink.

His sickly glower burns under the brim of his helmet. “You’ve done it before.”

“Not in a mob town. Good luck to you, Donal. I give you a week before someone finds you with your guts strung up between two trees. And that’s if you first apologize.”

He snorts. “What’s your plan, walk out then?”

“Read my mind; aren’t you clever.” And when he shakes his head, you tell him to check outside around the corner at the Pinkerton talking to his friend there in the courtyard. Which after a moment’s deliberation he does, taking you with him.

And so, through the tiny opening in that cell door, you look down at the man who lies on the floor. Never cared for a bed. Bad for his back, he always said.

The last time you saw Colm O’Driscoll, he was saddling up to meet a likely partner in Strawberry. And he would see you at Six Point Cabin in three days. You would be there to await the Pinkertons as agreed, he said, his hand crushing your throat, shrinking you toward him. Or he would see you shot like a mad cur. More trouble than you were worth, anymore.

Has your memory of him changed, or has he? This man is thinner, grayer, unshaven, of course. They have taken his suspenders, his vest and shirt. His union suit hangs on him like dead skin he’s withered inside of. His pinstripe trousers drape large about his legs. When he sees you, he sits up, crouching on guard like one of his bristling dogs.

“Hello Colm.”

In Strawberry, you had needed five men; one who had gotten himself deputized, four scattered in the crowd, and you yourself waited on the road outside of town with his horse. You got him to the nearest train station and didn’t see him again for six months. In Fredericksburg, you took seven men with you to head off the wagon transporting him from the safe house to the gallows, and he never even made it within city limits, though you lost one man in the pursuit. In Wichita, you planned for eight, needed four. In Jackson, Wyoming, owing to the level of personal firepower present in the crowd, you brought twelve, and lost five. 

Two men and yourself, in Saint Denis, is practically a triumph. How simple it is. And not at all.

Orly panics immediately, though to his credit silently, as you come out to the carriageway, Colm in shackles and led by Donal in uniform. 

Colm ignores him, as he does all hired men. Never give them your attention until they earn it. Until then, they are expendable, and even after still. He lies down in the bed of the wagon, amused to be escorted through the blue dawn out of the city. 

“Where we headin, Six Point?” 

You hand him a lit cigarette and a handkerchief for his face. “No, I found you a safehouse. Cool down your trail for a bit till we can get you on a boat.”

Orly trots alongside the wagon unable to catch your eye longer than a blink. When you do look his way, you give him a clear nod, as if you are all agreed here.

“Frank there?” Colm breathes deep through a tight skyward grin with his first drag of smoke. 

“Had a hand in it.”

“Man's a spider. Hand in everything.”

Donal, beside you on the seat, swivels his head owlish. “Somethin don’t feel right.”

“I bet nothing feels right to you, Donal. You should try wearing clothes that fit.”

Colm cackles. “Cold as the driven snow, this one. How the hell you pulled this off in a town full of Pinkertons, I will marvel at until my dying day.” 

“Who the fuck you think is our escort?” You give Orly another nod as he stares at you and falls behind, Apollo with him on a lead.

Colm’s chains rattle as he slaps his knee. “That head of yours, child. I doubted, and that was my own fault. You know, I had a dream. You sittin in an office of the Pinkertons themselves someday. That is power of a different sort. Infiltration. You ever know of them hornets? Or wasps, is it? They lay their eggs inside an animal, and the animal lives for a good long while - don’t act itself, but lives long enough to let the young hatch, and they start eatin on it until its last day, when bang, it dies, and they all come swarmin out. It’s just nature. That’s what you’ve got, Scar. A nature about you.”

“I’m real glad you think so, Daddy.”

Though he could put a bullet in your head the second you let down your guard, he is at his most generous in times like these. He once promised you a mansion on a lakeshore. His forgiveness may be short-lived, but until he is settled and safe again and the old thoughts creep back, in this moment when you are saving his life he will grant it freely. You flick the reins, facing ahead, picturing the turn where his benevolence and smile will shed and reveal him. It is familiar to you as your righthand gun.

There is no life here, no birds or insects stirring the air, no wind. The ground within the old fort depresses under your bootheels like bogland. Under the thick ceiling of clouds, the sky brightens little through the morning, the color of the ashes from your fire overnight gone cold. Where you waited, while Orly slept, and you could not sleep. And your ears ring in a cotton-dulled haze and you try to breathe through the pain in your side, as if the moment you could sit down, a wave of everything you've ignored for days, for years, comes flooding over you.

Donal lies dead in the yard. The rageful disbelief of his last second now wiped off his face staring fisheyed through the grass. You had hoped to keep him alive a while longer, but once he got suspicious, you couldn’t risk his quick hand.

Orly is shouting at you, pacing, enraged, in the yard. You stopped listening a while ago. Colm, still in his shackles, balances on a teetering chair, the noose around his neck, and he’s lashing out at you too, with all the venom you expected, which you are so used to by now you have the tolerance of serpent-handling preachers to withstand it. 

You sit on the fallen catwalk and rub your pounding temple and smoke, watching the ash flutter snowlike, and stare into a memory of snow. Crown of thick white-blanketed pines overhead.

When Orly perks his head and hurries to the entrance of the fort, you stand, and clamp your elbow to your side with a deeper stab of pain. You flick down your smoke and bite back your wince as you step beside Colm.

“All those times before, Colm. You must be reminiscing now.” You nudge the chair leg with your toe so that it wobbles and he shuts up with a muffled gag, writhing to keep his balance. “Always some risk it could go wrong, but at least you could say it was exciting.”

Arthur and Sadie dismount. She’s saying something about the time. His attention is on the fort, the horses waiting, the cart, and he walks past Orly, already scanning the yard.

“Well we are leaving nothing to chance today, old man.” You tap the chair again.

Arthur sees Donal’s body first, where it fell with your bullet in his temple, a prostrate sacrifice at the entrance, and he stops over it, disbelief fading as he views it up close, coughs into his sleeve a few times. Scratches his beard uncomfortably. Sees you standing there in the middle of this formality of sorts, as you begin to sink into a pit of doubt about the plan you’ve made. How this must look; have you finally gone mad or have you always been mad, now in the midst of the high tide of madness. Perhaps you have. Every time you close your eyes, you’re standing in the quiet conclave of pines, and snow gently wafts, scattered seedlike from the night sky, and melts into your hair and clothes.

“You devious bitch.” Colm spits in your direction when he sees him. It lands near your boot. “Arthur Morgan,” he sneers in welcome from his rickety chair. “Didn’t know you was invited.”

But Arthur has been in enough delicate setups to know not to interrupt this scene with questions. After a long concerned moment he nods to you. The way all backers pledge their guns. When Orly tries to appeal to him for some kind of help, for what, even he isn’t sure, he hushes him with a hand up.

Sadie freezes in the entrance, and when she sees Colm, she draws up from her shoulders with the all the impressive purpose of a lioness and lunges forward. Arthur immediately blocks her with his arm and has to push her back when she tries to draw.

“Arthur -”

“I’ll explain later.” He glances back at you. 

“You know how long I’ve waited.” Her voice crumbles as she seethes through the regiment of her teeth. When Colm starts to shoot his mouth off, you bump his chair again and he steers his insults back to you.

“I know.” Arthur looks down at the body lying there.  Holds her firm. “But this one’s hers.” 

She takes a few harsh breaths before she stops resisting him, then he releases her and she shoves past him. He follows her into that place, so still and strangely hallowed. 

You feel high from the heat within you, thin and volatile as fumes as you crank the rope around the truss and tie it securely.

Colm laughs nervously. He gets giddy when he's nervous. “Scarlett, you are makin your point loud and clear, honey. Whatever I done to deserve this from you, I regret it, I will make it up to you, you know I will. That whole ranch, if you want it -”

“Sadie. You’ve suffered because of this man.”

“Never bothered by me or my boys again -”

She is listening, her attention scattered in this place that has opened wounds like cellar doors. 

“I wasn’t at your home, but I was one of their kind. Nothing can bring your husband or your life back.”

“Goddammit Scarlett.”

“Arthur -”

He glances down, that grimace digging into his cheek, and is singleminded when he looks up again. “Nothin you have to say.”  

You nod, and turn, and speak dryly. “Colm O’Driscoll, your terrible crimes are too many to list. Your soul is rotten, and must be dispatched.”

The change can be a thunderclap. A snapping branch. A break. Always has been. It has laid welts on your back. It has blackened your eyes like a cursed punishment for looking upon a beast. Even as you gained skill and reached his height and could look him in the eye, the threat of it could leave you trembling. In time, you learned its rhythms and could parry his attacks, sidestep him, avoid him, deafen yourself to his poisonous words. He’s spewing curses with such frenzied rage he salivates and his eyes bug at you. 

“Why don’t you get yourself up here too while you’re at it, you traitorous cunt, you deserve it, your crimes no less than mine. Would they hang you for the boy you capped in Oklahoma or the farmer in Amarillo or the fat housefrau in Hot Springs?”

Once you thought you were a blackened plain where there was nothing left to burn. But your guilt has always smoldered beneath, which he well knows; he proclaims your faults like arrows loosed into your back, and yet he has never noticed how they form a skeleton of wings.

You wipe your nose on your sleeve and blink away tears. “I’ll get my due, but it’s your turn today.” 

“Well I got a few last words for you, you rotten snake -”

Your throat aches with sudden, impossible relief. In this moment, like the soft crystal click of a lens, you feel clear in purpose, as if the acts of your life have prepared you for this and grant you one moment of unquestioned faith. The space around you turns calm as falling snow.

“You don’t get last words, you sonofabitch.” 

Terror flares in his eyes.

“I just wanted to see your face when you found out no one’s coming.”

He yells your name, strangled to a cough when you kick the chair out from under him and feel his weight fall off, and watch his feet pointing, kicking as if they can paddle him upward. He rotates in a slow rigid vertical reel. You watch the swell of his reddening face as his veins bulge and his eyes bulge, and the rope creaks and he drools from the corners of his silent, protesting mouth. He is lean and dies hard by the neck.

The yard is silent. His trouser leg darkens. He twitches less and less.

Sadie, beside you, watches in a private way. Eyes dry. Jaw hardened. You could not possibly know what is on her mind, but in some way you hope she’s remembering a nicer scene than what led to this. Something that in its goodness shields her eyes from this sight. The glow inside a warm cottage, a man peeling his boots off in front of the hearth, or other such familiar scene. Any moment of a thousand that stitch two souls together in time. How they come to know one another still more each passing day in their lived-in ways, their maddening habits, their needs and ways they give of themselves. He is mild-mannered. She is clever. He is tidy. She is more innocent than she lets on. He is too trusting. She is brusque. When he props himself up on the stable door, privately worrying how they will make it through the season, when she cuts his graying hair and notices her own and gets that bewildering sense of time, they do not ask themselves is this all to life? She wakes up first and lights the fire. He pulls her back to bed a while longer.

From the cold places in your deepest being, whatever you dared to ask by this act - that memories of that life could exist untouched by the events of one night, that your crimes would vanish from existence instead of walking as ghosts around you - Colm gave nothing in life, and even less in death.

“It won’t bring your husband back, I know.” You strain to speak, your side beginning to twinge with a sharper pain now.

She seems entranced by the pigeontoed dangle of his boots.

“I had hoped -” You search for all your carefully gathered words as if they’ve blown out of your hands and scattered. “I hoped it would give you…some peace.”

She turns. Her chestnut brown gaze veers to you with dangerous patience, clear as if she has never doubted her way.

And what a fool you were to think your violent offering could repair what evil had destroyed. All you did was prove he was indeed only a man, and that the world has not been rid of evil after all.

She exhales harshly through her nose, twice, as she sees you this way, and her lip curls as she speaks. 

“You feel better?” 

She walks past you, outside the walls, to her horse. 

Arthur stands beside you and you don’t want to see his face or your last shred of control will unravel. Orly, behind him, looks stricken.

“You should see that she’s alright,” you say, leaving before he can catch your arm or see you cry. The corpse behind you is nothing more than a late-season pod still clinging to the branch. 

That snowy night when Colm descended on Hanging Dog, the last man ran through the snow. His tracks in the deep flat white expanse of the valley were easy to follow, sometimes marked with streaks of blood like breadcrumbs in stories that came to mind. Colm in his big buffalo robe stalked high-kneed in the snow and you followed in his tracks alongside the crooked groove made by the other man. Up ahead you could hear him groaning. You came to a stand of fir trees. Long, laden arms thick with needles and snow.

The man lay in the center of them, at the end of what a man could do to run or fight. In exhaustion, he wept.

“An important lesson for you today, child.”

Colm extracted his Cattleman, checked it, cocked it, and brought you into the warmth of his robe as he nestled his grip in your small hand.

“When a witness runs, you run him down. Done a good job child; why, here he is.” He spoke with theater in his voice.

Then he cupped your other hand at the butt of the grip.

“Think of it like a…wounded animal.” He laughed. Gus, arriving then, did not laugh; he stood there like a mourner or an attendant, unable to look at you.  If others were there, they laughed too, but such things are beyond your memory. 

“Colm,” he warned, between breaths.

The man panted up into the arching tops of the trees, where birds roosting there churred softly. Prayerlike words bubbled out of his wet and bloody mouth.

"No one's comin for you, buddy." Colm spoke casually, and aimed your arms like a divining rod. His stubble scraped your face. “Steady your shot now.”

You shook your head, tears already falling, and tried to look at Gus.

“Uncle Gus wants to see what you can do too. Everybody tonight gonna prove themselves.” 

He squeezed your thin shoulders. His breath was sour in your nose and he stared at Gus while he spoke. 

“Go on, now, honey, do it.”

Something like please popped from the man’s lips.

“See he’s askin you.”

The man shook his head madly, his chest pumping in huge gasps now, his face crushing in despair as he faced you and whimpered no and blubbered beyond sense.

You wept, and jumped when Colm shouted his spit-flecked order in your ear. “Do it!”

You began to flag and tried to back away but he held you firmly to his chest.

His other hand clutched tight around yours.

“You’re a witness too." 

It was a single blinding moment, a freezing white flash. Birds burst from the trees in a maelstrom. Snow fell in deadened thumps from the branches. And shrinking below, a girl stood in snow, and the cold air was thin and fast over your wings as you rose into the night in twenty fluttering fragments until you couldn’t see her tears or hear her weeping.

Snow would fall on blood-stained snow and fill the tracks you made. It smothered everything in sight and made it silent.

She is up and riding too goddamn fast for him to follow; he barks at Orly to get on after her, but as he reaches Georgia, he stops. Sadie stands at her saddle, head down. Just standing.

“She meant no harm by it. She thinks highly of you.”

“You knew, Arthur?” 

“About her?" He wonders at her surprise. This one who has not been an outlaw so long, still with an instinct to trust. He watches it dim a little. "Not in the beginning. But yes. I knew. ”

She nods, purses her lips. Pats Bob’s flank in slow, defeated beats, resting her hand there in thought. When she mounts, she looks behind her at the scene framed by the beam of the entrance.

“Are you alright?” He backs Georgia away to let her pass.

She sniffs and her chin dimples. “I’ll always be alright.” 

He watches her ride east down the hill as he hikes up and then turns north, where he saw Nell ride. He expected her to fly, but getting farther north, with no sign of her, he’s worried for one traceless mile by the time he sees them.

Orly’s horse stands with Apollo on the road at the top of the rise at Brandywine, and Orly stands where the land drops away to the falls, his shoulders slumped as if he’s lost something in the mist. Arthur jumps down before Georgia comes to a halt and he runs to the rim feeling sick.

There she sits on the mossy shelf below, looking over the void of the gorge, beside that rushing river where its bedrock falls away.

He says her name twice, loud enough to be heard over the falls, but he fears startling her. She doesn’t move.

Orly holds out his useless hands, saying her name again, and Arthur eases down the side to the mossy shelf and moves slow. “Nell Riordan.” He stands an arm’s length away. “What are you doin.”

She closes her eyes and tears cut down her cheeks. “I couldn’t…I needed to see.” She smiles sadly at herself, holds her forehead as more tears fall.

“Get back from there please.” 

“I don’t know a way out, Arthur.” 

“We’ll find one, sweetheart, don’t move.” Cautiously, he sits, and leans against the rock wall, coaxing her back to him by her shirt and then her arm until she lies against his chest, and he can settle his arm across her collarbone.

“It’s never enough.” 

He holds her tighter. Nothing to say in consolation to that. 

“I don’t know why I’m crying.”

“I don’t see how you couldn’t.”

Tears drop in two constant paths on his arm, and she begins to gasp, time to time, like she’s breaking from the pain. The kind that gouges a person hollow and makes a grave out of them. A pit bigger than Colm. The size of things unborn, he figures. The size of whole lives cut short and unlived, and how many, there’s no facing that number, and he feels her sinking into it with every heaving breath. The size of himself. 

He keeps his cheek tight against hers. He holds her, weaves his fingers with hers, blinks back his own sudden tears. “Don’t go that way you’re thinkin. Stay here with me.”

How she fights. How she’s fought since the moment he saw her. Never asked more than the simplest thing. Are you with me? And gotten nothing but pain. Like an injured deer in his arms.

He smooths her hair off her forehead and her skin is hot and dry, but she shivers. “Nell, you feelin okay?”

The plain click of a hammer overhead cracks through the wall of noise around them. A voice he doesn’t know. “Get up.” 

“Mister Johnson -” Orly begs.

“I said get up!”

“Give her a minute.” 

“Mister Orly, I believe you are too involved now to be of use any longer. Miss Riordan! Stand up now! You too, it’s Mister Morgan, I believe?”

Arthur unwraps himself from her, but she’s not in a good way to stand, shaking as he helps her.

“Get up! And throw down your gun!”

“Hold on, dammit!” Arthur turns, one arm around her waist, and is met by the black snout of a goddamn scattergun aimed down. Nell immediately steps in front of him, and it stuns him sick. He pulls her back to him, keeping an eye on the agent as he helps her up the low wall and follows, sets his Schofield on the ground and holds his hands away from it, trying to get the agent to keep the shotgun trained on him until he’s able to stand. 

“Milton’s orders, Mister Orly, time to bring her in.” He pulls back the second hammer.

“Mister Johnson!” Orly pulls out his goddamn Volcanic and levels it. His fingers grip and regrip, and he’s red in the face, his voice clear and fast. “I’ll thank you to put down your weapon.”

“Mister Orly, stand down -”

Men and high tempers and guns. It only takes a thoughtless move for the coin to come up sideways, and no man can guess the outcome. And Johnson’s the one, raising the muzzle not two inches toward Nell. In a snap of rage, Arthur walks straight toward him and grabs the barrel as a shot goes off, and his heart stops, and time seems to stop. 

The man’s hat hovers in place over the quizzical sideways jut of his head, blood bursting brightly from his ear. Arthur’s heel gouges the ground and he skids into the body as it falls. 

Still blazing, he whips around to Orly and that pistol and the hot six feet between them. He breathes hard, gripping the barrel of the shotgun, facing him dead-on. Can’t read Orly’s damned uncertain face. 

“You hit what you meant to?” 

Orly’s arm drops and he sniffs, staring at the body, blank-eyed, and nods.

Arthur uncocks the shotgun, drops it, and turns to Nell as Orly sinks to his seat on a rock. 

She sits in the grass, her lost gaze resting on the agent’s body. He crouches in front of her, tries to get her to look at him instead. Are you okay. She tells him yes, but her eyes are glazed dark and she shivers like she’s cold to the bone. He heads back for her saddle pack and finds her coat, a big thing, fur-collared, something he hasn’t seen before, big enough to be his own, and brings it back, draping it like a mantle around her shoulders. She grasps the fur at the collar like it means something to her.

Orly wipes his forehead with his wrist, breathing faster. The shock of a tyro who’s never shot a man before and can’t fully believe how such a thing could happen.

“Hey.” Arthur barks at him to get him to focus, his own voice gone hoarse. Orly seems to wake out of a stupor. “What’re you gonna do now?” 

Orly shakes his head, gaping like a carp until some English comes to him. “I don’t know.”

When an Appaloosa approaches from the road, and the Wapiti boy comes into view, Orly lurches to his feet, pointing that pistol without a sense left in his head, and Arthur jogs between them. “That’s enough there, killer.” He grasps Orly’s hand, keeping the hammer back, and pushes his arm down. 

Orly’s nerves are too raw to let him hear any reason, but he lets up his grip when Arthur pries away his pistol, uncocks and slides it back safe into his holster for him. 

“Mister Arthur.” The Wapiti kid calls from his horse, his voice stronger this time.

“Look, kid, I got my own situation right now. I’m sorry for your friend -”

“A patrol is coming. Not far.”

“Patrol of what?”

“Soldiers. Twenty men, to the south.” 

Everything turning a goddamn mess.  He turns back to Nell, breaking his heart as she sits there. Just take her, you fool. Leave them. Take her and her alone, toward any guarantee of safety, right now. But no such thing exists, and she knows it too. 

The Wapiti boy has already hopped down and leads Orly’s horse and Apollo closer. “Please come with me. There’s a way out, if you’ll follow.” 

“How far?”

“We can get there tomorrow if we ride through the night.”

Arthur wipes his thumb across the salt streaks on her cheek. “Can you ride?” 

She nods, taking a shaky breath, and he lifts her under her arms, feeling her left side constrict, feeling her steel against it. 

Orly stands by the body, rubbing his arm like he doesn’t know his own name. Mutton chops grown in on his cheeks. Corner of his coat pocket torn down like a dog's ear. That bowler long lost. Familiar now in a way that’s hard to keep despising, as if his constant presence has made him dutiful.

Once he helps Nell up on Apollo and sees to it she’s steady, Arthur whistles for Georgia and turns back to Orly, who has unpinned his badge from his coat and gives it a final glance as if it had never fit him right and he knew it all along, and hurls it over the ledge into the wild cascade of water. He scratches his temple, finding himself in the same uncertain position as the ones he’s chased before. 

Arthur nods to the boy, who moves on, Nell behind him. He mounts up and settles, watches ahead as Nell and the kid get to the road, and finally, against every ounce of good sense, turns his head halfway to Orly. “You got someplace to go?”

Orly holds his horse’s reins like a man’s last wretched tether, and sighs, and looks up. “I don’t think I do.” 

Arthur pulls on his gloves. Doesn’t face him too long; afford the man some dignity at least. “You better come with us then.”

He asks Georgia ahead, passing Orly mounting and coming up last, and they ride west in file as the shadows pour out of the mountains.







Notes:

TW/CW: Nell as a child in a traumatic scene. No sexual violence of any kind, implied or otherwise. Depiction of hanging. Colonialist nomenclature, attitudes per canon.


Had to throw in a wink to Tarantino with some good snowy violence here in the dead of winter, and a visual nod to Hateful Eight.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you liked it! It's always lovely to hear from you, here or on tumblr 🖤

Chapter 24: The Path

Summary:

Every time you open your eyes, the forest around you has changed. Thick snow lies soft as icing over the ground. Whole forests of thin, bare trees bending high overhead and combing the low winter sunlight, their long shadows endless stripes of blue that switch over your face like rail ties. A birch forest of knotted staring eyes. Deer sit quiet in a group of three, not bothered by you but watching. You pass a huge rotted trunk with its long open mouth frozen in a silent bellow. Tracks of animals cross everywhere and Arthur tells you each one - wolf, coyote, rabbit, as if they have all chased each other. Ravens chatter, a cardinal soars bright overhead. In a wide open meadow, late in the day, the long stilted shadows of your horses step stiffly one after the other and you watch these stretched wayfaring apparitions in a daze. Their skeletal legs traverse the shadow of a hanging man, but there are no trees nearby, and his shadow disappears with the last of you.

Chapter Text

“Tell me about Bessie.”

Hosea sucked his teeth in thought. “What would she have told about her…”

“Was she very private?”

“Particular about the particulars. She knew how things could be seen different ways. And how idiots misinterpret them and embellish.”

A fish rose in the lake and plashed the glassy surface into rings.

“She didn’t let herself get troubled much by a decision. Life was an inexorable path. Pulling you along with no regard for your careful plans. No sense in fretting one way or another. She was right, of course.”

The wind picks up at nightfall, and it brings a stinging rain. Ahead of him, Nell huddles in her coat, jogged by every one of Apollo’s steps, her right leg drawn up in front of her for warmth. She’s given the boy the blanket from her bedroll. When she starts to lean, Arthur takes the lead and heads them toward the place they spotted before they lost the view.

The path ahead narrows and carves close to the rocky hillside. Georgia makes her feelings known, and he talks sweet to her as they wind up the steep footpath, up to the outcropping, hooves staggering on rocks that are set loose and slide behind them, until they reach the flat ground at the top, where a wooden lookout tower rises thirty feet high or more. Someone has built a camp here, but its effects have been blown by the wind, the lean-tos half fallen-in, a flooded fire.

At the door, meeting no one staring back with a shotgun, he tells Orly to light the lantern and get the stove going and water from the pump before he heads back out to the yard. He leaves the boy to shelter the horses, and pulls Nell down into his arms as if she were caught in a tree; she doesn’t resist; he walks faster.  

Inside, he strips off her heavy coat and helps her onto the bed, where she curls up facing the wall. He sets the lantern on a chair to see better as Orly lights another. Then concealing her with himself, Arthur inches her trousers down over her hips, going gentle to skin her wet shirt from her. He finds a folded blanket and drapes it over her upper half. The bandage might as well be a plate of mud stuck to her side. Of all the wounds he's seen, his own and those of others, fatal ones, the ones that would make an undertaker cringe, somehow, to see this dark dressing on her, the snatch of her ribs with every breath, he has to sit back on his heels. Takes a long breath, and another. Peels his shirt off and pushes up the sleeves of his union suit. 

Bessie, at the kitchen table, standing over John, unrolled her instruments, and snapped at him over her shoulder to get the water going. And wash his filthy hands. 

There is a basin on the chest of drawers; he hands it to Orly to fill it, and even finds a cracked shaving of soap he can use to scrub the worst from under his nails. He kneels by her and cuts the strip around her waist. When he begins to pull the bandage up by the corner, she flinches, and he keeps one hand on her shoulder as he removes it. Jesus, Nell. Two small holes, front and back, four or five inches apart, each still letting go a thin drip of blood and serum. Skin an angry pink around them, but not hot and red like festering wounds he’s seen. Though no telling what fibers of her shirt the bullet took inside. A bruise shades her side from hip to ribs, blooming onto her stomach and back.

He wipes her hair off her face, and she lets him help her onto her back. He tucks the blanket around her. 

“Don’t look like it hit anything important.” He tries to smile; she tries to smile. He holds her gaze for a moment.

“I’m gonna clean it.” 

She nods.

“Figure you had it done before.”

“Couple of times.”

“Doubt you remember it from your shoulder.” 

Orly pours some of the boiled water in a bourbon bottle, after emptying the bottle himself, judging by the look of him swaying with his eyes fixed on the map of the territory. Once the bottle is cooled enough that the water won’t scald her, and with the wash basin under her at the side of the bed, Arthur folds the blanket back, keeping as much of her covered as he can.

When the boy enters, Orly takes him by the shoulder and turns him around to view the map with him as if it’s a window looking out on a captivating scene.

“You ready?” He caps her head with his hand. She nods.

He winces as he floods the wound, and she begins to pant and her body stretches as she grips the brass headrail. She tries not to make a sound, but he’s seen Dutch in tears to get a wound flushed out. Hell, his own self, getting seen to this same way. John didn’t let him hear the end of it for a week or more. Although John, as Bessie stood over him the next time, didn’t feel a thing. 

Threads of half-congealed blood and scab wash down into the basin, nothing cloudy or foul or dark, some bright fresh blood only.

Then the alcohol.

“You want anything before it? That tonic?”

“I'm not taking your medicine.”

“Whiskey?”

She shakes her head.

“Nell.”

Her jaw fixes like she’s about to get angry.

So with his hand firm on her side, and one alright, he spreads the skin around her wound with his thumb and forefinger as he pours a stream of moonshine as precisely as he can, stopping with the first hard jerk of her body, and then continuing while she is rigid and gritting in pain. 

“Don’t you start to twist away and get that muscle movin so it gets - there you go. Doin real good.”

She suffers it, swearing through clenched teeth, heels digging into the mattress, and he hates to ignore her pain as he holds her in place, and he doesn’t give her a rest even though she asks him to wait, pushing her up on her side to get at the one in back, until the drizzle is running clean. He towels her off but lets the wound dry to the air before he lays a clean handkerchief on for a bandage. She faces the wall panting shallow, and he rubs her upper back as much to keep her warm as for his own reassurance he hasn’t put her off his touch completely.  

All the old wisdom from Bessie comes back to him in flashes of her scolding about the right way to dress a bullet wound. She didn’t nurse the whole Pennsylvania 83rd and come back knowing less than an eighteen-year-old. 

The wind blows hard overhead and whistles over the opening at the top as if it calls down to them, and he glances up the tower, the logs precisely fitted and mudded, all the instruments on the walls, each in its designated place.

Her voice is a worn-out whisper. “I didn’t mean to hurt her.” 

She puzzles in a refracted stare at images that pain her face or confuse her for where events went wrong, and fever steams in her eyes.

His thumb strokes her forehead, uneasy reassurance. “You didn’t. Wasn’t you that hurt her.” 

The corner of her mouth twitches, a smile for his sake. Then her forehead clusters. A tear runs off the bridge of her nose. “You’ll see me different now.” Not a fear spoken aloud. A fact acknowledged. 

“No.” His voice grinds in his throat. “Nothin’s different.” 

He grazes his fingers through her hair, tucks the blanket snug. No good comes from thinking of that right now. This place they’re going, he bets it’s unlike what they’ve ever seen before. Go see a new view together. She nods a little, and gradually her breathing slows, and he gets lost at the feel of his thumb brushing the tight skin of her forehead.

Sleet pelts the outer walls. Orly lays out his bedroll on the far side of the room. The boy, Ten Crow he says his name is, is already half asleep on the floorboards before he gives him his own bedding. He will sit up the night anyway, on the floor beside the bed. He will step out when he has an attack, and tend the horses, and find more firewood in the small covered woodbox, and break down beside it with his head in his hands, and get a hold of himself and pick up the wood he dropped and go back inside. When he opens his watch, it is hardly past midnight. 

He climbs the ladder to the top of the tower, where the wind whips sleet nearly sideways. There is a canvas tarp half-unfurled on the western side, and he unrolls and ties it down as a shield from the wind. The tower creaks from the sail it makes, but he’s warmer out of the wet wind and can light a lantern on the floor. Nothing is visible in the dark. From here, they would hear someone coming sooner than see them. 

He dissolves into a coughing fit, and at the end of it, his lungs feel made of wet leather. He clears his throat and props his head on the wall, staring into the dark of this problem they’re running from. This farce they’re running towards. And would any of them make it. Questions of Dutch no longer trouble him; whatever rottenness was in himself to follow a cold calculator, or ignorance to be the disciple of a failure, is pointless to waste time in ruminating. As long as there is any hope of keeping her alive and safe, other matters pass, less to him than melting clots of snow.

The top of the ladder claps against the boards with the weight of someone climbing, and Orly pokes his head up, and both of them lurch in place, trapped in company now.

Avoiding his unwelcoming stare, Orly climbs out, pretends to take in the shapeless view until it’s absurd to stand in the sleet, and comes around to sit under the cold protection of the tarp, the dim lamp and a useless stillness between them. 

Orly rests his forehead on his palms, wipes his face, fidgets like his own skin doesn’t fit anymore.

It’s like a parlor talent to make himself sound tolerant of such a performance. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“How can any of you sleep.”

Arthur rests his head against the wall. “All us vicious killers, you mean.”

“I don’t know what else you think you are.”

“I suppose a man who found himself in your place once. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, it ain’t gettin easier from here, amigo.”

When Orly raises his head to argue, Arthur shrugs.

“I mean it. Bullets will start to fly your way. You can shoot back, run, or take one, but you ain’t got many options. Well, noose in your case.”

Orly pushes his palms into his eye sockets. "Goddammit."

“I’m just givin you a hard time. Noose in my case too. You forget about it eventually.”

“Somehow I doubt that.”

A gust of wind punches the canvas and the whole tower seems to bend and creak.

“She still restin?”

The agent grunts some kind of affirmative, facing away, an attitude he’s getting tired of in this accidental partnership.

“You were supposed to look after her.”

Orly coils up like an offended snake. “How was I supposed to do that? You tell me the answer, because I have tried for weeks, and she will find every way to spin you around.”

He huffs with a flinch of a smile, nodding, although he wants to strangle this fool for letting her get shot by even a stray bullet, much less for getting snippy. “Did you even see it?”

“I saw her take an odd step, and it made me think of a deer at the time, but she didn’t let on to it after that.”

Arthur has to rub his eyes. 

And Orly doesn’t know when to shut up. “She’s lucky it’s through-and-through.”

“Call her lucky again, I’m throwin you off this tower.”

Orly drops his head like a dog. Scratches back and forth through his hair. “Sorry.”

With another gust, the tower strains, like a ship tossed at nature’s goddamn mercy toward the dark open mouth before them. Even this small watchtower barely visible from the road in daylight seems unsafe. They’re more trapped than concealed.

He pushes himself away from the wall, wobbling on the balls of his feet, and stands. “Better be ready.”

“Did you hear something?” Orly pokes his head up above the rail panicked as a squirrel.

“Only that we’re fools to rest too long. Soon as this clears, or first light, we gotta move.”

Down below, he oils her revolver as he sits back against her bed and she sleeps that heavy sleep. Bessie’s practical hands come to mind, the audible poke of her embroidery needle as she sat by John’s bed. The ticking clock. The busy hands of vigil. Trim your fingernails, clean your guns, she’d told him. Can’t do aught but wait it out and you can’t beat time.

Nell keeps hers in good, not pristine, condition. Perfectly tuned and timed. But there’s residue in the fine channels of the engraving. The bone grip is slightly discolored; she hates the feel of a polished grip. And if he thinks about her fevering, it knocks the wind out of him. He has to reach back and take her hand by his shoulder, and then all he can do is watch out the dark window in that interminable night for any sign of the weather letting up enough for them to ride, and what the hell is he doing, wishing away time?

As the sky lightens and the sleet dies down, Ten Crow helps him feed the horses and load them, and the boy is not impatient, but nervously helpful as Arthur heads back inside. Orly stands contemplating the cabinet for a while before he takes some cans of food and leaves a dollar on the shelf. Arthur wakes Nell last and changes the bandage, and helps her tie a strip around her waist. Her clothes are dry at least, and warm, and she insists she needs no help even though she has to sit to pull them on. Her eyes seem brighter, despite the peakedness of her face. 

The door crashes open and all of them look up as if panic blew in with the daylight. Ten Crow stands there panting.

“What’d you see?”

“A scout.”

“You sure it wasn’t just someone on the road?” Orly swings his head from the kid to Arthur and back like one of them dolls on a track.

“Don’t matter.” Arthur grabs Nell’s coat from near the stove. “He see you?”

The kid nods. “He turned around.”

“Get out there; we’re leavin now.”

Arthur holds the coat down by her hands and draws the sleeves up her arms, and he kneels in front of her at the bed. Grips her calves. Looks her in the eye. 

“Miss, would you like to go for a ride with me?” He smiles a little and swipes her cheek.

She gazes back, weary, but smiles a little, too. “I thought you’d never ask.” 

Apollo’s bare back is warmer between your legs than the hard leather of your saddle. His coarse mane warms your hand. You try not to fall asleep but then your eyes will close and you will slip and jerk awake, and the wound in your side seems to split open. You try to move as smooth as you can, impossible as the trail hardens into a craggy mess. You ride through clouds of your horses’ breath, clouds of your own breath. 

You climb in this jagged line into snowy country as the sunrise floods gold between the trees and the snow glistens and turns phases of blue and violet and peach. The tawny grass sticks out like fur and the deer in the wood graze on it anxiously. The boy, Ten Crow, looks back sometimes, as if he is unsure you are all still there, this train of adults trusting a boy taking them into his country, or, as you’ve heard it, the country apportioned for his people, a sliver of his former country, across some new partition that makes less sense than the one before it.

As soon as the path opens to a wider stretch midday, Arthur trots Georgia up next to you. He asks how you are doing, in that way that is asked when there is nothing one can do. Your saddle is bound on his pack behind him. The shape fools you, and you ask who is with him, and he tells you Ten Crow and Orly, and you hear yourself saying No, behind you, as the trees to your right quickly arc overhead and go dark. 

He’s rubbing snow on your cheeks and grating his knuckles up and down your breastbone, Nell wake up, come on sweetheart. And then Ten Crow sits with you on a log, at first almost fearfully distant. As you start to list, he inches closer to prop you up while Arthur and Orly shift the gear and saddle to Apollo, and with breathtaking pain you are boosted up on Georgia, Arthur sitting behind. 

His chest rocks with your back, and right arm holds you as steady as he can. You lean into him. His neck is warm, his whiskers rough, and the scars on his chin appear almost raw in the cold.

“Try to sleep, Nell.”

“I’m fine.”

“I’ll believe you when you can stay on your horse.”

Every time you open your eyes, the forest around you has changed. Thick snow lies soft as icing over the ground. Whole forests of thin, bare trees bending high overhead and combing the low winter sunlight, their long shadows endless stripes of blue that switch over your face like rail ties. A birch forest of knotted staring eyes. Deer sit quiet in a group of three, not bothered by you but watching. You pass a huge rotted trunk with its long open mouth frozen in a silent bellow. Tracks of animals cross everywhere and Arthur tells you each one - wolf, coyote, rabbit, as if they have all chased each other. Ravens chatter, a cardinal soars bright overhead. In a wide open meadow, late in the day, the long stilted shadows of your horses step stiffly one after the other and you watch these stretched wayfaring apparitions in a daze. Their skeletal legs traverse the shadow of a hanging man, but there are no trees nearby, and his shadow disappears with the last of you.

You pass into a place thick with pines, colder in the darkened cover they make and sealed from wind, and there are people there with all their bundled things, remnants of a tribe sitting, awaiting something, women and silver-haired elders, and they watch you pass, stonefaced. One of them calls out to Ten Crow in front. A tone that is not friendly. Ten Crow offers a simple answer, undefensive. He sits straightbacked and does not cower. Another one calls out, and the kid makes no reply, and they continue in silence, through the people watching. And what must he feel, leading the three of you through his people here, being uprooted from the place they know, forced onto trash land, starving in winter. You pass in uncomfortable reverence for such suffering. Arthur draws the collar of your coat closer around your neck.

Then you wake in the sundown blue as the horses stop. Charles’ voice. Arthur hands you down to his warm arms, and he carries you easily. His shirt smells of woodsmoke and winter air, and his arms hold you so tightly you want to hold him back, a reflex of souls to kindness. His chest is warm against your cheek.

Charles takes you through a doorway into a dark room, and his breath steams above you - Help him light that stove - his voice is sharp and direct. He seats you on the floor. Scraping heavy things dragged out of the way. Odor blooming of dust, fuel oil, cold metal, old wood. Someone else, a man you don’t know, helps you to lie down onto a rug of deep, coarse fur, and your eyes close again. 

“We didn’t ask to come here.” Arthur holds his hands out over the small fire outside that shed as he stands next to Charles. Some other men across the fire ignore them. 

“I know, brother. And we need your help, but they have nothing; medicines are in short supply as it is -”

“You saw her, she’s in a bad way -”

“I know.”

The Indian feller on the other side of Charles pulls Ten Crow over to him and checks him over, face, head, neck, and speaks to him softly, and Ten Crow answers, writhes away, annoyed. 

“If I can’t help her here, we gotta keep movin. Maybe the fort, I don’t know.”

“We will do what we can.” The Indian feller puts his hand on Charles’ arm to quiet him. He says something to Ten Crow, and with the grind of gravel under his soles the kid turns and runs toward the camp. 

“The fort will not help you,” he says bitterly. “They will sooner hang you.” 

Charles glares with restraint for his sake. “The boy they’re holding is Paytah and Ten Crow’s brother.”

This Paytah nods at him more fully than he had in the shed, but still a vacancy in his face, the constant remote focus of worry.

“How long have they had him?”

“Three days.” Charles kneels to arrange more logs on the fire, and watches them take. “We get official reports on the prisoner’s condition twice a day.” He pushes himself up.

“What’ll they do to him?”

“If he is guilty, prison. Maybe the boarding schools. There was talk of hanging early on. A twelve-year-old.” 

“He would rather be hanged.” Paytah grits his teeth, and then lowers his head as if he’s reached the extent of what he can imagine without cracking.

“But Eagle Flies has threatened war if he’s not returned. We can’t tell if the army is calling his bluff or stalling for time, but something is wrong.”

Two women come up the trail carrying a bowl and a basket, although they do not share more than a glance with Paytah as they go past him into the shed, and do not look at Arthur at all. 

The shadow of Ten Crow comes up the trail too, his gangly adolescent limbs swinging as he turns back to the straight-shouldered man who follows him more slowly, hiking that incline with long steps as if he is strung along or held up by a will of another’s purpose. The people he passes greet him softly, and he speaks back. He wears a uniform, he trims his beard, but the dust on his boots and the wrinkles in his coat are more apparent as he approaches, and he clears his throat, nods to the other men at the fire.

Charles passes his hand between them. “This is the man I told you about, Arthur Morgan.”

The man regards him as if had forgotten he’d been told, or like a man who no longer puts stock in promises and hope and only on the sure thing in front of him anymore. Clear blue eyes look on him now, tired but understanding.

“This is Captain Monroe.”

They have made her comfortable at least on the floor of that old shed, on a thick mat of fur rugs and covered her in a couple of blankets. When he comes back in, it is late, and he feeds another half of a log into the stove and glances at his pack, untouched and therefore ready, and when he hears her wake he crawls over and tells her not to move. The poultice on her wound forms a delicate shell, pungent with sage and sassafras.

“Are you warm?” He dusts his hands on his knees and adjusts the blanket over her, tucking it under her feet, and lays her huge coat over top.

“Are you?” 

“Asked you first.”

She nods, humoring him. 

He cannot leave her here, in this dark cluttered shed in this settlement among strangers who are too desperate to care for themselves let alone this woman who looks like an enemy. Despite Charles asking. Despite the kid. He ignores his growing temper. Tries to make himself calm while he’s with her and think of anything pleasant to say, when all he can think of is distances to a train station and a town, and would it make a difference after putting her through that further ordeal.

“Where’d this coat come from?”

She fingers the gray fox fur of the collar. “I had it made for you, actually."

“Me?” He picks up the sleeve, examining the cuff trimmed with a thin braid of leather. 

“Before we were going to leave. Guess I never got around to giving it to you after that.”

He watches his hand running over the mound of her hip. Several times. A sudden stretch of sand in his mind. He sniffs and reaches up to move a strand of hair out of her face.

“Finest thing anyone’s ever given me.”

“Probably too big for you now anyhow.” She smiles weakly.

“Oh you makin fun of a sick man?”

“I couldn't help myself.”

He glares teasingly, but can’t bear the glassy green of her stare, that pensive faraway focus, as if the reflection in them is the shape of what he fears.

“I heard you talking with Charles.”

He shakes his head. Even with a hole shot through her, she can be -

“I think you should go.”

“Not right now.”

“I’ll be alright. The women took good care of me. And they need you.”

“And you don’t?”

“You’ll do nothing but sit around here and get on my nerves, all your fretting.” 

“Nell, I told him no.”

“Orly’s here if I need anything.” Talking like she doesn’t even hear him, as if that shitheel’s presence is any consolation.

“I still ain’t recovered from last night. You scared me.” He sits beside her on the fur, pulls off his shirt, and slides out of his trousers. Takes the tonic before he suffers the next fit he’s half on the verge of all the time now. With his coat rolled up under both their heads, he lies down facing her. Her cheeks are still flushed, but there's no longer the clench of pain in her whole face. 

“Get some sleep like he said, and if you’re feeling well you should go with them in the morning. That captain seemed like a good man. It didn’t sound anything too reckless.”

“Don’t feel right, leavin you.” 

“I’m already better.”

“Liar.” He feels her forehead. She squints back, a little daring.

“Just come back to me safe.”

He pulls the blanket up higher on her. “You can’t be sure you’ll be okay.”

“As sure as anyone can be.”

He frowns at her, and she takes a careful, deep breath, as if to show him the ride that day hadn’t taken everything out of her, but her fooling asks him to ignore the dark streaks under her eyes, the puff of each pained exhalation, the color on her. She can’t hide it all, but she tries, and that’s what terrifies him the most.

“Hey.” He picks up her hand. She closes her eyes and it seems an age before she opens them. 

“You don’t get to go before me.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.” She smiles but even with the lightest laugh she tenses from the pain in her side. “And you don't get to go be-”

“I mean it.” He waits until she looks him in the eye.  “I would lose my mind.” 

She pulls his hand to her and presses the backs of his fingers to her lips and holds them there as she gazes pensive through this stretch between them. He watches, picturing the insidious ways life robs a man for his devotion. Where she seems to go inside her head, as she holds his hand like it’s her way back, as he lifts a finger and swipes her cheek, he wonders if she feels the same quiet cold abatement, but then she presses him to her lips again.

“How could I leave you?”

He glances up as she does too, the little crescent at the corner of her mouth that appears in shades of regret and worry and the beginnings of argument and discomfort but right now is something different entirely, a half-moon rising with a solemn shimmer over the deep body of herself.

“How could I leave my heart.” 

His chest seems to crack inward with the truth and sadness in her voice, and he has to face their hands together. 

“How could I take yours away.” Her breath warms through his fingers like he might hold it. 

He closes his eyes, pricked by tears.  

“See I can’t leave you, Arthur. It's just not possible.”

She says it with that practical clarity. A report of the way of things. The sun rises, the sun sets, rain falls, they love. And the luxury of time, uninterrupted, does not belong to them, and never has. Necessity has always called lovers away from bedsides and they make do as if the earth weren’t crumbling around them. He steels himself through the ache of that unbelievable distant image that has aligned into focus between them before they were ready, and not the image he was prepared for. Cluttered shed. Makeshift bed of furs. Pungent poultice. Sickbed cough. Peaked fever. Hands clasped. He kisses her fingers.

“I’m gonna hold you to it.”

The start of a smirk stabs her instead. 

“Oh you think I’m foolin.” He straightens the blanket to keep it away from her side.

“Course I do.”

“You don’t wanna find out.”

She pulls his arm up against her chest as she closes her eyes, and holds onto him tightly, even in her sleep.

They wait on the trail south of the train station at an overlook. Through his binoculars, the guards around the fort move like gnats if gnats were lazy imbeciles, one of them laughing like an idiot at another’s joke, one of them scratching his ass like he suffers something recurrent.  

Monroe waits at the road as a guard emerges from the fort. The terseness of their silent exchange is clear from the interval kept between them, a few words delivered, Monroe’s visible sigh as the guard goes back inside without answering the questions he calls after him. Shaking his head, Monroe mounts, and heads up the trail.

When he reaches them, he tries to conceal his annoyance, but it’s in his voice. “They say Enapay is well, and ate bread this morning.” 

“That’s all? In every way, they show their disregard.” Charles mounts and adjusts his hatchet with a grim expression.

Paytah’s eyes bore through Monroe. “How is his spirit?”

“He didn’t report on that. I believe they intend to send up his lawyer in the next day or two. He will be able to say more.”

The scorn of bullshit lingers in the captain’s face as he turns his horse and leads them up the road. Checking that they have what they need. The next water source is half a day’s ride. Arthur walks Georgia on trying to ignore the chain in his chest that snakes out from its iron coil with each step farther from Nell.

“Where is Eagle Flies? Can’t he help you get him out?”

Charles calls over his shoulder. “And then what? If the whole tribe fled, maybe. But Eagle Flies has thirty men ready at the first sign of aggression to go to war. We try to free the boy, even under cover, and the army will respond in a way that provokes real violence. Besides, he may have already escalated matters by stealing some horses from a transport yesterday. They aren’t certain it was him.”

But he shares a knowing glance. He would put money on there being a cigar nub at the scene of it.

To his amusement, the captain doesn’t hold back on his disdain for the fort or the army. The capture of the boy and Ten Crow’s escape. This farce of a trial over a matter so small, the only reason it merits attention now is for the hostility it could provoke.

“Given the sensitivity of the situation, the government has agreed to call back all but a defending contingent of its soldiers into the Heartlands. But they’re getting impatient, and so are the Wapiti.”

“What’s the holdup?” 

“No one knows. But I suspect something else going on. That’s why I wanted help to check on the men I saw up on the northeastern quadrant the other day. A surveyor and some others. A few soldiers without insignia. If it gets messy, it can’t be Wapiti who are involved.”

“We been seein them soldiers over by Annesburg, hired by Cornwall, we think.”

Monroe has to move ahead of him as the trail narrows, and he starts to wonder how a man like Monroe could get trapped in a life like this, oath-sworn to what would use him up and spit him out like a cartridge casing spent among many, fighting for something he doesn’t believe in. But he reckons men change, and leaders change, and on that subject he isn’t a stranger himself. 

Each night they light a fire, and each night around a fire and in the shelter of the rock walls and their large shadows cast, or the infinite night around them in a field, when the silence creeps in talk will draw out. Monroe, joining the military at eighteen, following an older brother who was killed in an accident not long after that. How afterward it seemed like he had been given new sight, watching the cold and careless hands of power he was unable to escape, and then staying in through malaise and the minor resistance he could enact, feeling powerless otherwise. A man with a wasted sense of decency.

Paytah, being the oldest generation at twenty-five. Born into the sacred hoop of the world the elders spoke of, but he had always known it was broken. And now his parents dead. A sister and a brother taken to a boarding school. Two brothers left.

“They’re the only two children left on the reservation.” Charles continues for him when Paytah’s voice clips off abruptly, and he spreads the coals with the fire stick.

Monroe, laying out his bedroll, stops. Stares into the shadow outside the fire for a while and all its sightless prospect.

Charles continues, with a glance at both of them, and then Arthur. “Enapay was six years old when they took the other children away to the school. I guess he heard that they would cut their hair. So when they came for the children, he took Ten Crow and they hid for three days up in the bluffs. They hide now whenever an inspection comes through. Or they did.”

“He didn’t say anything about that.”

“Probably didn’t think you would care.”

He can’t sleep at first, feeling minuscule under the starspray overhead, thinking of this group unequal to what they faced, a failed soldier, a worried brother, and two outlaws good only for belonging to neither side. And how to stop a war that was balanced on nothing more than a twelve-year-old kid’s back.

When you open your eyes in the thin light, he is gone, and you comb your fingers into the fur where he lay. Proud of a good man, but missing him undeniably. He left some biscuits and a pear for you on a handkerchief. The dawn light hides the definition of the broken things around you; their dark silhouettes form a spindly dry garden. Your eyes close again to dreams of men hanging in the breeze like token bottles strung in a tree, and in the end you are alone behind the sharpened timber walls of a fort. When you wake to a stronger light, the woman who wakes you is not unkind but not particularly precious about checking your wound, and you stretch away when she removes the poultice. She mutters under her breath as she applies a new one. She lays the blanket over you. Without Arthur there, even the slightest kindness invites your stinging tears. 

“Where are my clothes?”

“They were filthy,” she says, blunt in her manner, not concealing a similar assessment of you. “There is a dress by the stove; I think it will not lay tight against your wound.”

An old man speaks to her from the doorway and she answers, her tone softer. He says something, vaguely lighthearted. She responds, and you hear the weary forced smile in her voice. She leaves with brisk steps, and for a moment you think yourself alone.

“How are you feeling?” There is a slowness in the old man’s granite voice, care taken with words akin to turning delicate objects to view them. His boots on the floor of the shed tread softly as he approaches, and when he kneels to set down a cup by your head, his face in greeting is not unwelcoming but not without mistrust, the color of his eyes cloudy as if he must see everything through a wasteland fog. To an old man who knows many faces, you are only one, and a stranger. 

“I think I’m better,” you say, but you can’t do more than pull the blanket up to your chin. He puts another couple of logs into the stove. 

“I do not think you are as well as you say.” 

You wish he would leave. The shadow emerges in you, the leaden sadness, made worse, being observed. Here you lie on the floor of this shack, a wretched burden. Tears drip off your nose and you wipe them away quickly. 

The old man closes the door to the stove and although you think he turns to leave, instead he kneels by your head again and lifts the cup and holds it close to you, and supports your head. Again, this undeserved kindness aches within you, but you accept the cup, and hope it will satisfy him enough to leave you alone. It is a warm and savory broth, and before you can hold back, you drink it dry. A starved greed you can’t withhold.

“Thank you for bringing the boy back safely.”

You wipe your mouth on the blanket. “He saved us.”

“I am not surprised.” The man smiles at his knees. “No child is meant to be anything but a child, but now he must carry a heavy weight. If I speak realistically, he will be the last child among us soon; they will certainly send the other boy away. There is a deep loneliness in him since Enapay has been gone.” 

“That’s not surprising, either.”

“Did he tell you?”

“No. The way he is around people.”

“You know something about that peculiar loneliness.”

With an ache through your side, you shift slightly. “I guess I might.”

“Perhaps when you feel stronger you could speak to him. Like you would speak to yourself.”

The weight of that possibility crushes you with new exhaustion. Your head pounds and the light pierces and you are chilled in the air of the shed. He tells you to rest, and to his sad eyes you must appear so plain and undeserving. What he says after that, you don’t recall; you sleep again.

It is late in the day when you wake again, and order yourself to get up as if to edge away from the tar that wants to suck you into the things you would rather not recall. With the gingerness of all wounded ones, you manage to snag the dress with your toe to pull it closer and get into it little by little. It is an old buckskin dress, worn to a color of bay and the stitching blackened and the beading at the bottom bare as a pecked cob. But it fits supple and heavy, like a skin you can hide within, loose as a good holster. A shawl folded with it is a cheap woolen thing like the kind found in poor boxes and immigrant camps. You put on the coat instead, and your boots.

You emerge from the shed into the blinding winter light. Dried pine needles make a thick mat on the snow-dusted ground, and the towering pines are sparse overhead. Dryness everywhere. The snow is dirty, trampled with the silt. Some tents are fallen-in, the articles within tipped over, picked over, and left like the final readiness, which you understand to some extent now is not of preparation but of abandonment. Do not put them up again in hope of their occupant’s return. Do not clear them to tidy this space for the living. They lie collapsed, deflated, like shrouds over those who gave up waiting out the unknown time.

One small canvas tent on the outskirts of the camp moves with the muttering life inside it. When Orly emerges with his canteen and sees you, he ducks halfway back inside, a weave of indecision, and then crawls in and comes out with your own, empty, which he hands to you, not looking you in the eye. You thank him.

“I was going to fill it soon.”

“That's nice of you.”

“Your beau threatened my life and my horse’s life if I didn’t bring it to you daily.”

“Oh he’d never lay a hand on your horse.”

He has less of a sense of humor today than most. But he tolerates you walking with him out of camp, and stays at your limping pace, though he avoids facing you at all. As if, to face you, he will be unable to keep from strangling you. 

You have to sit by the side of the trail where it overlooks the lake, too dizzy, too weak. Orly waits, like a ship or an anchor to you, you couldn’t say which, facing out, might as well be boiling for all the steam coming out his nostrils. Down by the lakeshore, the little boy is crouched on a rock, shooting imaginary arrows at the fish below him. Aiming them. Letting fly. Making the sound of them loosing through the air.

“You okay?” Orly doesn’t face you.

“No.”

Breeze blusters between you. 

“I’m sorry, Orly.”

Orly looks back as if he isn’t sure he heard.

“I’m sorry I ruined your life.”

He watches the kid for a time. Standing by that stunning lake. The pines. An eagle perches at the railing of the footbridge. When it takes off, its wingspan could rival Orly’s. It dips to the water with grace, imposing its shadow on the surface, plucks a fish out in its talons and climbs again. 

“You need help?” He offers one hand to you. Not friendly. Not giving in. But you take it, and he helps you to the water, to the boy.

 




Four days, they’ve tracked them. Four days being distant without word of Nell, of the boy. Following five sets of hooves, they might as well be watching them up in the distance, but something doesn’t sit right, something is off in this slow chase. There are no traces of the men. No cigarette butts, no pocks of tobacco spit on the roadside, no places they stopped to piss, no food scraps, cans, or threads of cheap uniforms. Just a trail of drying horse shit to mark the trail of men moving unhindered through the borderlands.

They’ve gone as far east as the mountains allow, and looped back around west until they are heading up near the pass where they started. The thin air brings on his cough worse than usual, and Charles watches with an attentiveness that breaks things down to sinew and bone. He wishes he would keep away uncomfortably like anyone else, pretending not to notice as he drinks the tonic or hangs back from them until he can get enough air and the crackles and hisses in his breath quiet some. 

“You sound bad, brother.”

“This ain’t about me.”

“Okay.” 

“I wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t told me to.” 

Charles sits silent for that duration that always makes him wonder if he heard him. But before he can repeat himself, Charles turns. “I imagine she’d be here too if she could.”

And he's right of course, a painful thought in its own right. Arthur spits to the side and tries to keep his mind on the trail brightening ahead.

Charles slows Taima as they round up the pass and the granite walls around the flat there make it quiet from the wind. Echoes of their every move and jangling tack. Paytah and Monroe stand at the far edge at the road, Monroe with his binoculars up, squinting hard in the late afternoon sun.

Arthur takes his up, too, peering down on a clearing in the pines. Five men. They are efficient in setting up their camp. Horses. Tents. Fire. Food. One tall man with a mustache wears a pair of shiny black riding boots to the knee, and seems to be the leader of them; he puts away his equipment carefully while they set up camp, and answers when they consult him. 

“I know them.” Monroe’s lip curls as he lowers the binoculars.

They all turn to look at him.

“Those are US Army. Two of them, at least.” He has his hands on his hips as he paces away and turns back, rubs the back of his neck.

Charles takes the binoculars from Arthur.

“Do you know the feller with the boots?”

“That’s the surveyor, and I don’t. He looks well financed, though. If we can prove they are here, connected with private interests - it could be damning evidence.”

“Would it make any difference?”

“It might. I can’t say for sure, but it might. It’s the best chance I’ve seen in a long time for everyone to step back from this insanity.”

Paytah is the last one standing there as they make a rough camp to wait out the daylight. He watches, knowing he’s unseen, and watches, knowing more than the rest of them all the ways the world could end.

At sundown, Arthur brushes Georgia and gets her ready, and hangs onto her cantle in a fit until he can find the tonic in his saddle bag.

“He should stay back with Monroe.” Paytah reserves none of his meaning, hardly looking at him as he protests to Charles.

“He’s the best gun I know. If something happens -”

“Nothing may happen.” Paytah grabs him by the forearm, unbending. He stands a couple of inches taller than Charles, and has the austere quiet bearing of an elk as he stares him down.

“He’s right, Charles; I ain’t exactly the right feller to be sneakin right now...”

“You’re coming. No shots unless we get into trouble.” Charles stares back until Paytah releases his arm. 

Down the hill, as they come upon it in the dark, it is a camp as spare as their own. No comforts in duty, only to drink their boredom away once the work is done. Five tents. Brand new saddles lined up and ready. Three of the men have gone to sleep. The two on guard are the kind of drunks who are invigorated with more drink, but the bigger one, oxlike in his shoulders and chest, announces he’s going to go dig a hole and not to follow. The other tells him to go downwind, and gets whacked on the back of his head with a stick the big one sizes for its usefulness and takes with him. The one at the fire hisses an insult, then turns back, adjusts himself, sitting unsteady on his canvas stool by the fire. Charles and Paytah circle opposite each other around the north and south side of the camp as Arthur creeps behind the tents that glow like soot-coated lanterns in the light of the fire. 

Doesn’t even know what he’s looking for that would prove a thing. These men travel light and disciplined. Everything they have has a pocket or a place it is kept. He peers into their tents on the periphery, figuring something might stand out among the manufactured standard of military things. Nothing but ticking bedrolls and tin plates and men dead asleep in their itchy woolens.

Then sticking out from the corner of one tent, something catches his eye, resembling his journal. The dull leather sheen of a folio with a waterproof flap, but large as plain paper. He slides it toward himself and sticks it in his vest and keeps on.

Across the camp, the crouched forms of Charles and Paytah pass unseen outside the ring of firelight behind the man awake. The glint of a knife in Charles’ hand flashes at the ready as Paytah gathers up the surveyor’s equipment, and then Charles signals them to leave.

Leaves scrape and rustle to his left from the bearlike form of the shitter ambling back toward camp on Paytah’s course, Paytah coming around with his arms full, and there’s no time to signal. When he notices Paytah, the soldier doesn’t make a sound, but draws his knife quick as a spark and slashes at him. The knife hums through the air. Without thinking Arthur sprints through the brush as Paytah stumbles back, and he jumps the soldier from behind and clamps his forearm hard over his mouth. He hardly feels the slice on his arm, and struggles to throw him to the ground, grappling with his knife hand at the same time and finally falling on top of him as he goes down. The soldier bucks under him, grunting, and beats his elbows up into his ribs. With the fifth hit, Arthur recoils, gasping. The soldier rolls him onto his back. The man’s weight crushes his stomach as the soldier bears down against his hands with all his immense strength, the knife shaking between them like a rageful threat, and by some mercy Arthur lets up his resistance at the right time and the knife slices his ear as it drives into the ground. With every iron punch to his face up against the handle, he drains. He can’t recover, and he can’t move beyond trying to cage his head as he drags for breath. His ear rings with one hit and he feels himself losing consciousness just as his hand finds the handle of the knife and he muscles it out of the ground and yanks it up in an arc. It slits the man’s lip and chin and the side of his neck hard enough that the bastard rolls off him and both of them sprawl there half senseless. But leave no follower. Arthur drags himself back on top, his goddamn head spinning, and as the soldier grabs for his neck he yanks his Schofield up, snatches the barrel in the air in one motion and clubs the soldier in the temple so hard he falls back. The man’s whole form goes dead slack under him. He pushes himself back up to give him the one that counts, but it’s the cough that saves the bastard’s miserable life. He stumbles as far away as he can and stifles himself in his coat, hands smothering his mouth and catching his blood, from his arm or his lungs, no telling. He gets farther away, falling to his knees in the brush like a suffering sinner and retches and fights himself in that shuddering air to stay conscious. 

“Are you wounded, brother?” Charles reaches him quickly and crouches beside him. 

“Where’s Paytah?”

“He’s here.”

He gasps an apology of some kind, Did they hear, did he wake them, and Charles looks behind them and shakes his head.

“Clear for now - are you okay to ride? Georgia’s right there.”

“Yeah - go, I’m behind you.”

He lies in the brush until the world stops spinning and he can get up without puking. Then turns over, hauls himself up to one knee.

His blood chills with the metallic sliding rack of a pistol.

“Get up.”

The man in his shiny tall boots stares him down with a gleaming M1899 that gets him straight to his feet, gun holstered, hands up, toe-heeling backward. 

“We’ve seen you boys tracking us the last two days.” The man speaks like a city boy.

“We’re just travelin on the road -” He spits to the side. “Same as you fellers.”

“Is that so?” 

“More like four days.”

The man advances, hand out. “I’ll take those papers back.”

“Naw, I’m keepin them.”

He feels the warmth from Charles’ arm as he comes up quiet beside him.

Tall Boots has a sweaty man’s habit of adjusting his grip. “Thought you boys were smart enough to keep out of this. You don’t want any trouble tracing back to the reservation. I hear you all are hanging by a thread.”

The other three men are up now, all within a gettable range if the world don’t tip.

“Oh we ain’t with the tribe. This man here is just a butcher with that ax of his. And I’m just a man with a hair trigger on his guns.”

The man in his tall boots swings his head in a bored sneer to the others until Arthur’s gun is up, that flick so smooth and his aim so certain with his stare unchanged; even as he stands there wheezing, it has the usual effect of getting Tall Boots to loosen up his grip.

The man smiles as he tips up the 1899 with a sporting capitulation. “You won’t feel so cocky once Cornwall gets here.”

“Cornwall’s dead, you idiot.”

Tall Boots gazes at him in wonder, and he turns to look at his men, who laugh. 

“Well, you got me. Now why don’t you boys get on your way, you got what you came for, I guess you win.”

“Somethin funny? Your dead boss?” He lets Tall Boots’ shit-eating smirk die to the sound of the snapping fire.

The man’s tone is untroubled, his dark eyes daring. “No, bronco. We still mourn the devil you know.” That gun fits his holster fast and quiet as a gasp.

And he stares at Arthur like he’ll see him again. 

 

 

Up at the pass, Charles inspects the cut on Paytah’s chest while Monroe tries to make out the papers they stole. Something about Cornwall, and this Colonel Favors feller that Monroe is near in a fuss to read. 

“I’ll file this as soon as we get down. I don’t know what comes of it, but I’ll tell my man at Georgetown; he’ll run an article, try to make this as unattractive as possible for the army while we put pressure on them internally.”

“And Enapay?” Paytah asks, little caring for the cut that stripes his chest horizontally.

“Maybe technicalities will make it untenable to keep him. Or it will reflect badly on them, imprisoning a boy over nothing. Maybe this blows over, who knows. It’s sure as hell the best chance I’ve seen in a long time to put a stop to this insanity in peace.”

Arthur leans back against a boulder and concentrates on controlling his breath and wrapping the slash on his arm and not on the clap of near-death that made him feel his pulse beat through his whole body. 

“How are you, Arthur?” Charles kneels beside him.

“Been better of late.” Four words is about as much as he can speak at a time up there. He manages to smile. “Altitude don’t help.”

“We’ll get down tonight.” He glances at Paytah, who nods. “And,” he utters down between them, clearing his throat, watching Paytah walk away, “thank you, my friend.” He takes the ends of the bandage and ties it for him before looking up. The look says more than thanks. It tells him something precious was saved tonight. Had it not been, a man might have been struck with the kind of grief that salts the earth. Never seen Charles so much as worry, bravest man he knows, yet here is a man newly somber with relief, the feeling that will now sicken him whenever his mind wanders back to this time, before a boy was freed and a war stopped, before nothing happened. Arthur looks him in the eye, and clasps his hand as it’s offered. Charles pulls him to his feet. 

The ride down is a dark blur, but he can feel the air thicken like nourishment, and by the time they reach the reservation he has shaken off the weight of the soldier that remained. A few people sit up late with Rains Fall at the big fire flickering low, and the swell of feeling flares as Paytah explains what they found.  The chief rises in front of Paytah, takes his hands in thanks, brings his forehead to his own, and then Charles. When he takes Arthur’s hands, he feels awkward to be so acknowledged, and publicly, even more so when other people begin to thank them, and he quickly leaves to find Nell.

He doesn’t get two steps when he sees her emerging from the shed, and she walks straight toward him like a vision in a borrowed buckskin dress. He rushes to her like he’s carried by a current and reaches her halfway, stopping himself from throwing his arms around her before she throws her arms around him. His hands spread in rediscovery over her back.

He takes her hand, not rightly pleased with himself; he isn't sure what he is; but he wants to bring her to the fire to sit with him and Charles and Paytah. Watch with her as someone tells a story they don’t understand, and laughter ripples around the fire. Show her Rains Fall across the circle and a moment’s lessened worry smoothing the deep grooves around his mouth. Watch the light and passing shadows of the flames on her attentive face.  It is not a celebration; a child is still imprisoned. A chief’s son is gone and angry. Tomorrow there may come retaliation. But this night is marked by a rare good, or so he can figure as he watches the fire grow. 

“You’re hurt,” she says, holding his right hand, looking down at the strip he’s tied around.

“Ain’t too bad.” Her face has a deeper color, like she’s been out in the mountain sunlight, and he’s never seen her hair braided this way.

“You’d be proud of this man.” Charles leans over and speaks across him, and Arthur glares at him, and is ignored as Nell replies back across him that she has a feeling she would be. 

“You two want to sit together to finish your gossip?”

To his annoyance, Charles turns back to the fire looking wise, and Nell has the same wise smile. Someone adds another log to the fire, and there is a sense of proposition when Paytah unfolds his long body and stands, almost as if he intends to speak, then presses two fingers on Charles’ shoulder, then walks away from the circle and waits on the path. Charles watches him go, and turns back to glance at Arthur to his right, and holds his gaze a moment with a certain stillness mixed of self-willing and unease he’s never recognized in him before. All at once it dawns on him, with a roused pang of recognition in his own gut, goddamn dullard that he is, understanding now the look of sick worry he saw in Charles on the mountain, and he clears his throat. Nods at his friend, opens his mouth to say something, but Charles just grips his shoulder and stands, saying good night to him, Nell, Orly. After he leaves, Arthur stares blankly into the fire for a while.

His throat is suddenly dry. “How’re you feelin?”

She’s staring at the fire too, and her lips purse away a smile. “Good.” A word as full as a bucket of water.

The fire has grown or perhaps the wind died down to nothing, but he’s warm now, freeing his neck from the top buttons of his shirt. Her index finger slowly hooks over his, insinuating deeper between his fingers. Now he’s gripping her hand and standing, and saying good night to Orly sitting with another, drawing to each other in the silt. Now he’s taking her back in the blue night to the shed where the coals in the little stove are still low and he stokes them for light more than heat.

He turns to the sound of water as she wrings out a cloth from the bowl. 

“How did that happen?” She points at him to sit on that soft mat of pelts, and indicates his face.

He takes off his boots and feels the ache of his whole skeleton as he lowers himself to the floor. “Turn of events.”

Gingerly, still painfully, she places the bowl of water beside him, and gets down on one knee and then straddles his legs, and begins to dab at the blood on his face. He watches her while she cleans him up; he would have simply scrubbed it all off but wants to keep the feel of her hand curving around the back of his neck and watch her face while she wipes dried blood and dirt away from his cheek and forehead, the slope of his nose, his hairline, with the care of a restorer. Discovering something in this broken object, valuable only to the one who knows what it is beneath the tarnish. She turns his face to see his ear and rinses the cloth and wrings it.

“Turn of events had a knife, looks like.”

“He was drunk anyhow.” He winces when she cleans the cut on his ear, recalling the hard chip of the blade stabbing the rocky soil. He pulls her hips close, careful of her left side but her weight feels good on him, like a counterbalance to the remembered jolts of that near-miss that cut his breath in half. He blinks like a flinch, and glances up; she sees it. She recognizes it. Wipes under the angle of his jaw with the overpowering persuasion of her thumb. 

When she concentrates, her brows huddle and two parallel lines draw up into her forehead, same as when she is concerned. She scrubs harder at the dried blood in his whiskers.

“Been a while since you had a trim.”

“Do it tomorrow if you like.”

“I like you rougher.” She’s rinsing the rag and wringing it, glancing at him to mean something more, but still shy to, all the same, that way she's sometimes naïve without realizing. So damned endearing he wants to tease her but not to interrupt her washing away the blood on his neck so intently. Finding a scratch that makes him flinch to feel it. She pulls back. Flick of her eyes, apologetic. He smiles, angles his head to bare his neck to her, invites the sting of her touch. And she presses as he watches her, motionless, testing her. Will she lighten up with a little guilt; will she see he prefers pain if it brings her closer. 

“Did you know about them?” She nicks her head toward the door, and then when her eyes meet his, glinting keen in that way, she rocks her center on him, and fires that bolt inside. Jesus, been hardly a week of distance, but he’s already getting hard like it’s been a month or more. Days fearing she would die seem like those lived in an underground life, the way the memory of pain isn’t painful but leaves a deeper kind of mark; as if he comprehends his own relief, he is affected just to see her up, and now on him, eyes shining.

He coughs lightly into his arm and leans back on his hands, gazing up. “I do now.” 

“He seems different. Happy.”

If happy means the relief that comes after worrying sick. Then he and Charles both know the feeling. “I reckon.”

“Aren’t you glad for him?”

“Sure.” But the crush in his throat strains his voice. 

“What’s the matter?”

“I want to see how you’re healin.”

“It’s alright, Arthur -” But she stops arguing when he holds her hand with the cloth, and brings the lantern closer. She lifts the skirt past her left hip.

He holds her below her wound, still shining with unguent and healing slow, but not worrisome like it was. Bruises like crushed violets all over her flank, watercolors of green and yellow on the margins, a thin line of dried blood. His thumb brushes beneath the wound in front. He looks up; no glaze of fever on her face. 

“You took good care of me, and so did they.”

“Must hurt pretty bad still.”

She shrugs, beckons for his right arm, settling her hips closer on him. When he reaches for her cheek she brings his arm down, always practical matters first, but he can’t feel a bit of that cut when she keeps moving that way.

“You feelin alright to?” 

“To…” She perches on him closer yet and her brows lift slightly. 

The truth is, there’s no word for describing what it is with her and what it does to him. Fucking. Making all things right. Laying waste to him. 

Outside, the voices get livelier still. Inside this run-down shed, the walls and crates glow in lamplight.

“You look pretty in this.” He inches the buckskin up her thighs.

He watches how that makes her frown at her hands still wrapping the new bandage. And how it melts on her like a shimmer cast off a mirror. He rises into her slightly just to watch her eyes close.

He tents the heavy sheath away from her wound as she bows out from the top of it and he lifts it off her, and she strides him in her nakedness both known to him and new. Before she can lean in very close, he takes the rag and rinses it and squeezes it out, and wipes the scalloped edges of blood and the traces of the poultice from her stomach, and she guides his hand up her chest, up her neck. Carefully, she turns and he washes the remnants away from her back, the entrance wound, as far as he can tell, heals slower, and he rounds the cloth over her back, her hip. She pulls the rag away; she takes him by the wrists.   

Her breasts don't quite fill his hands, soft, nipples peaking and pushing into his palms with her breath, into his avid grip, and she yearns against him. He’s grazing his teeth on her neck, biting as hard as he can until the lust of her moan charges into his guts. His dick aches with it. His head. He feels queasy for a moment in the heat of the stove.

“Don’t want your wound to open.” He sits back enough to check her but she leans toward him and he has to prop himself on his hands.

“We’ll go easy,” she says beneath his ear, her breath on his neck, her breasts brushing his shirt. He lets his head drop back as much for the cooler air as to steel himself for the building sure-fire that will flatten him.

He lets her unbutton his vest, then his shirt, watching her fingers push each button through; she’s being thoughtful, her expression not sad, to his relief, not cautious, undertaking a simple task with contentment for its own sake. And of his union suit, and he sits up higher to get out of his sleeves, steals a kiss at her throat, and leans back again. Her hands spread up his stomach, his chest, sweeping out over his collarbones, then back in, up the curves of his neck, and she pauses there, with her thumbs grazing back from the corners of his jaw.

He asks her What, and she brushes her fingertips along the bruise of his left cheekbone. No feeling quite as tender as the touch around a wound, and it aches when he smiles at her.

She kisses him pertly on the nose. “You’re handsome with a bruise.”

“You must still be delirious.”

“He comes back to me bruised and cut, and I get delirious.”

“I oughta get in more fights.”

“If it means you let me take care of you.” She glowers a little.

“I’ll remember that.” He scoops her in closer, rocks her against him until the slyness leaves her face, and she glances down and continues the buttons of his union suit and then the ones of his fly. He watches her face as her fingers trace the spine of his erection through his trousers, her serene interest in him, and when she pulls a breath from him, she splines the backs of two fingers around him and drags them up more firmly, then lightly down, the pads of her fingers breezing on him, her eyes locked on his with a prowling kind of stare, and with her whole hand then grips him like a handle and pushes up, as if this is the way his head drops back in yielding. And this is the way he pants in the slight alarm of coming close before she grins privately and quiets her hand. And rocks toward him. And kisses his neck, her lips and tongue on his neck and her hand urging his cock, her shoulder rolling into him with each stroke.

He coughs lightly to the side, and notices her flinch when she shifts closer, and he reaches up, touches her cheek, and she curves her face toward his palm, kisses and tenderly bites the meat of his thumb, hollow breath in the small cave of her mouth.  

He cups her jaw. “Go slow.”

She slips her hands down his sides, down his waist, and he lifts up as she edges back, sliding his trousers and union suit off his legs, then she crawls up on him again. Her abdomen so soft against his twitching shaft. She touches a bruise on his ribs. Her touch is not light, a hesitant touch that is shy that he will pull away, but a necessary touch, a shared pressure, feeling him wanting to be touched.

She posts up high over him, and he cradles her right breast, watches her watching his hand. Glances up as he puts his lips on her and her eyes close, he sucks and teases her nipple in his teeth, her chin raises, she pushes her breast into him and he takes a fuller mouthful of her body. It is beyond his own intention, this need from the base of his back to devour her. He pulls her toward him with a grip of her ass and slides his hand under her, to feel the way she hangs on the back of his neck as his middle finger finds her wet and strokes her so light she tilts her head. Her breath is still. Then the bow of her chest into him, soft sound in her throat as he pushes inside. She reaches down to take him in her hand, and at her stroke both of them pant with the rush.

Anticipation troubles her face as he wets the head of his cock in the blush of her lips and fits to his place at her brink, feeling her heat within and the fierce urge to drive into her but restrains himself. The small of her back comes unlocked under his hand as she takes him, her arms resting heavier on his shoulders with this profound descension. She exhales as if the breath is forced from her in equal measure, and her head tips back slightly, her throat exposed; he tastes it, kisses and sucks her, pants into her neck in the glorious stretch and pressure as she receives him to the root and her face rolls against his. She gasps, and he feels the wince in her cheek.

“You okay?”

She whispers yes, her ear to his temple, and urges on him seriously. Her breasts flatten to his chest and her hips swing in with that first muscled thrust of herself and already he feels the flow, his rigid bone driven into her, pulled off of, wet, driven slick and deep until she holds all of him at his extremity and even with the pain in her face and the ache she must feel through her entire middle she slowly surges on his cock like she craves a deeper ache. He slips his hand between them to let her ride her clit on his thumb as he rings himself. In this slow unbroken gyre she gazes down, her forehead to his, her nose rubbing his, her mouth so close to his he longs to kiss her, and as he feels her rocking harder he grabs her ass with both hands and lifts her, gets his knees under him to fuck her more willfully, and smiles as he brings her down on him again. He wants to be careful but she locks her legs behind him and grinds into him. And when she begins to nod - yeah, you close? yeah - and her chest to spread he drags her hips in tight to hitch her to him and make her come. She folds around his shoulders, grips his hair. Soft moan, flutter of breath on his neck, and in her intense throb he cannot hold on and spills into her with a strangled groan, still clutching her. 

She holds him close, still inside her.

In the watchtower, a week ago, what seems now like an endless year, she had spoken in pain as he knelt at the bedside.

“You’ll see me different now.” 

Feeling grave, he sat closer. Smiled, shook his head. That terrible courtyard in his mind fell dim as a sinking stone. 

But she burned in the middle of it, a luminous pillar at Colm’s feet, that sonofabitch, as he spat at her and denounced her. The straightness of her head, the shame he lay on her. She said nothing in her defense, for she balanced bigger scales, and took it all in front of them, like a confession. And was that what all of it was for -

“No. Nothin’s different.” 

And yet - 

That body he tended, war-wearied on that bed, all manner of sensations it stored until it could rest then released with the charge of wild horses. Only by the grip of their hands did he not lose her. Penetrated by that bullet, and changed irreparably.

That girl he brought outside, like a used-up messenger bundled in his coat. Her wind-erased outline as she huddled in the night and he checked the privy first beforehand. The shivering painwracked shoulders he held steady, as he stood crowded with her in that space. He joked for her sake, bracing one arm on the wall overhead, Wouldn’t it be awkward, to find in the daylight this was a wardrobe. She rested her head on his hip. He held her cheek. 

“Thank you,” she said, a waver in her voice as if it was an apology instead.

“What for?”

Her head bowed. 

He stroked her cheekbone. “Reckon it’s a privilege, if that ain’t strange to say.”

She wiped her nose on his coat sleeve and then looked guilty for it. “A little.”

“You know what I mean.”

Her hand around his thigh pulled tighter. Then he helped her up. Took her inside, made her as comfortable as he could.

This woman he loves, as he holds her now. This body now healing, bearing its record of pain like figures depicting a story on the face of an urn, this body stronger than he knew. Different in ways that dawn on him in vague pieces, like he needs a scope or a looking glass to understand. Realizations that leave him dumb with disbelief. Now with her eyes on him, he ain’t worthy of it.

“What.” Her nose beaking his. Glinting eyes. 

“You were right.”

“About which part?” She feels him getting serious, and tips her head back, pleasant and wise.

But the fit that comes on is so strong she gets off him to one knee, that fearful crush in her face that hurts worse than the rattling, bone-bruise pain that comes, for all the empty air it keeps between them. He wants her there anyway, away from him and the blood spatter of sickness and any risk of it infecting her - if it hasn’t already, jesus christ. Instead, from one knee she reaches to the side, finds a rag, kneels close beside him and hands it to him. 

And then the moments he would rather she not see. The coughing that lasts until there is no more in him to expel, gagging like a final reflex of a body to shove a threat away, and the inexpressible panic of suffocation. Thinking his last moments will feel like this, just that when it goes dark it will not come light again. 

She talks to him, her voice strong and calm. She breathes with her hand on his chest, and she reaches for the tonic, and she doesn’t flinch with the next bout. She opens the door a crack to let in the cold air. Sits with him beside it, under the blanket. He rests his head against the wall, blinks with that relief after terror; she takes his hand. Far away, the talk around the fire quiets, an owl’s hoots shiver up in the treetops.

“I just realized I met the chief of a tribe when he brought me some broth like a servant.”

When he makes to react, his lungs threaten another fit; she jostles his hand. 

“Why don’t I babble for a while if you don’t hate it.”

How could he.

She talks about Ten Crow, his sweetness as they took slow walks at first, his stoic loneliness, his haphazard boyhood form in that place hanging on him like a man’s oversized coat. His pranks, when he filled her boots with sand and she put them on and wore them like to spite him; when they hunted and he sooted up her stock so that it blackened her cheek and he laughed until tears ran down his face. He brought her water and clean dressings for her wound. In camp, he ran errands, he helped the women cook, he tended the horses and cattle.  And yet most times he stayed by her side like he was drawn to the warmth of another. And she tells him about the day she found him at the southern overlook making a high and howling call. And it was slow to occur to her that he was looking at the fort, and calling to his brother, whose call, if he made one, could not reach him.

And Orly, struggling. Completely lost, from the trouble she’d caused him, a man who had never been without a path before. Hunting with them, his beard growing in. His restlessness subsiding as the days passed and the distractions of the place took over his worrying. In spite of everything before, she found his company pleasant. He even seemed to despise her less.

She starts to talk about Chief Rains Fall and the dignity of simply existing in the face of unthinkable misery, but her voice chokes up and she swallows and studies his palm until she recovers, clasps his hand.

“I can’t seem to think of anything else to say now.” She smirks at herself.

“How about our plan then.” He unburies his arm from the blanket to hold her closer around her side and she lays her head on his shoulder. They’ll meet Dutch in a couple days when she’s feeling up to the ride, and he figures it’s best to talk to him alone. About John and Abigail and Jack too. And he wouldn’t like the effect of their wagons leaving the rest of the camp. Have to consider it. If he means to move on under his smoke, best time as any to split off on their own way. The northern states, maybe, for a while, if she could stand it. She says she’ll think about it. He tweaks the tip of her nose.

And what after that? Time enough to think it over, all the miles they got ahead.

For two days after Monroe leaves to file his report and send word to the journalist he knows, the respite in the camp leaves everything as still as the air. The mountain sun warms them. There is time to rest. Time to make repairs to the tipis, time to hunt an elk with Charles. Nell feels stronger, and lets Ten Crow teach her to shoot with a child’s bow because of her wound, and the kid laughs until he has to clutch his stomach when she can’t hit that target for shit. When Arthur calls out that she’d better go back to bed if she can’t at least get within a foot of the target at twenty yards, she doesn’t wink at him; that thwarted ire of a missed shot flashes in her eyes and she nocks another. As they walk by the lake, he begins to detect the ease in her smile he had not seen in months. If she could stop running forever, how would it change through the seasons. 

They learn through some of the warriors returning that Eagle Flies is with Dutch on the Cumberland Forest road, and since she is feeling up to the ride, on that high winter morning they head down, Paytah and Charles to get the welfare report, Ten Crow allowed to tag along as far as the perimeter of the reservation at the railroad tracks. From there, they see them coming.

Dutch is in a lively mood, judging by the jaunty forward kick of his heels as he walks beside Eagle Flies, animated, turning around as he addresses the five or six men behind him on the road. Despite the winter chill on the breeze, the sun is piercing, and in his black bear coat he stalks in dark contrast to the snowy woods around him. The smell of his cigar precedes him, as does the tang of black powder from the dynamite carried on the backs of their horses. 

When they see Arthur and the rest, they brighten further yet. Eagle Flies calls ahead to Paytah, and Paytah, first smile he’s seen from him, calls back. 

Ten Crow slides down from his horse and runs with a lope toward Eagle Flies, who crouches as if he’ll wrestle him, and at the last moment sidesteps and swats his shoulder. 

Arthur dismounts and stretches his shoulder. “Looks like you boys had a good outing.”

“You missed an education in demolition this morning. Demolition and light sabotage.”

“Guess you all learned too quick.”

Dutch stops near him in this crossroads at the tracks, breathes deep in the fresh breeze and grins with the cigar in his teeth. “The winds are finally in our favor.” That obsidian gleam in his eyes as he greets Nell cordially. She is cordial back, and then gets distracted by Ten Crow who has to show her something Eagle Flies has given him. They continue as a group on foot up the road.

“What’s on the wind?”

“Nothin special, son. Missed you down in Saint Denis. Although Missus Adler managed to find out what happened in that disaster of Colm’s execution.” 

“Did she now.”

“She did indeed. He was sprung; in that, the papers were correct. What they didn’t report was that a lunatic, one of Colm’s own, spirited him away, only to string him up somewhere north of the city, then offed himself at the scene. Gone is gone, but I confess the hair rises to think of a trusted man turning like that.”

“Well Colm had a way of handlin his men that came back to haunt him I think. ”

“I try to find reassurance in that. But you don’t see your best man for a week, you begin to wonder what’s gone on.” Dutch strikes a match to relight his cigar, the flame flickering close to the brim of his hat.

He ain’t sure how much he wants to explain about it as they walk, Dutch keeping to the shaded side of the road complaining of the blinding light, Arthur in the sun. 

“We got routed by some of them soldiers and ended up here.”

“Those soldiers, Arthur - I tell you what, there’s enough powder here to give us all the smoke we need, but you were smart to keep ahead of them. Now Annesburg is shut down; no train’s comin north through there anytime soon. We figure to close off the tunnel at the state line, make the main roads impassable with a little more practice, get these boys to clip the telegraph wires in a few places, and I’d say that buys us enough time to get gone, and them enough space to make their point. Maybe have a threat in reserve to negotiate for the kid. There are two futures, Arthur, and one is bright and possible.”

“It’s a fragile situation here, Dutch - you can’t just go blastin your way out; these people stand to lose a lot -”

“It gets no better sitting on hands. This young man, Eagle Flies, his fire reminds me of you. It may not be pretty when it’s over, but he will get it done.”

“You sure got a way with words.”

“Lighten up and see the prospect, Arthur. He will do right by his people and we will get gone, end of story.”

He sighs, flaps his hands out in front of them. “What do you do once you get gone?”

“Lick our wounds, move forward from a place of advantage for once, instead of piecing together another escape from the rubble. We’ve been on the run so desperate for so long, I think we’ve lost sense of who we are.”

He blinks at the road, surprised at the hard truth he would’ve sooner heard from Hosea.  

“Get you where they can treat you, son. I’ve been worried.” Dutch glances sideways to him, then watches the road, blowing a slow cloud of smoke and walking into it. “Whatever it costs, Arthur, don’t so much as wonder about it -”

“You just worry about findin that place of advantage.”

“I will always take care of my son, first.” He grabs his shoulder and holds him at arm’s length to see him, his face resolute. And lets up several moments after Arthur clenches his jaw and looks away in discomfort.

On the road ahead, Ten Crow walks with Nell, and he shows her something in his closed hands, and she gives him an exaggerated gasp of surprise and he laughs with the glee of a successful shock. Her smile is almost visible from behind her as she walks.

“I like her, Arthur. If I can speak frankly a minute, I didn’t trust her in the beginning.” 

He recalls her at a stagecoach, knowing the truth all along.

“Perhaps it was because I saw how right she was for you. I feared she would take you away. But that was wrong of me, son. I didn’t give you enough credit.”

The less they can keep talking about this, the better. He wracks his brain to think of some question to turn him back to. Up ahead, Charles and Paytah wait, both watching intently as something approaches from the south.

“I should have remembered you always follow through. You would never abandon your family.”

He listens for the tone of manipulation, but Dutch gives him what almost appears to be a humble sideways check, thumb hooked easy in his vest pocket as he walks with them. Usually he’s riding ahead after a job as if he can’t get back to his tent and a book or a map fast enough.

“I expect you’ll ask her for her hand?”

He gets seized by a cough and sheer surprise, unsure how to answer. “Been considerin it,” he rasps.

Dutch scuffs some gravel on the frozen road ahead of him, almost wistful if scattered rocks could express such a thing. “Don’t consider too long. None of us is guaranteed a day. Do all you can to be happy. Make her happy. If I’d married Annabelle like I should’ve, but that I was too blockheaded to see it, she might be alive. I might’ve quit the life and become worthy.” 

When he squints hard in a ray of light and his boots stutter on the road, Dutch steps in front of him, with his great bulky coat and collar blocking the light, and the shade pours an instant chill through him. All this talk of planning, noise and sabotage against the goddamn army, and now this new infiltration.

“She doesn’t have anybody else, does she?”

“Dutch -”

He walks with his arm heavy on his shoulders. “I would not want to impose, but if there were a chance it might prove I am serious, I thought perhaps I could even give her away.”

He coughs, feeling a runaway kind of traction in this whole conversation. The need to slow it down, to dig his heels in the ballast. He steps away from Dutch’s arm, claps his shoulder. “Gotta blow up a train tunnel first.”

Dutch studies him a moment, then smiles out at the road ahead. “First things first.”

He touches his brim with his cigar hand at Nell glancing back.

“I love you, son.”

From the southern edge, a man comes through the trees. He is not on a trail, and he carries a large pack on his back, and reaching the road, Captain Monroe doesn’t raise his face as he approaches, still winded taking the last few ponderous steps. 

He drops his pack at his boots, stuffed tight and heavy. Only then does Arthur notice he isn’t wearing his uniform jacket but a plain hunting coat. His cheeks are brighter than they were in the mountain wind the other day, and he breathes through his nose as if it is the only way he can control himself. He carries three rifles. He spits in the dirt, wipes his mouth, and ignoring all the others, he finally looks up at Paytah. 

There are things that are just unspeakable. Unhidable in the faces of the ones who must bear it.

Paytah’s knees buckle, and Charles moves quick to catch him under his arms and hold him up.

Eagle Flies stares at Monroe with the growing power of thunder, seeing the other future that would bind them. Even Dutch beside him steps back, and watches gravely. 

“When.”

The captain’s voice trembles in anger. “Seven days ago.” 

Eagle Flies gazes past him at the fort.

“They buried him in the fort rather than risk telling you. They lied every day, all of them, biding time until they could get reinforcements I suppose, or until it all blew over.”

In disbelief, Arthur turns from the view of that distant, quiet fort back to them. “How could it blow over? Did they think they could just forget a boy?” 

Monroe glances at Paytah, grief-glazed and stricken over Charles’ shoulder, then Eagle Flies, and back at him, his shared and unforgiving stare. 

Eagle Flies has already sent two men back to the reservation, and Dutch is pledging their dynamite for new purposes now and all the help they can give, watching with some interest as Charles speaks in low tones with Paytah who tries to embrace Ten Crow, who runs from him up the hill, and Monroe is picking up his rifles and his pack and following the men up the path on foot. 

The road clears as if the chilled breeze dispersed them, and Arthur turns, this bright place circling into a blurring disaster, and thinks of the hoop of the world where they have broken all sacred prospect, when he stops. 

Ten Crow sits on a far boulder overlooking the gorge and the train bridge beyond and the fort beyond that, to the south where life is supposed to come from. He wipes his eyes, tears that won’t stop rising. Nell sits beside him, and speaks softly.

His whole skin flinches when Arthur approaches, and then he drops his head and weeps to be seen. 

Slowly, he sits on the other side of him, and feels the disconcerting fit of himself in the shape of Dutch when he sat beside him in the dust all those years ago.

“I’m sorry, kid.”

Tears fall straight to the rock from the kid’s crumpled face.

He lays his hand on the back of his thin neck and holds him lightly. 

Ten Crow mumbles down at his lap. “We started it. We broke the rules.” 

“No. You didn’t do anything wrong. This didn’t start with you.”

Nell wipes her eyes as she stares hard at the fort.

Ten Crow’s fingers, still soft in their childlike way, fret at the beaded trim of his shirt. His voice is small. “Why did they bury him there?”

“Because they are dishonorable men. Cowards. They try to cover their wrongs instead of owning up to them. And they get away with it.” 

“We will not let them get away with it.” 

Arthur faces down and scratches his forehead.

“Will you help us?” The kid seems dazed by the realization of what is already happening within the ordinary churn of the earth.

Over the boy’s head, Nell watches him steadily. 

Between them, the boy is quiet, and there are only so many moments that can pass after a question like that before hope will start to falter. Arthur watches a tide of fear and dull acceptance come into Ten Crow’s face as his nostrils flare and his eyes go round to picture what is coming, this boy at eleven going to war, and then he finds himself agreeing, and Nell nodding too and putting her hand on his.





Chapter 25: The Point

Summary:

Let them think us lost in the fire.

Notes:

cw/tw: Brief depiction of attempted assault.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

The sun had touched the horizon by then and lay mirrored on the lake lightly dappled by the sunset rain. As you walked, and he endured your lonely silence, Hosea rotated his wrist, massaged his aching fist, and glanced back between you toward the camp, where Pearson’s dinner call reached far across the lake but up the shore was muffled by the ravens in the nearby mulberry trees. 

“I should tell you Arthur confided in me where he was going.”

You turned to him, mute with surprise, but he shook his head.

“It’s a dangerous thing, going to meet a man like that. A Judas. No one wants to be mistaken for his associate.” He shrugged. “And rightly so.” 

When he glanced at you sideways, he seemed to be checking to see if you could follow him one more step along the curve of his insinuation. A conman extending his open palm.

“It never sat right with me, people naming a Judas. It makes the one he betrays, well, Christ. Don’t seem to matter why a person does what they do; money, saving their own skin, or breaking away from ignoble causes. When you get old, you turn coward and invent complications. But what it comes down to is you have a Judas, and you have a demigod. I only knew of Juney Rider. But I knew Tom Hall. He was the furthest thing from godlike you could picture. When I heard what happened, naturally I am given to thinking about loyalty, what does it mean.” He coughed and pulled out his handkerchief. “What does it cost.”

“Arthur would never -”

“I’m well aware he’s loyal to a fault; he would probably tell you the same.” He blew his nose and stuffed his handkerchief away. Then, as if he had reached a spot he’d predetermined, he slowed, and you did the same. He faced the lake with you beside him, squinting west into the golden sun.

“I’d like you to be very honest with me right now, Miss Riordan.”

For a moment, he only stared across the lake. But when he looked at you, there was no mistaking his seriousness, and you realized he had taken you this far with a purpose all along.

“I want to know if you’ve ever heard the name Mac Callander.” 

Your throat was suddenly parched. Your heart pounded. Hosea faced the brilliant oil painting of a sky over Blackwater, his formal, kind face revealing, in profile as he waited, the outlaw he could be. Hardened enough to see the darker complications in the world, and recognize those who saw them too.  In the shallows, a school of minnows sprayed apart in chaos as a bluegill carved into sight. When Hosea turned his face to you, you felt the same small explosion. You closed your eyes.

“I first heard that name in May, this year.” The petrichor rose thick and heady in the air, in that light rain. It took you several shaking breaths to find your voice. “The same day I met all of you.”

You couldn’t tell for a minute if it was the answer he wanted to hear. His musing observant face always finding the angles, always reading between the lines and seeing motive in the gestures, now seemed lost in thought as he faced out across the water, blinking, squinting. 

“If you heard that name for the first time that day, and we’re both of us here, still breathing,” he said, as he eyed you with a look of regathered resolve, “then I think, Red, I should tell you something.”

He didn’t glance back at the camp, over the half-mile you had walked. In fact he ignored it staunchly. His jaw set hard, his chin high.

“And you will promise on your life to keep it safe.”

 


 

There are thirty rifles for thirty men, lined up in stiff formation. Or lying there like the stiffened dead, however you choose to see it.

He steps out beside you onto the porch of that abandoned cabin, holding the buffalo blanket around his shoulders, placing his boot between two rifles arrayed along the boards, finding another clearing for his toe. He shields his eyes from the snowy glare, and lays a hand on your shoulder where you sit, hunched at the rail, adjusting the rear sights on the Springfield.

You bring the rifle down and crane your head back to look at him above you, and your voice is strained when you speak. “You’re supposed to rest.” 

“Hard to sleep when it sounds like execution day outside.” 

He picks up your binoculars and with a pleasant groan sits in the other chair, propping his big boots on the porch rail beside you. “Might as well be useful.” He spots while you line up your shot and fire, and the recoil rams your shoulder back, and you knew that shot was off the second you touched the trigger and the muzzle spat fire and the blast penetrated the cotton in your ears and boomed in that basin in the mountains.

He tuts through his teeth. “Good four inches nine o’clock. You cold?”

The huge buffalo hides shrouding both of you would keep you warm in the depths of a winter night, but up these couple miles from the reservation, the afternoon sun fills that windless bowl and you hardly need them. A spirit of gunsmoke escapes as you pull back the bolt. You shove the cotton back in your right ear with your pinkie and try not to let him see you gritting your teeth.

You lower the stock and tinker with the rear sights and try to make your voice cheerful, which you’ve never been able to do and can’t now. “Why, do I aim like I’m shivering?” You rest the barrel again on the bedroll on the rail and settle your cheek against the cold stock and line up your bead now three inches left of center. Arthur lifts his binoculars again. You fire and wince with the kick as a ting like a blacksmith’s hammer rings out in the valley. 

“Everyone thinks it’s skill when it’s all just bein steady under pressure,” he muses, squinting, but holds up his thumb.

“Speak for yourself. You saying I’m not steady?”

“No ma’am,” he says, but there’s a smile in his voice. 

“Fifty now.” You feel yourself starting to tense up, and you’re bracing for that kick and breathing to calm yourself down, but each shot hits like a beating you can’t guard yourself against, again and again, and you’re failing to shoot straight enough to do what you promised. You know this. And, stupidly, you always dig in. Gus would pluck a rifle straight out of your hands and tell you to go soak your head in the creek. Stop takin the kick like it's personal, you ninny. Instead, a clutch of frustrated tears aches in your throat, your nostrils flare. You let out your breath, not your whole breath, and curl your finger too soon and fire. Your shoulder aches with a sear up into your neck. You get a dull ping, but Arthur’s shaking his head. 

“Good two inches up, ten o'clock.” He coughs lightly and rests the binoculars in his lap, balancing on the rear two legs of the chair. He tries not to let you see him peering at you sideways; you see it anyway. “All of these same batch?”

“Wasn’t the rifle’s fault.” You yank the bolt and it releases a question mark of smoke into the sunlight with a flash of the brass casing.

“I think you’re bein hard on yourself. These will drop a man if you hit him two inches off from anywhere.”

“And we should do the best we can by them.”

Again. You put it up, peering down the V-notch to the post that dips like a ship’s prow until you can stop your damn lip from quivering. How the hell can you zero a rifle like this, let alone thirty? 

“Self-pity gettin you any closer to center?” Gus suffered his new stump by chiding you as he drank against the pain. As if you had caused him the festering sore that led to it. 

And Dutch’s warning from days ago cuts through memory and sharpens the strain. 

They cannot lose. 

Arthur had sighted in five of the rifles before the stagnant gunsmoke and the recoil sent him into a fit and he had to retreat around the back of that abandoned cabin. Blood speckled the snow alongside his tracks. Jauntily, you told him you had done this before and could handle it. How else had Colm’s men been better shots than they had any right to be? 

“Besides, I thought you liked it, watching.” You had winked and held your gaze on him steady until that hurt pride abated in his eyes.

So here you try again. Put your own pride to rest. You exhale. Then you let out the other reserve of air that sinks your shoulders and caves your chest to stillness. Bring up the bead. Lay Betsy Bead in the middle of the bed, don’t let her feet go over her head. Goddammit Gus. 

It rams your shoulder like a train.

Arthur’s chair creaks as he leans back further, still peering down the tunnels of his binoculars. “There you go, close enough.”

You slump against the stock.

“You’d hit their right eyebrow aimin between em.” He means to console, and there’s concern in his face as he stands. You dread it, and can’t look at it.

He takes the finished one from you and picks up the next, counting as he checks over his shoulder at the uniform lineup of rifles on the porch. “Fifteen to go.” And there is a thread of regret in his voice, as if that bright day is wasting too fast, blue shadows gathering underneath all things in view, about to creep down the sparkling white slopes, and you watch them advance on your precious time, ushering closer everything you’re not prepared for. 

There would be no formality, no tent or table. Two days ago, the five of them arrived - Chief Rains Fall, Eagle Flies, Monroe, Charles, and Arthur - to an empty field between the reservation and the fort at the stated time, and a bitter morning wind bit at their red noses and ears and let nothing lie still. They waited on that frosted rustling field half an hour or more. The hard wind made paper out of his lungs, and he braced himself for a fit, but only rationed a bit of the tonic.

In true military fashion, they spared all sense of respect, the bastards. The Colonel himself was absent; “called away,” they said. His acting lieutenants were two unshaven louts, uniforms stained and faded. Hadn’t sat so much as a trotting horse in quite a time, paunched as they were. Two others guarded them with rifles, though for twelve feet away it was a strange choice of weapon. And finally, no need for pretense; the surveyor, that Tall Boots, rode up on a fine black thoroughbred with his own second man or partner following, a quiet one with a scar up his neck and a pair of Smith and Wesson Russians that made Arthur’s hair raise a little. He’d only known one other man to favor them, a terrifying talent, and a backer like him only heightened tension where he went, and confounded what he could make of this surveyor.

The hot shot who quiets a saloon until his challenge is met, the rancher who won’t let another man set a foot on his land, the sheriff who is the law and the word and the way of the town, the king’s son who would declare war on the United States Army with his chest bared and his teeth seething spit and his voice searing in the last summoned stand of his men; they had significance in common. Pride. They wore their guns outside, stars on chests, gave their true names. They came from a common well, some worthier than others. But they had the kind of understanding of something greater than they amounted to on their own, the kind of pride that proved a preacher wrong on the nature of that sin.

This man made no such sense. It put him cold, to make this one out as a man who cared so little of the impressions of men he discarded them from all consideration. Not their suffering, nor of the ones who would come after them. All consequences beyond his care. As if everything they all knew about the world in the present was already the old way, worn out beyond use. 

Even in the daylight, he brought to mind the darkness he’d first seen him in. Black mustache and hair, piercing eyes of amber gold staring under a shelf of a brow that seemed to focus his squinted gaze to a point, and he bore into men with his attention as if through solid rock. He stood straight and tall, a build that knew heavy work but had never been forced to it. Sought it. His partner hung back like a trained dog.

“Bronco,” he said to Arthur across this scrimmage line as the other men made their clipped introductions. His mustache spread in an undetectable hint as to his own private understanding.

The officer was already speaking; what little he caught had to do with arresting the deserter Lyndon Monroe. Eagle Flies was refusing. Rains Fall’s earthen voice asking for the body of the boy Enapay. Officiate intonations interrupted him, slighted him. Tall Boots gazed at them both with the kind of obsession he might have for a stuffed grizzly. Admiring its claws up close. Not troubled to be caught in fascinated inspection.

“The United States Government will establish transfer of the remains under de-escalated circumstances,” the other lieutenant declaimed with authoritative coolness as he glanced back at the others. 

“What does -”

“De-escalated.” The lieutenant enunciated loud and slow, baring his teeth as he leaned forward to deliver it. 

Rains Fall nodded. And breathed and let the air clear of the insult. “What are those circumstan-”

Arthur stifled a cough to the side and managed to quell it, not enough.

The officer left an irritable silence before continuing. “To be determined as hostilities are observed to abate.”

While Monroe asked the terms with a paling face of restraint, as if he detected an undercurrent in all that bluster the rest of them didn’t hear, and one of the lieutenants hissed at him Traitor, the surveyor’s brow rose in mild surprise, this sport match going on in front of him.

The first lieutenant answered. “Your surrender. And the surrender of the insurgent Eagle Flies for hostile acts against the United States.”

Eagle Flies stood perfectly still beside his father, an onslaught in his eyes. The men before him already lay dead and didn’t know it.

Rains Fall raised his chin. “We will not submit to those terms.” In refusing surrender, there was a different surrender in the old man’s spirit, a kind so inconceivable his own voice lost volume.

Charles shared a glance with Arthur; no doubt his heart raced as fast as his own. His hand twitched in the breeze, his fingertips barely brushing the leather of his holster. And Charles, too, got the surveyor’s squinting scrutiny, who marked his tomahawk, his newly shorn head, his braid, and the surveyor seemed impressed but again not intimidated, and like the condescending shitheel he was, wiped his eyes, stood with his fists on his hips, bored with the pageant. And every time his surveillance came back to Arthur, he found another detail to hate just as much as the surveyor found something about him to calculate in his head. 

The shine on his boots put him off, the shine in his black hair, the salt gray coming in on his whiskers, the thick wiry hairs of his brows, the broom of his mustache and the way he would contort his mouth in annoyance or showy confusion at the proceedings, as if even a battle, let alone the negotiation, was an impediment to greater things. 

“Then the position of the Army is that the Wapiti tribe is in active revolt against the United States and is henceforth considered a hostile entity,” the officer droned, and another fit began to take hold in Arthur’s chest as his droning went on. “Any act committed against the Army, any of its soldiers or property, and any trespass on its territory will be considered an act of war and its response should be considered as reasonable defense…” 

Arthur made it to the line of trees, and grabbed a branch before he started to stagger, and hacked a wet expulsion some minutes before it was over, eyes watering, breath thin, head light. 

“... are to remain within the boundaries of their settlement. Any elopement from those premises…”

He wiped blood from his lips and kicked snow over the ground and watched as Eagle Flies left in a storm, fuming in two languages while the officer continued his unbroken announcement at a louder volume. Charles gently turned to Rains Fall and began to escort him back to the horses. Monroe waited at the line, if only because he could not stop staring daggers at the officers now, and so despite the new interest from the goddamn surveyor on him, Arthur walked up to back Monroe, should the mood degrade as it seemed on the balance of doing.

Which was when the surveyor cleared his throat, and the officer eyed him and continued. 

“Additionally, any native activity on the settlement south of the forty-eighth parallel will be viewed as aggression toward interests critical to progress in the region.”

“That cuts them off from a sacred site as you’re well aware, lieutenant. Another pointless provocation.” Monroe’s voice shot across the line, and there was no denying how their eyes lit up on the other side of it.

“I don’t make the rules, captain. Tell em to go pray to a different tree.”

As the officers turned back to their horses, and Monroe stood with his hands on his hips, alone, staring at the hill behind them, Tall Boots and Arthur remained at the line. The surveyor lifted his chin in casual recognition, but his eyes remained fixed on them, dead in their expression, as if they had never witnessed clemency toward another living thing. “Arthur Morgan, is it?” 

He could feel Charles’ silent warning behind him.

“Who’s askin?”

“Agent Andrew Milton sends his greetings.”

“That make you his postman?”

Tall Boots seemed to sniff the air, take a last glance around, cleared his throat as if an introduction was a formality he tolerated to the same extent as all the other impediments and barriers he had to endure. “Richard Harrier. Leland-Cornwall Corporation. I represent the interests of the son of its late founder. You’re the one with the hair trigger on his guns, if I recall.”

His second, standing there with the matched Russians, was enough to keep Arthur’s hands out and steady. 

“And your guard dog?”

“He’s got hair triggers too.”

“I admit I wondered. Good for you, partner.” 

The second man looked about ready to use them, and he half hoped he’d try, just to feel that heavy tomahawk whoosh past.

“Seems you’re more involved than you made yourselves out to be, Mister Morgan.”

“I’m on the outside. Like you. That your business then, takin over Indian land?”

Harrier extracted a pouch from the interior of his coat, and spoke while he opened it, pried the cap off a small box, pinched a measure of snuff, and sniffed it, and put it away. “Progress stops for no man.”

“I reckon it might stop for you.”

Harrier straightened, a vertical transformation, as if the devil in him turned its face up from its work, as if wings might break the skin at his shoulder blades. 

“I once knew a man with a cough like that. He didn’t make it very long.”

“I’ll make sure to tell him you’re still a thievin shitheel.”

Harrier’s last-chance smile, when he stepped near and over that line, was enough to get a man’s hackles straight up. “I like you, bronco. You will call a man out. Rare bird these days. Pity there aren’t many of your kind left. You’ll make this interesting.”

After a glance back at Charles, Arthur then took a step toward the surveyor, until his bandolier was what divided them more than the inch or so of height Harrier had on him, and he glanced down to make that fact plain. He smiled, leaned in and curled his fist around Harrier’s lapel, yanked him close, and spoke low as he faced over his black shoulder. “They make all their moves like it’s a game, your boss, the ones in the back rooms. But us on the outside, we ain’t really playin, are we.”

He felt the huff of Harrier’s laugh and cut him off with another jerk of his lapel, his blood running high now, that electric frozen-time sense before he took a perfect shot. He kept an eye on the second man some feet away, and he spoke as men spoke when the bullshit was over. 

“So pity this. I hear you set one foot on their land, I won’t make it interesting. I’ll just kill you.”

When he released him, they eased back from each other like they had merely shared a friendly word. And Harrier’s sharp mouth widened like a fissure in the ground between them. Like a release of certain pressure. Freed of formalities, now the glint of cold prospect in his amber eyes. He tugged his lapel straight. His teeth set end on end. 

“Return what you stole in Blackwater. Within the week.” He tipped his head. “Or we’ll kill you.” 

“That little money seems to mean a whole lot. Your boss’ coffers got plenty more than that. Or is it the example you mean to make? A few outlaws stopped a railroad dead in its tracks. A few miners would’ve stopped a mine. How far would you go to make your point?”

“Sounds like you understand, bronco.”

As Harrier backed away, Arthur only watched, hands on his belt. Nodded to the other man with the same silent promise, and left them without looking over his shoulder. 

Over by the horses, Charles helped Rains Fall up to his saddle. Eagle Flies was already gone. Monroe shoved his shaking hands into his gloves.

“God damn you all got a way of dancin around a subject with words.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“The way they’d see it, this all is a tornado, and they’re just watchin.”

“That is unfortunately quite apt, Mister Morgan.” 

As Rains Fall rode away and Charles returned to them with Taima, he wondered if they all felt the same reluctance as himself, to speak freely in the chief’s presence, reveal the truth, what was most likely worse than they expected, even after all they had seen of what the whites could do.

“What’re we lookin at?”

Monroe glanced over at the fort, and back to his gloves. “Sixty men at Wallace. I’d say reinforcements are two days away. If your friend Mister Van der Linde’s plan succeeds, maybe three.” 

Charles mounted heavily and hunched on his saddle horn, and glanced at Arthur at the mention of Dutch. 

The clarity of fear shone in Monroe’s eyes when he looked at them both. “They’ve got mortars,” he said, nodding to himself. “A Gatling they’ll aim straight out from that gate.”

“The Wapiti haven’t got more than nine working rifles we counted this morning. Ten if you count the goddamn flintlock.” Charles soothed Taima as if she felt riled by his sudden vehemence.

“I thought to head to our camp with Nell today and take up a collection, but it ain’t gonna be enough.”

The way Monroe’s gaze fell, and he blinked and sniffed and got up on his horse with the heaviness of duty, he must have reached the point in his mind foreseeing an end, when to move forward at all he must force himself to believe it is not at hand. Always a shocking plummet inside, moments like that. Charles did not have such a way about him.

“You’ve done enough, brother; it’s not your fight.”

Arthur shook his head at Charles and held out his hand to Monroe. “Well I promised Ten Crow.” Monroe clasped it, and they met eyes in the strange exempted agreement of men facing war, freedom from the other weights in life. “We’ll help you see this through.”

And so, days from war, Charles and Monroe rode up toward the reservation. And Arthur got up on Georgia, talking sweet to her as he turned her east toward Roanoke.

The horses were all thin and overworked, corralled at the entrance to the camp, and he kept Georgia and Apollo hitched far away from the damp hay the rest of them picked at. He was surprised to see The Count’s ribs over his unwashed belly, stained the same drab umber of the dust on the roads there. Nell stayed back to get them cooled down and brushed, and as he walked into camp he noticed Bill up on the rise, standing on lookout but watching only her.

If a man wanted to cause himself trouble that day, he would keep watching. Arthur stopped walking. Stared up in warning. Bill's watch switched to him. Dared him with an expressionless gaze. But he turned away one heartbeat from Arthur reaching to his hip. After a reassuring nod from Nell, he moved on.

By Pearson’s wagon, Grimshaw spoke low as Pearson nodded and cut a purple leg of rabbit through the joint on his bloodstained cutting board and threw it in the pot. They both glanced up and ceased talking as Arthur passed, and returned his greeting as if to a stranger. Coldness that couldn’t be helped now. There wasn’t time to care for all. A shame of the world always turning.

A wasteland there. Wind channeled straight through camp, the wagons standing aside so nothing broke its bitter intrusion. A few cans littered the path, fallen branches, and tumbled and strewed in gusts until they gathered where they could go no further. Leaves collected at the wheels of all their wagons, so that they looked abandoned there for years. In a way, it felt that long. No one sat around the smoky fire at the far end of camp despite the chill. As he passed the girls’ tent, he saw Mary-Beth, Tilly, and Karen huddled in the back of the wagon like a nest of chipmunks, covered in blankets, waifish, hungry, terrified. Karen whispered loud for him, and he watched Nell go on to his tent.

“I’m sorry it’s miserable. I’m sorry I been gone.” He crouched down and pulled out the few things in his satchel they could use - biscuits, some jerky, a couple of apples, an uncounted fold of money, and passed them to Tilly. “I’ll get you away from here before anything happens.”

“Dutch doesn’t want anyone leaving camp, Arthur.”

“He ain’t -” He checked behind him. “Listen to me. We’re workin on a plan, but you girls do whatever you have to do to take care of yourselves. You armed?” 

Karen and Tilly nodded. When Mary-Beth shook her head with a terrified shiver, he dug out an old knife he had picked up somewhere for the interesting carving on the handle, and discreetly set it under the blanket near her, nodding when she pulled it away. “You know where to stab a man if you have to?”

It seemed like a question she was too innocent to have considered. As if by dumb luck alone, all her life the bad men she’d encountered couldn’t be bothered by the threat of such a good girl weeping. 

He pointed at her sternly. “Wherever you can. Throat, eyes, privates, belly. Just don’t ever lose your grip. And then you run.” He picked up his satchel. He braced his hand on the wagon frame as if he was only making a comment on the cold evening, and spoke under his breath. “Don’t say a word to no one. Be ready but don’t look ready. Pack only what you need, keep it light. Eat as much as you can. Smile if you hear me.”

Three small and brave and timorous smiles. 

He patted the side of the wagon and left them, and his boot dragged to a stop in the gravel when he saw Micah standing at the mouth of Dutch’s tent. He found himself checking the whole perimeter as he walked. John stood by his own tent, arms crossed as he drank coffee and kept an eye on Jack scattering anthills, and shared a motionless, ready stare. Waiting.

“We gotta talk.”

“Arthur!”

“We will. Not here.” He pointed at him as he headed for Dutch.

Cinders from the fire and scattered leaves skipped on the ground before him, swept by the stiff gusts funneling through camp.

“They cannot lose.” 

Dutch sat in his tent glowing in the mouth of that cave, and scraped his hand down his stubbled cheeks, thumbed the corners of his eyes that were heavy with exhaustion, bags under them the way they got when he hadn’t slept several days on end. 

“Tomorrow, six young, strong men are clipping the lines of the three telegraph arteries in the region, in three separate places. It will take weeks to restore them. The night after that, they blow the road at Whinyard Strait, Bill and Javier blow the train tunnel and the road at the Roanoke state line, and just as the Wapiti commence their attack, John and you will handle the train bridge nearest the fort. Almost a complete enclosure of the region. We have tactics on our side, but more importantly we have passion, Arthur, and time and time again that is what has separated us from the machine.”

Dutch massaged his temples with the strain of strategy. Arthur eased down to sit on the cot opposite him.

“If they lose, Arthur, the fist around our necks only gets tighter. The government is emboldened. They will make examples of the survivors, and hunt all of us down to do it.” There was the forlornness in his voice, a thickness in his throat that Hosea had had a knack for persuading away.

“It ain’t our fight, boss.” Micah sat with his boots up on the table and smoked, sighing an irritable cloud of smoke. “They’ll cause enough of a dust-up on their own for us to get out underneath. They win, and Uncle Sam will send enough troops to retake San Juan Hill.”

“Can’t believe I’m sayin this but Micah has a point.”

“But then Uncle Sam will be focused on taking back the fort, not a bunch of sorry outlaws making their way into Blackwater.” He bit the wet end of the nub of his cigar, speaking around it.

Arthur leaned his elbows on his knees, his forehead on his fists. “So you would leave them on their own, with that comin?”

“Would you have the Wapiti lose otherwise, Arthur? Submit to slaughter?”

“Course not -”

“Even under so-called peaceful terms they have suffered lash after lash.”

“You think the Army’ll treat em fair if they’re defeated? It ain’t our necks on the line to take that risk, Dutch.”

“They very much are on the line, son. We are knit in this together. The Wapiti make a show of their justified anger and power, force the government to concede its wrongdoing, renegotiate the treaty under their terms in exchange for the fort. We escape for the last time under cover of smoke, and you tell me if there is a bigger cloud of smoke than the one that rises from the ashes of the US Army’s defeat on its own soil. Doesn’t matter if it’s Fort Wallace or Fort Sumter. They will see that smoke coast to coast.”

Back by his wagon, Nell stood at the side walking her fingers caliper-like across his map. 

“Just feels wrong to use it to our advantage.”

“That is because Hosea taught you well.” He reached across and cupped his hand on his knee. Couple years ago, maybe, it would’ve been an ordinary gesture. His shaky hand felt awkward now. He almost pitied him for that strangeness.

“And I can think of no greater honor to Hosea’s memory than to assist in this matter now.”

Micah rolled his whole head as he brought his feet down and stood with a sarcastic snarl. “Two men, Dutch. You and me if you like. Tomorrow night, if you like. Get into Blackwater, get the money. Simple as that.”

Across camp, Nell began to walk toward them and passed through a windblown spray of embers like they were drawn to her, never flinching.

“And then what, Micah?” The snap in Dutch’s voice turned a few heads by the fire their way.  “Say we could manage to recover it under the noses of a bunch of bored bounty hunters, you want to leapfrog around the country with a stack of money and bonds so well-known a shopkeep in Annesburg could recognize it? That is why we need smoke. The kind that makes national headlines.”

Nell approached, taking a deep breath, and stared at Arthur long enough for him to see the trust me in her eyes.

With more than a little pleasure he caught the last bit of Dutch laying into Micah. “Tonight our issue is, figure out how to help thirty men win a battle with nine functioning goddamn rifles. Miss Riordan,” he called, clapping his hands on his thighs and standing. “It is encouraging to have one other strategical mind about.” 

Sweet lord, the look on Micah’s face. Shame there was no photographer about to show the sourness of seething petulance on a snake.

“I may know how to help with the rifles, at least,” she was saying.

“We only have time for sure things, sweet girl.” He squeezed her upper arms so intent and fatherlike. 

“It’s as close as I’ve got to a sure thing.” And by her pursed lips, there was more to it.

“If Miss Riordan is correct, and our other contributions are successful, then we could stand half a chance. The fort is taken, the smoke blanketing everything far and wide. They know we are involved.” Dutch stood, and put an arm each around Nell’s shoulders and Arthur’s and spoke in his most convincingly dark tone for Micah’s sake. “Let them think us lost in the fire.”

You roll your head side to side, your right side tight as cold leather, your shoulder almost numb from the repeated abuse of the rifle stocks. He gets up and hands the next rifle to you as he comes around the back of you and places his warm hand on the scoop of your neck while you load. His strong thumb carves under your collar, down the muscle of your spine by your shoulder blade where you get sore. When you put the rifle up, he lifts his hand away and spots through the binoculars over your head. You fire to twenty-five yards, and again he rubs the side of your neck. 

“That one’s five inches straight southeast.”

The bolt clacks and slides. The wisp of smoke twists free. You make a generous adjustment to the sights.

“When was the last time you did any of this under some heat?” He kneels beside you on your right side as you reload. 

“I thought you were trying to help.” You flap him out of the way with your elbow and bring up the stock.

“Oh, my mistake.”

He spots your target casually at your eye level and breathes with you, and as your finger tightens and you feel the spring inside creaking as if it’s in your jaw, he zips his finger up the inside of your thigh. Your shot goes a mile wide, no sound or any tuft to indicate where it lodged. 

“You want to show me where you find bullets growing on trees?”

“See what grows where you planted that one,” he says, half laughing and coughing into his shoulder.

Dryly, you swipe the next bullet he holds up and chamber it.

He doesn’t spot this time because he’s only watching you. In the quiet period of your aiming, you feel his gaze studying you, and you feel self-conscious of his attention, penetrated by it, exposed for your inability to control yourself. As you settle, newly determined, and let out your breath, his hand slides between your thighs, and with slow thoughtful attention brushes the back of his index finger up your center. You close your eyes. His grip lovingly rises over your thigh and holds firm. You aim and your shot clangs dead-on.

He eyes you over the hill of your shoulder, earnest now. “Sure you ain’t cold?”

“A little, no matter.”

“‘No matter,’” he scolds. “Cmon, warm you up a little.” He stands and you stand, and he drapes that heavy buffalo blanket around both of you as he sits and pulls you onto his lap, settling. 

“There, better angle anyway.”

“This won’t help a thing.”

“I’ll be still as stone.” 

He’s careful not to touch your left side, but draws the blanket close around you, and matches his breath to yours, his chest to your back, and his stillness is your concentrated stillness right before you pull the trigger. You hit fifty within half an inch of center, and to hit anything but perfect feels like you’re personally risking a young warrior’s life. You pull the bolt back. The tail of smoke twists out of the chamber. You dig in your coat pocket for another round and he gently grasps your wrist. 

“I’m not gonna be lazy about this, Arthur.” You tug against him.

“Half an inch, Nell. It ain’t a marksmanship contest.”

You rub a drop of oil away from the stock with your thumb and sigh.

He pries the rifle from you. “I would be…” he says tightly, reaching to the side to pull the next one over, “the luckiest man in battle, takin in a rifle tuned by this one right here.” He pats your leg hard like you’re Georgia.

“If you need luck, I’m worse than I thought.” You give it a quick check down the sights and load.

“You’re kind of impossible today.”

His hands this time grip both your thighs, and before you set up your shot he leans in close, peers down the barrel with you, and then blows behind your ear. 

“You keep doing that, we’ll be here past sundown.”

“That was my plan.” He kisses you there.

“Oh your plan?”

“You think we packed all them rifles up here just for a day on the mountain?”

“Out of earshot.”

He shrugs. “Kill two birds then.” He undoes a couple of buttons of your shirt, snakes through and cups your left breast in his warm, perfectly still hand, only the slightest mischief in his voice. “Alright, go to work.”

You shake your head, and that bead swoops around like a gnat in your dovetail with his hand on you, and you feel the first twitches of him beginning to get hard under your seat. So it’s difficult to control your breathing, and you have to shake your shoulders loose. You finally get your bead up and steady, and the pad of your finger presses the trigger.

“You clench when you concentrate.” 

You rock back together with the kick.

That wasted round disappears somewhere to the north, and after you give him a scornful glance Arthur sits back unapologetically while you reload and quickly zap the twenty-five off-center and adjust the rear sight. Meanwhile he’s tugging on your hips slightly, but acting like nothing in the world is on his mind, reclining on the chairback while you work, his cock unignorable under the crease of your thigh.

“You always get this arrogant the day before a risky job?” You poke the screwdriver into your braid and load another round.

“Can’t help that watchin you shoot gets me hot.” He adjusts himself between your legs and rests his hand high on your inner thigh as casually as his own. “You always get this crabby?”And although his voice is playful and heated, and he settles further in his seat by nudging up into you, you feel worse.

“Only when some fool makes it impossible for me to do my job.”

“You’re doin fine. I’ve seen you shoot from a damn rowboat.”

“Not while I was trying to tune a rifle. I ought to tune yours next. See how you like it.” You hunch over.

“I’m countin on it.” He chuckles when you twist to glare back at him, but you recoil from the pain in your side, and immediately he’s sitting up and you realize he breathes with you then, too, as if he feels what you feel, and he rubs your thigh.

“Want me to check it?” His hand spreads on your stomach as if he means to hold your pain.

You shake your head, clenching your teeth until the pain subsides and you can ease back. While you take your shot, he sits perfectly still, but for his trigger finger drawing inward on your stomach, the slightest motion, an intimation of the unconscious way he moves with you now, and absorbs the jolt of your body into his with the kick. The crack echoes over that hillside and against the back wall of the mountain, a long wavering declaration, and in its aftermath the silence of your miss. There is a breeze somewhere whining, though it is still calm in your little cove. 

“Why don’t I take a few -” Arthur pats his hands in a short rhythm on your thighs.

“It’s bad for you.”

“Like I ain’t breathed a little gunsmoke before.”

“And earlier you practically fell over.”

“Have a break from it at least - shoulder must be the color of a plum by now.”

“It’ll tighten up worse if I sit.”

“Let me untighten it.”

You slump and rub your eyes. “There’s no time.”

He sighs at your excuse. 

He’d intended to scold her later, mad and fearful as she made him. Fear running abreast with anger once the bullets started flying. 

They had passed binoculars among themselves on the ridge to peer into the filth of the camp at Six Point Cabin, and tallied eight horses hitched up out back and tried to get a headcount of the men standing lazily around their fire. He figured if they could catch a couple standing guard, they could head in from the south side of the cabin and fan out.

But Nell had some other fool idea of what it meant to pull off an attack, which far as he could tell involved one look at Sadie and a stoic look shared between them in their uncomfortable truce, a comment tossed off about you boys waiting for an invitation, and both of them slipped down the hill, digging in their heels fully upright and opened fire as they took off in a V. 

“You have got to be fuckin kiddin me.” John gawked through the binoculars.

“'Look after her.’ ” Orly glared at Arthur somehow vindicated there, and John closed his gaping mouth as soon as Arthur snatched the binoculars away, and the three of them pushed up from the ground and followed. 

Even wounded, she was a sight, the glimpses he got of her through the trees. Hair flying. Flares of muzzle flashes. Phantoms of gunsmoke floating in the air long after those shots were fired that had made new ghosts of their targets. He took out the two men hiding out at the wagon nearby the cabin, and covered John who was stuck playing gopher with an O’Driscoll behind a boulder. Took Marston four shots.

“I ain’t hearin it, Arthur.” John trudged past him and then took off in a sprint, running another one down like a cat.

Orly stayed up by Nell, as he well ought, and let off a few respectable shots, to the low voice of Nell talking him through it, and if he could’ve felt more admiration for his girl in that moment he would’ve ruptured something in his heart.

But then a round zinged past Arthur’s neck like a hot hornet, and he traced it to one bastard trying to hide out in the privy, a poor place to die; he almost felt pity firing back, but that door didn’t come open again. 

He ended up walking after the last one who ran through the camp to the trees and then back as if the feller confoundingly reconsidered his escape, and finally Arthur’s bullet dropped him, head and shoulder ditching into the dirt, feet flying in the air and flopping down flat like a bison killed running.

If there were others, he didn’t see them nor hear another single shot around him. He made it around the back corner of the cabin before he crashed to a knee, fumbling in his satchel.

Only a few drops left, not even a dropperful. He held it over his tongue letting the bitter milk drain before his breath shredded into a deep cough, the scrawling insectal sensation in his entire chest, the iron tang of blood, the need to gag and not expel everything in him. And he slid to his seat against the back of the cabin until that meager medicine suppressed the convulsion, until he could breathe, but the coalsmoke in the air choked him near to suffocation. He lobbed the empty bottle off into the brush. 

John crouched by him. “You got any more of that?”

He rocked his head side to side against the wall. “Be fine.” He batted his hand heavily. “Gimme a second.” 

John nodded, and acted like he didn't see the blood smeared on his chin, his wrist, and chuckled lightly as he looked around. “Hell of a fight. I hardly got more than a cylinder off.”

“Me neither.” He tried not to laugh, and went through another bout of coughing and spitting, and waved John away. But he just hung by, hands dangling off his knees, wiping his sweaty face, shaking his head as he looked around the clearing.

“I thought I knew what I needed to know. But you got some more explainin to do brother.”

“Ask her.” His voice like a harmonica.

“I ain’t sure I got the balls.”

Inside, by the sound of it the women and Orly seemed to be dragging furniture across the whole place, and then the intonations of a good find. Arthur nodded, his head lightly knocking the wall. Marston glanced their way, scratched under his jaw, spitting off in the weeds.

“So what’s the plan? We goin?”

“Dutch gets his smoke. We split off. Figure it out from there, just get. Start from zero, I guess.”

“Been there a few times.”

He smiled in worn-out agreement before another fit got him, and Marston crouching there hearing him wheeze and suffer. Picking up his Schofield, reloading it for him -

“Marston, dammit -”

“Just keepin you rigged, brother.”

He snatched it from him and was about to light into him on touchin another man’s sidearm, Marston’s hands already up and defensive, when a low sound came from the cabin and quieted them both.

“Arthur. John.”

The cool steadiness in Sadie’s voice was loaded with subdued alarm, a warning of the like of snakes and mad dogs that got them both to their feet. John gripped his forearm and hauled him up.

“Boys, get in here.”

Guns drawn, they headed around the side. Through the window, Sadie stood with her rifle across her chest, and beside her stood Nell, her revolver raised in fury at something out of sight. 

That day in May, when the Pinkertons came to Six Point, you waited for Colm for hours. Wan sunlight leeched color out of all things there, so different from your wildflower valley. A twist of smoke rose from the chimney into the arms of the ponderosas and smudged the pale blue sky.

Thirty thousand dollars’ worth of bonds huddled wrapped in a paper bag from Mrs. Wilson’s Baked Goods. Stained in blood like butcher paper. On the floor at the foot of one of the Pinkertons.

“You checked if there’s still a Danish in there?” One of your boys, Harry Donnelly, had an awkward way of joking.

“You boys know whose blood that is on that bag there?” The Pinkerton scrutinized the two cards in his hand like a wiseman. Lean and sly and enjoying being mysterious.

No one said anything, as if they were unaware they were supposed to find it significant.

“Mac Callander’s.”

“He the big guy?” Harry tossed in his chip.

“That’s Morgan you idiot, you live under a rock?” Martin folded his cards impatiently.

“What about Mac Callander?” Liam Byrne sat back, coving his cards in one hand. 

“Fucked Van der Linde good.” The Pinkerton drank from his flask and screwed the cap on with a fluttery mania in his fingers that had your attention. “Fucked the lot of em.”

“You don’t know that.” The younger Pinkerton got up from the table and walked up to you at the stove where you poured coffee before you fell asleep standing up. That one had a wrestler’s build and the cauliflower ears to match. “Milton said he was following Dutch’s orders -”

“Well Milton wasn’t the one that found him, was he. That was yours truly.”

The young Pinkerton rolled his eyes at you in commiseration. 

Inside that cabin, you aimed so goddamn straight your elbow wanted to buckle from the snap.

Behind you, John and Arthur stepped through the doorway; their shadows blinked the meager daylight in the room. In that place inhabited by ghosts. The light still thin, the old milk tang of a hunting cabin full of unwashed bodies and dried cum and whiskey and cigarette smoke and boredom still stagnant in the air. Never thought you’d have to stand there again.

Facing the old cook Eamon Byrne on the other side.

“I thought I killed you, Eamon.”

“You should’ve, you turncoat bitch.”

“I turned for no one but myself.”

“I heard you was in with Van der Linde now. That them?” Byrne kept his hands up, his cream-white eyes seeing with pearly fascination into the room as he stepped toward you and waved around at the configuration of you all. “I knowed that day you was fixin somethin.”

“Oh you did.”

“You was the only who didn’t unsaddle. You knew Colm to be late on purpose every time.”

“Well I can’t argue.” You tapped your foot on the floor beside the nearby chair. “Sit your ass down.”

John stepping into your periphery, took this all in with a bemused expression, wide-eyed and maddened by Arthur’s seeming lack of surprise. Sadie’s reserved waiting. Orly’s keen interest. When John looked at you, you made no excuse or apology, and let him see it unfold at the spittle-white mouth of the man easing into the chair.

“You didn’t have to shoot Liam -” Eamon’s chest hitched and his voice choked with a quick snort of tears.

“Well now that depends who you ask. If you asked me, I’d say little brother had it coming, shooting first.”

Tears and spit spouted from his face with a strangled sob.

“Oh stop, he was always a bastard. He'd still be alive if he'd walked the other way on that train, but he just couldn't leave well enough alone. You could say he had a fair chance.” The graze on the side of your neck burned, but all it brought to mind was Arthur. Splashing whiskey on a kerchief. The burn of his touch you leaned into one night on a bridge.

“I hope the rope breaks and they have to hang you twice you mangy cunt.” 

“You watch your mouth - Watch your goddamn mouth.” Both John and Arthur scolded him sharply and he sat scowling in his pitiful tears.

How fast it had fallen apart. 

The younger Pinkerton who followed you back to the storage room and arsenal. Antagonizing all that time. Oh he was only seein how your reflexes were, were you really as fast as they said. Acting hurt when you snapped at him. When you shoved him back and he played reformed. But t he strength in his arms when he grabbed you squeezed the breath out of you. A line of pale sickening light dilated as the back door opened and the blind cook stepped in.

“Well you stood by and did nothing; you would’ve let that goddamn Pinkerton have his way, may he burn in hell. I ought to send you to join him.”

Arthur blinked in such steely comprehension you couldn’t look at him directly.

“Could’ve given me one more bad excuse to stay, you bastard. But you didn’t. Maybe I’m grateful.”

A scuffle of seconds, of surprise and strength and struggling silence, fingers gouging your cheek, scratching your ear, crumpling your throat before your hand found your knife. And Eamon there. Iron pan in his hand. Backing away. 

While you grappled and weakened without air, all their big talk in the other room.

“Whimpered like a fuckin schoolgirl when he died.” The Pinkerton swept his few chips to himself and stacked them.

Your men all snickered as they pushed their cards to the next man dealing.

“You tell em yet about Mac Callander, how he fucked em over in Blackwater? The money’s gone, boys.” Eamon hooted, a furious crazed grin on his face as he wiped his tears and reveled in the confusion of the silent group of you all around him. 

“Two hundred thousand dollars. Poof. All that’s left is in this here sack. Have to appreciate a man who would do that with his final act.” 

“You catch his last words?”

“Some female’s name I think, I don’t know. It was a little pathetic to listen to very long.”

You suffered the wordless, hesitant shock that evolved in John’s face, Arthur’s steady, purse-lipped patience, as grave as you had ever seen him, watching Eamon, and watching you. Sadie’s quiet attention now.

The weight of the Pinkerton’s forearm on your throat lightened the instant your blade slid in above his belt. His whole body snatched sideways like a snake and he rolled off. You slit his throat before he could get enough breath to scream.

“Did he say Blackwater?” John bent forward. “You say Blackwater, old man?”

Eamon shook with his woodsmoke snicker, his wide-eyed bitter enjoyment.

“What do you mean gone?” John started to splutter, near panting, unconsciously rubbing his arm. 

Eamon cackled and you shut him up with the click of your hammer.

“Don’t pay him any mind,” you said. 

John cocked his ear as he took a step toward you. “I’m about to have a hard time here, Nell, what the fuck is this crazy hermit talkin about, Mac? Arthur?” He held out his hands, but Arthur was staring at Eamon with murder in his eyes by then.

“It’s not gone -” you said.

“How the fuck would you know?”

Arthur. John. Orly. Sadie. They looked to you, all four, not a one you wouldn’t fight for, even Orly, being honest with yourself. You could suppose - if supposing was a sufficient measure of certainty to satisfy old promises and still keep them, technically - that in such company you’d be forgiven for this.

“Hosea told me.” 

John craned his head in impossible thought. The moment passed, of not really comprehending. But when John started to speak, Arthur suddenly turned directly in front of Eamon, his nostrils flaring.

“You stood by that, you did nothin?” 

Eamon faced up at him, shaking his head in new tearfulness. “Not -”

“You stood the hell by that happenin, you did nothin to help.”

“What was I supposed to do!”

“Anything.”

Before Eamon could weep another tear for himself Arthur jammed his Schofield straight in his chest and shot him. And cocked and shot him again.

All in all, it amounted to eight dead, thirty rifles in six crates, and two crates of ammunition, an old score from a train job, nothing more. And a good deal of sideways looks. Questions asked to the room, what else you hadn’t told. Why didn’t you tell them sooner?

"Why didn’t you tell Arthur sooner?" John helped you pull a crate up from the crawlspace beneath the cabin, as if he couldn't be more indifferent to the success of your score.

"She had her reasons." Arthur sounded distracted over by the cabinet browsing ammunition like a pantry.

"You didn't know - what reasons?" John was so hoarse his eyes watered.

"Hosea asked that I wouldn’t. Unless -" You shoved up the front end of another crate.

"Unless."

"The conditions were right."

"And what the fuck are those. I got shot for that money. Mac and Davey died. Jenny."

"Cool it off, Marston."

Hard to make them understand, even if you were Hosea himself. It wasn't the right time anyway, if it ever would be.

As Sadie and John walked past you with the last of the crates, you lifted another metal box up to the floor and checked it. More of the right caliber, most not in bad shape. Orly squatted down across from you and you handed it to him and reached down again. 

“Could’ve made life easier on yourself.”

“You know that’s not true. Nothing gets easier.”

He smiled down at his hands and you handed him another ammo box and pushed yourself up to shimmy out. 

From the back side of the room, you heard a low whistle and turned to find Arthur, kneeling, unwrapping a leather sheath nearly as long as his wingspan, and he lifted a handsomely carved Sharps rifle up on cradling hands. The checkering of the forearm wrapped around it fine as scales, a wing carved on the stock, another on the pistol grip. The double-set triggers, the pretty S-curve of the lever. Blued steel. Twenty-three-inch scope. S.R. tooled with care on the sheath before him. He raised his eyes as your stomach sank. 

“This you?”

The heaviness of foreboding seeped into you, as if its return to you had been inevitable, as you walked over, watching him admiring it. You nodded, put on a little smile, and took it from his hands. Even the weight of it reverberated with the hammerclang of memory, harsh as the first time you held it. 

“Ain’t ever seen one that pretty. Walnut.”

You traced the engraving on the stock, tempering your rueful feeling. “The finest.” You lay it back in its case and fastened it, picked it up and brought it out with the others while Arthur got up from the floor, letting you not explain.

 


 

“You always do this before a big job?” He gazes through the binoculars like he’s watching for birds.

“What, tuning?”

“Get so serious.”

“I’ve never fought a battle against the US Army.”

“Well. I saw some of them, they ain’t so scary. Few lazy lunatics who need a boot up the ass.”

“With a fort. And a Gatling.”

He shrugs.

“What do you do? Go out and get drunk?”

He leans back in the chair but keeps his hands at your hips, coughs a little. “Nah. That was always Sean. Davey, that lot. I remember Hosea sayin years ago, plan but don’t overthink it, sleep a little but not too much, get your head right, and do what it takes to keep your hands from shakin."

“Always sensible.”

“He’d tell Bessie to wait two days and then find a new man.” He laughs, and hadn’t heard Hosea say the other part, about her feelings on the matter.

“Last one.” He takes the rifle from you and leans it up against the other chair, and drags the final one over. 

Shadows reach the target now from the trees to the south, the scene framed by the borders of this porch, and the encroaching chill of the late afternoon settles in. Clouds gather on the slopes of the mountains and the snow will come in soon. You finish sighting in as Arthur sits back from you, letting you work. The last breath of smoke is released from the last chamber. The casing falls to the boards at your feet.

 He pats your thighs and you stand, and as you start to pick up rifles and set them back in the crates, you hardly notice him reaching inside the door of the cabin.

“Hold up partner.”

He unflaps a fold of canvas from the Sharps and appraises it in the light. 

“Arthur.”

“You wanna show me what you can do with this thing?” 

In the hollow of the door he stands now, shoulder against the jamb, holding it out vertically, in casual ceremony. 

“Not particularly.”

“If we had someone who could hit somethin with this, really hit it, that advantage is worth a lot.”

Brass casings tinkle like dull bells as you scrape them together with the edge of your boot.

“Do it for me?” 

You sniff and look away, pin your gaze on the near target.

“It’s probably rusted and pitted to shit.”

“It’s perfect.” His face is almost grave with sincerity. “I cleaned it. Hardly needed to.”

You shake your head, trying to smile as you dismiss him. “It’s been too long. I’d blow cover with a miss.”

But he holds it out like he won’t look away, no matter what you say. “Somehow I’m guessin that ain’t gonna happen.”

He steps closer, and when you reach for it, you don’t know how to describe the automatic and unquestioning lightness of your arm like the jointed limb of a marionette that makes you accept it, the vaguest sense of future knowledge that drags you forward like a current. The sadness billowing inside you like smoke.

 

In the unbroken stream of days after the death of the lawman’s son, your young husband, you went adrift of yourself and all you knew. Even Colm knew he’d done wrong, on some level, perceiving a different regard in the men. You wouldn’t see him for months. You were different when he returned.

“No, it's everywhere.” Frank’s voice boomed from downstairs in the kitchen. “Bounty high as Mount Hagen…Doesn't matter. All the more sensational, saying it was her…Won’t make a difference - best to keep her here…You won't believe the devils who are going to be out on the road for this one.”  

Gus brought a tray of food twice a day, and took them away uneaten. And one morning, weak and lightheaded, it seemed you followed death out the door into the glaring mountain sun. Sick, breathing shallow. You walked into the valley and sat down when you were too weak to continue, certain it was possible to let go of a soul by giving up. Perhaps you would simply turn to stone in time and let the rain freeze in your cracks and break you apart.

Gus’ hobbled steps in the dry grass announced him, and his boot and his crutch stopped by your side. All the snapping mountain grasshoppers, the caddisflies that fattened the trout that time of year weaved around you in the tremble of the heat in the air.

“You dead yet?”

You closed your eyes. “Go away.” 

“C’mon. I’m onna take you to see somethin.” He wouldn’t leave until you got up, dizzy, puffing from the exertion of standing. The cart was ready, and he got you up into it like a shepherd driving his brainless sheep, and took you up that mountain road to the low overlook, and the thing he meant for you to see.

At the overlook, you walked to where he pointed, and your shadow fell over the long gun lying open-breached, its graceful lever down, on an old tartan blanket, a box of express black powder cartridges beside it. You picked it up, not wanting to marvel at what was surely not yours to keep.

The lump in your throat muted you. As he got himself seated on a rock and leaned his crutch behind him, he did not force the usual morning prattle on the songbirds or the weather, fine as it was, a high summer day, bluebird sky, the breeze cooled through the shadows.

He looked to his right, down into the long channel of the valley through the clearing framed in the trees, and back at you, and he didn’t reach for his flask and he didn’t light a smoke; he sat with the calm of the prepared.  

“Twelve hundred yards.”

Standing on the edge of an ocean of air, you felt as hollow as the empty space between yourself and an object somewhere in its depths you could not see no matter how much you focused. “I can’t hit twelve hundred.” The more you looked, the more lost you felt, as if you were only pulled farther out to sea.

An impossible distance.

“I think you can.”

“You said I’d never be a sharpshooter.”

He may not have meant to let his gaze fall on your wrists, braceleted pink and raw. Your eye still bruised black. “You didn’t have the stillness before. Slow heart.” And his stare remained on the dark stain on your shirt. The blood of a lawman’s son. He sniffed hard and took the rifle from you, making himself gruff again as he wiped the eyepiece with flannel. “I think you have it now.” He handed it back.

He didn’t tell you what to do. He only turned to a large brass telescope he had fitted to a tripod, and squinted through the eyepiece.

You lay down prone and propped the barrel on the rest. Heavy. A thirty-four-inch blue-black spine, muscled on either side by the forestock. You inserted the cartridge in the breech and brought the rifle up, the stock smooth against your cheek, and you opened your eye to the orb of the light of the powerful scope and the fine crosshairs within. Down in the valley, sweeping the field of lupines, you found your target, a whitewashed bright speck in the sunlight exposed on the sandy shore of the creek, and its red flag showing you the breeze. 

You sighted in, some halfhearted math putting your angle up and leftward, and fired. 

It kicked so hard you grunted in surprise. But you stayed still. And watched. The cloud of black powder smoke blew backwards over you.

Four seconds later, a splash of sand puffed up like an answer, some three target-lengths to the left. 

“Again.”

To the percussion of all the clacks and scrapes of precision and perfection in design, you unloaded the empty brass, fed the next one in. Pulled up the lever. Pulled the hammer back. Embraced the stock. Drew up the rear trigger to prime the hairtrigger in front. Settled yourself to stillness and let out your breath. Watched the waterdrop of focus for the rise and fall of wind and the tremoring mirage in the lull. Lay still until each throb of your pulse bled soft through you like barefoot steps toward fate. Drew back your finger slow, and took the kick.

Gunsmoke like a swish of skirts dancing over your head. The splash beyond the target signaled your miss. 

“Again.”

As you lay pressed against the ground, the artery in your gut throbbed like a life inside you struggling to get free, and as you slowed your heart, its resistance waned and became more of a wave coursing through you. The scope took you beyond the place where your elbows and hips and knees were bruised by the baked rock beneath you, beyond heat and cold, and showed you a faraway place of peace in the wildflowers and wild grass and the gleaming creek and a simple target among them. Then as your view hung perfectly still and the tendons in your finger began to contract, a doe stepped into your crosshairs. You pulled your hand away.

You hid your face by the stock as sudden sorrow began to crush you from within, hot tears dripping off your nose.

“I thought it made you feel better, seein so far.” 

“I don’t feel anything.” You could hardly breathe.

Gus endured your tears without irritation, waiting through your grief while he seemed to mull something over.

“Come up here, sit by me.”

You were like a child easily persuaded as you crawled up to sit beside him on the rock, slouching to look over all that emptiness in the sunshine that made you feel so small. 

“I believe a person is tested -” he peered at you with one eye squeezed shut before facing the valley - “truly tested, one time in their lives. Could be their last day, could be any old day. When you find out what you are and what you have to do, beyond doubt. Beyond thinkin. You’ll just know. Not everyone will do it, faced with it. I ain’t a smart man, but I am old as a few of these mountains around here, and I’ve seen it happen several times before.”

“That was just me being tested? With Colm?”

“No. No, honey.” He cleared his throat. “You loved that kid but he wadn’t everything to you. There’s no shame in admitting it.”

You wiped your face, that wound still so fresh it took your breath away.

“How would I know?”

“You would know.”

“Maybe it happened already and I chose wrong.”

“You would know.”

“Has it happened to you?”

He grunted a bit like he did when his ulcer burned. “It did.”

“Was it your leg?”

He shook his head with a rueful smile. “Naw. That actually felt better.” 

“Did you know what to do?”

He drank from his flask, and when he wiped his lips his head and whole upper body rocked in a lost and musing nod. “I did. But I was too coward to take my chance.” He blinked in the clarity of a thin shine of tears that dried quickly before he swung his face to you, and then he looked away like it hurt his eyes. 

“That won’t be your problem.”

“Some other time.” She smiles thinly and props the Sharps against the wall.

“What’s the matter?”

“We have a job to do.” She holds out her hand, a few fat snowflakes starting to fall. “What if we get stuck up here?”

“Well that would be terrible wouldn’t it?”

“And leave them without their weapons?”

“Don’t have to be back until tomorrow anyway. So what if we put off a war for another couple hours.” He starts to pick up the rifle again but she pushes it back.

“You tryin to make me curious about it and how a rifle’s got you all riled up?”

She gives him a flat glare. “Just a feeling I get,” she mumbles as she bends down to start crating up the rifles again.

He doesn’t want to think it hurts, all her sharpness at him. All the burden on her for his lack of help. And half likes getting her riled up. Just not past the point of return, something he figures he crossed some time ago and now she’s something closer to mad. 

“It’s all nerves, night before. What do you usually do?”

She eyes the sighted rifles all lined up neat. “Work.”

“I meant gettin your head right. Last will and testament?” Somehow he only knows how to keep infuriating her when she’s like this, fool that he is.

“You aren’t making me feel any better, talking like that.” She packs the rifles in a bad temper, brusquely checking the chambers and then almost throwing them in the crates.

“Makes me feel better. Don’t wear black if I die; it don’t suit you.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Just think you should know it’ll scare the good fellers off, and I want you to be happy.” 

She stops. “What?”

He figured to say it plainly, breezily, a thing lovers say to each other, he reckons. Looking out for them. He clears his throat. “I’m just sayin… it’s practical. It would make me feel better knowin…when I go, I’ll have told you already. You can’t be mournful the rest of your life.” 

She straightens up immediately, facing him, aghast.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I feel better thinkin you’ll…have a good life -”

“How can you say that to me? Goddammit, Arthur!” 

There’s horror in her face; he put it there. She kicks the chair and it clatters off the porch. Before he can stop her, she’s spearing one of the rifles into the snow and storming off the porch toward the stables in the snow, leaving him in a deadened silence. 

He sits alone on the porch, as the late day snow blanks out the sky and through the clouds the dwindling daylight blurs all the features of the land, but for her tracks leading away. Their straightness makes for a hostile trail. And so he’s frozen for a while there. Idiot, how did you think she’d take it. 

For some time now he’s had an image in mind, plain and soft, slightly bitter. Her, coming in the kitchen door. Handful of garden flowers. She puts them in a jar, sets it on a little table. He can’t see her face, but it is thoughtful, he imagines, or distracted. She is maybe five years older by then. Looking well, healthy. A scar on her hand faded light. He watches her like he would watch her now. Where bright light fades the border of her profile, and where her shadows lie. The angle of her head. The sound of her humming a tune as she stands at the window. And at some length, some time in the afternoon sun, someone would walk up behind her and put his arms around her waist. Him he can’t see, either. A little bit stout around the middle. Strong shoulders. Dark hair. Rests his chin in the bend of her neck and sways her. He’d hate him but he can’t, because all at once he says something and she laughs. And then it all fades fast from mind like a shimmer; maybe it’s him who’s faded from it.

She left the Sharps leaning there. Feels wrong not to go after her, but he’s learned by now not to pry until she’s ready, and then he’d better ask. What a thirty-four-inch barrel could have to do with the sorrow he saw, he is at a loss to guess, but he picks it up, fifteen pounds of exquisite machining. Merely to hold it level, he can feel his own muscle getting hot from it. He peers down her scope, but stops, pulls over the chair, and rests the barrel on the porch rail. 

Through the scope again, the snow overwhelms his sight in white, a void as desolate as pitch darkness. He feels queasy trying to control his view, soaring through the powerful scope in that cloud of a place without so much as a horizon to steady him until he catches a tree on the high ridge like an anchor, and wobbles in the chair. At that distance he witnesses the trembling magnified apparition of a bird of some kind silently agitating the snow from the shrouding branches, oblivious to the crosshairs that cut it. He moves his hand away from the trigger entirely, as if by a terrible accident, a forgotten chambered round, a tremor, he might kill what he only wanted to watch from this longing distance. He watches until the crackle in his chest gets him coughing and he has to detach from that strange inhabited silence. But then the heaviest sense of lovelorn remains, and it takes him a moment to adjust to his own eyesight.

He leans the rifle back against the wall, and follows her tracks to the stable. Out back, the sound of her struggling. Mad as blazes. Muffled grunts and blunt pounding. When he rounds the far corner of the stable, he stops. She stands under the overhang of the stables. One by one she’s heaving the busted rifles away and they each leave a stripe in the snow with a dull thump.   Her braid has come undone and her hair spreads like a rust-red wing as she hurls the next rifle away. When she stumbles over the crate she gives it a furious kick and the side cracks. 

“Fucking goddammit!” 

He winces in sympathy, but the pain only makes her madder. The last one, the flintlock, slips out of her grasp and her voice breaks when she swears. She yanks it up out of the snow, and it swings so heavily from her grasp that she staggers forward, then she grabs the empty crate and throws it too, and slips to her hands and knees, her coat flipped over her shoulders, and hunches there, bowed by her raging breath, clutching her side in pain.

When he reaches her, she wipes her nose, head down. He crouches beside her, takes her cold hand, scraped by the ice or the crate or the frozen packed floor of the barn, bleeding a little. He blows on it in his cupped hands.

“Everything we’re doing to get out, and you talk like that.” She glares at the ground.

“I’m a fool, I thought you knew it.” 

When her brow momentarily crumples, her eyes show the sting of truth, fought back many times. “Time is already against us. You don’t have to act like it’s already over. And would you like hearing the same from me?”

“I couldn’t stand to, Red. I’m sorry. Just makes me feel better to talk reckless about it sometimes. I wasn’t thinkin.”

When he pulls her up to stand and lowers his chin to get a look at her, her eyes seem to fill halfway with tears before they spill and he pulls her close. Her back shakes, and he feels useless, parting her hair out of her face, kissing her forehead, her cheekbones. Yoking her neck in the cradle of his hand. He rests his head against hers.

“I’ve had a terrible feeling for a while,” she whispers.  “Doesn’t go away anymore.”

The plane of her forehead is warm; he feels the small sweep of her eyelash on his temple. In the nearness of her face, the hard thin bone of her nose rubs alongside the scars and broken shape of his, guided in this longed-for friction until the tip of his nose roots at hers, draws down, grazes her lips. Soothing by this gentle proximity. Their heads nuzzle, cheeks, chins, blind and testing, his whiskers stirred by the hint of her breath like all parts of him revived by her, and then, slowly, her lips brush his. Hardly a touch. He is motionless with her idling stroke light as petals, mesmerized by such tenderness, his heart pounding. She presses warm to his mouth, warm and salty with tears, quivering and with his selfsame pressure calming, soft and sealing. Borne up by this delicate suction alone that breaks light as a membrane and his heart sinks. He pants, blinks. And suddenly his senses come charging back; he pulls away, no, Nell, we - but she shakes her head and grasps his face and sips from him again and again like deepest thirst, I want this. 

Her lips split with his like a wound. The slippery prod of her tongue on his tongue. Her taste. Their mouths breach apart in tentative awe, their breath within them still as fog, and although the borders of him crease in desperation to spare her, the whole column of him pumps to join to her, awake with the urge to give in to her, body and breath. When her fingers wrap around the nape of his neck, the sound of her trembling exhalation pulls all his breath from him, a gust from his chest that breaks him at his knees. Their starving jaws push each other agape, her tongue carving into his mouth, the sudden throb in his cock so strong he stumbles into her against the wall. The desperate needy sound from his own throat as they drink this fountain. Her teeth press into her lower lip, springing free fuck into his lips and he consumes her. Mouths chasing, seizing, the span of her panting smile, their clashing breath.

For so long, he has been untouchable like this. He feels a swell of panic begin to take him over but she holds him, staring into him, both of them rising in waves and waves of breath, she looks him in the eye, so sure, her streaming stare so fiercely certain, nodding.  Solid. Strengthened. Consoling what’s beyond consolation, until he feels that painful sweet relief as his own urge becomes unyielding, and when she kisses him and grasps his cock through his trousers he moans at her open mouth. He ripens in her hand. She wraps around him like a splash.

There is madness in his veins as he tastes her more deeply, craving what he’s wanted for so long, lips closing, that parting suck that leaves himself unsteady on the edges of his boots. Then seeking each other, lips sipping sharply, forcing each other open, wet and raw. Their impatient teeth and tongues. His thumb pulling her cheek, the ruining spread of her fingers on his throat. She bites his lower lip and he kisses her so hard then they taste blood. He breaks away to find and suck the rapid fluttering pulse of her neck but she pulls him back to her mouth and stamps him with her lips, the branding heat of their love colliding as her hand grabs his hair and he gasps for air and tastes her again like breath incarnate.

Trembling hands and trembling bodies propel them, his buttons pried apart, her trousers ripped down. He turns her, falling against her into the wall, panting as he grips his cock and she pushes her ass and back and shoulders into him, and turns her head sideways to receive his kiss again. His eyes fall closed and he reels with her surging need. He keeps that sweet long kiss as long as he can, her hum that feels like a murmur through his chest, but his boot slips and he falls harder into her; his hand slaps the wall beside her head. In that slip the channel of her body glides him to her devastating rim, catching the lip at the passage of petaline flesh. Both of them jump with that twinge and he exhales into her hair, sliding himself back and forth soothingly along her slit until he recovers the rim of her inlet and slowly presses in. Her body seems to kiss him there too, the soft suction as his cockhead breaks her seal and his eyes roll back from the heat of her cunt. Her neck arches, she bears back against him. And even feeling her tight, unready, as she whimpers with the sting, all restraint breaks, and he’s so hard that agony clenches in the depths of his gut, his eager hips, to wait any longer. He enters her in one uncontrollable thrust even knowing how it hurts her, the stiff flesh of his cock only tightened by the sound of her deep-throated moan that drugs him as he ruts her hips to the wood. He draws out wet, well-glossed, and glides into her now fully hard. His fingers claw over her fist against the rough grain. Her nails cut into his other hand gripping her hip, dragging him around to her stomach, pushing him down between her legs, and instead he takes her hand and holds her there. Feels the inch of her fingers touching herself, and he’s ruined, unable to stop, as if in the slick of her body he loses his grip on life itself, sinks underwater dragged by a weight, the merciless plunge to damnation for what he’s done to her. He can only succumb, give up his exhausted resistance. In the rise of her emptying wail he fucks her so hard the wet smack of their bodies begins to sluice and he feels her soaking him, the spontaneous clutch of her cunt as she comes with a groan cut from her throat in a sound so raw he could split as her back arches and she falters, rammed weak by his last, fast, rigid thrusts. He pants as his entire body lurches into her, his face buried in her neck as he jets his seed inside her, the kick of every spurt running straight to the root. Draining, slouching. Gasping for air. Her hand on his hand through the slow rocking of their breath. His cock slips heavily out as he lets her down.

He manages to see her steady just as he falls to the wall, holding himself, dizzy, unable to catch his ragged, wheezing breath or swallow through his parched throat, about to dissolve into dry-drowned terror. He hears her voice or imagines its long-gone echo in the vacant air as he slides down and sits hard on the ground. He tries to open his eyes to the light but he can’t. 

Then she’s there, her hand on his chest, and winter air streams into his lungs, sharp and clear and calming the burn inside.  She cups a handful of snow to his lips, and kisses him lightly again. He fastens himself, fingers feeble, but damned if he dies with his dick out, and she takes his hand.

She waits.

When he can look at her, the knot in his throat chokes him. She combs his hair back from his sweating forehead and temples. Her thumb on his cheekbone sweeps back with clement certainty. 

“I shouldn’t’ve…”

“Arthur, don't.”

“Goddammit Nell.” He bars her with his arm as he rakes his hands through his hair. Wipes his face.

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay.” He coughs with his mouth closed, covers it.

“We’ve been this close as long as you’ve known.”

“That don’t make it right.” And the intolerable thought of a different future, her in a bed, starved for air, gouges him through the middle. Himself the reason. “Sweetheart I’m sorry.”

He hates to hear his own voice break, but she doesn’t flinch.  

She leans on his arm, taking his hand in both of hers, and he sniffs spitefully, the taste of his tears in the back of his throat metallic. 

“You think it’s safe, this distance, but it’s false.” She kisses his shoulder, now his thumb as she pulls his hand up. 

He glares out at the snow, piercing bright. Finally finds it in himself to clear his throat. “Can't really hope for much of a future," he smirks, rueful. "Feels better, I guess, thinkin of yours.” He presses his thumb over hers. “It kills me to think I could take it away from you.”

“You don’t know that, you don’t know tomorrow. Any day beyond that is the luckiest day of our lives.”

She watches the snow fall out there beyond them in that quiet basin.

“Anyway, I figure that’s when you need hope the most.” She purses her lips.

His head falls back to the wall; it's useless to argue; she won’t let him, he ought to know by now, in the shine of her green eyes peering.

And her breath comes quick with a new catch of feeling. “I said I can’t leave you, Arthur. I’m yours, my whole life. My breath. I’ll hope for all the days we can’t see. Don’t need a reverend or a church to say it.”

Under the heavy brow of the roof of the stable, smelling the hay and the horses, he rubs his forehead, unable to speak for the spike driven through his throat right then.

“Would you say it too?” Her voice shakes. Like she’s nervous, but he’s never heard her quite nervous before, and he’s such a fool he don’t notice until he sees her fingers curling to white knuckles.

“Will I say it?” he rasps, sitting up, realizing, and jesus christ his heart is galloping, his mouth dry all of a sudden, goddammit gather yourself Morgan. He just stares as it seems every emotion he’s ever felt surges through him, and he coughs to find his voice. 

And in a blessed stun of clarity thinks better of it. If there’s an afterlife, Hosea is somewhere yelling at him.

Despite her confusion, he’s pushing up to his feet, brushes off his wet seat and knees, half-dries his palms on the sides of his thighs, and motions at her with quick beckoning fingers to take his hands. One of the stranger moments of his life, little doubt of that. The horses stand on the other side of the wall, one of them more than likely about to take a shit or Georgia ready to interrupt them with a long whinny, and he will be damned to hear it right now. Sludge and snow soaking them, sheltered in this dark and run-down stable. He flutters his fingers impatiently until she takes his hands and he pulls her up, beats the mud and snow off her ass. Scans all around as he takes long steps into the deep drifts, pulling her behind him. 

Nothing but the cliffs and a few pines and a hitching post and a privy and the brass-littered porch, and the snow falling in fat flakes that melt and soak them, and were it not for him holding her hand Nell might have smacked him by now and ought to. He leaves her for a few strides, looking around. Not so much as a good fence to sit her on. Nothing but the snow and the mountains and sky.

He turns to her, flaps his arms. “Say it again.”

“What?”

“Say it again, what you said.” He steps back toward her.

“Why.”

“I don’t want to smell a stable when I marry you. Say it.”

She blinks.

“You forgot?” Good god it’s a treat to catch her speechless, he ought to keep a list.

She pushes him back. “No. Don’t say marry, you idiot, you’ll damn us both.”

“Didn’t figure you for superstitious.”

How she glares, those fire-green eyes.

“Fine I won’t marry you.” He raises an eyebrow. “But say it.” And he fingers the edges of her open coat and lightly pulls her close, and he won’t tease her anymore, not now. “Let me hear it out here.” 

“You're making fun.”

“I've never been more serious in my life.” 

He nudges her forehead with his nose. His lips. 

“I said I’m yours,” she starts to fume, but her eyes water up and she drops her head, and then she smirks, raises her face again with a tearful, quivering smile, and with her hair all ruffled and her pink tear-streaked cheeks she’s as pretty as he’s ever seen. “My whole life and breath.”

He kisses her trembling lips. Keeps her close. How in hell does a person make a vow without time to make good on it, well he sure doesn't wait another second. Say this right.

“I’m yours. My whole life and breath. Always have been.” 

 

In the end it was always going to be sudden and broken and old wounds left unresolved. They both seem to know this, these brothers, facing the Bacchus Bridge. 

“Sadie’s ready. Abigail’s packin overnight. Didn’t want the boy lettin on in camp.”

In the fading dusk, the mist from the falls unrolls a dreamy winter fog over the gorge where the four of you stand. You. Arthur. John. Ten Crow.

“Maybe he won’t even remember it someday.”

“My heart’s in my goddamn throat.”

Arthur grunts in agreement, and you all watch as ten more riders come down the hill at a trot. Paint veining their faces. They sit high, their necks are tall. Rifles on their backs with their bows. Among them, Monroe stands out, his rifle and his sidearm ready, unadorned in his plain hunting coat. When he sees the group of you, he lifts a hand in distracted greeting. Paytah turns his horse, a bright red kerchief around his head, and sends Ten Crow a long and stoic stare, and beside you the boy stands straight, his hands clenching, his chest pumping. Charles' braid curves a black spine down his back. The last one down, Eagle Flies walks his horse those final few inclined feet, slowly jostled by his horse’s steps. His men are motionless and formal as he passes through them.

“Jesus christ what are we doin.” John stares. The fuse dangles from his hand.

“What we can I guess.”

John nods, still staring. “Dutch and them are on the other side watchin the road to the south.” He glances sideways, hesitation he doesn’t want to let on to. “You feelin right about this?”

“There’s no clean way out; never was. But it’s now or never.” 

“Yeah.”

From the group of men on horseback, Charles raises his hand in signal.

Arthur elbows John, who crouches by the detonator, wiring the last line.

The mountain breeze has let out to a stop. John stands, shakes Arthur’s hand with a long and resolute nod. Then he offers it to you. You reach out to shake and he grips you firmly. His breath through his nose trembles, and he gives you a tight smile. 

“You all ready to see somethin?”

You step back, and John takes the bar of the detonator, and Arthur pinches the edge of your sleeve with the backs of two fingers, pulling you close, hooks your index finger, weaves his fingers through yours as you stand on that high overlook with a view of the bridge to the north with the falls beyond and the fort to the south and fine flakes of snow begin to fall.

Arthur glances down at your hands. “No goin back from this.”

But there has never been any going back. 

For a second, you only hear the hush of the falls, like the whole earth lies indifferent to all man’s love and war. And you jump when that booming cascade stuns the air, thunders in your chest, flooding you with the fullness of life since the time he first took your breath away, and the massive spine of wood and steel arches higher against its stays before the bridge explodes in a fast bright eruption of flaming wood, and in the smoke its twisted back begins to bow and plummet. 

Arthur squeezes your hand as he gazes up at the embers and splinters sparking through the evening sky. You grip him as hard as you can.

When he passes you your rifle, he keeps his hold on it, and pulls you close. “I know it ain’t easy on you. I’m proud of you.” He holds the back of your neck and tilts your face to him. “You ready?”

“Yeah. You?” You slip an extra box of his caliber in his satchel.

“I got you watchin my back.”

“Stay with Charles and John. I’ll meet you.”

He leans your rifle to you. 

“Give em hell, my girl.” He lifts your chin and kisses you, and when he straightens again his eyes are dark and loving and bloodshot and fierce and dancing as they take in the details of your face before he settles his hat on his head. He holds Ten Crow by the shoulder and tells him to mind you now, and heads over to where John waits with Old Boy and Georgia. When Arthur rides, he’s flat to her neck and up from the saddle, handsome a rider as you ever saw.

You pass your ammunition belt to Ten Crow and both of you hike up to your position on the high rock that juts out halfway between the bridge and the fort. You quickly clamber to the top where you stand together in the silent snow. 

Two shots. 

With your scope, you spot the Gatling that hunches with her left side to you, ready on her cart in the yard, as Monroe said. The soldiers within are alert from the blast of the bridge, and hurry around it. She sits perfectly still in the midst of them. You figure eight hundred-some yards away. Your cartridge is a three-inch 110-grain high-velocity round. And at the signal, your cartridge delivered into the housing at the Gatling’s magazine will set off her internal coil of rounds and cripple her. 

And you will have seconds after that, from the moment of the signal, to find the runner, who will have gotten close under cover, and who will have begun to sprint toward the weak spot in the wall with a tarred clutch of dynamite, and once it is planted you will give him to the count of four to get away.

As you sat in the breezy quiet with Gus, that day on the mountain, the speck of your target suddenly seemed to glint out in that great open valley like metal or a distant beacon, and you wondered was it just your head up in the high elevation, the stars you would get in your sight, until it flashed again in proof.

“I don’t want to leave you.”

“I won’t make you. Not yet.”

With a great sigh, he sat up, flicked his hand at the rifle.

“Gotta do this first,” he said gruffly, and wiped his sweating forehead. “Twelve hundred yards. Get to it.”

You got down into place and pulled back the hammer. Put yourself through the scope into the motionless middlespace where you had begun to feel awake and untouched, bridging this new distance with determination, transfixed by how natural it seemed, like floating in water the same temperature as your body, the gradual vanishing of your outline. Your breath let out slow, until your chest was quiet and you could measure your heartbeat against the rise and fall of the breeze. Throb. Lull. Throb. And in the lull your crosshairs hung motionless until your finger was the only thing that moved, and the hammer snapped and the rifle kicked as the bullet flew and your heart beat four times and the target flapped like a valve as your silent shot connected.

Surrounded by the evening amethyst sky and the dead-still air and the snow strewing soft all around, you nestle your barrel in the notch of a young tree and plant your boots wide. Press your cheek against the stock. Gaze through your glowing sight. Slowly set the hair trigger. 

“Flag them.”

Ten Crow waves a red kerchief high as he can overhead.

And a bellowing signal answers clear and terrible over the gorge. 

And you breathe out slow, and lay your finger down.









Notes:

Thanks for reading, and thank you bruisedambition, always! 🖤

Chapter 26: The House on the Hill

Summary:

In the end, you think of the beginning.


The way he told it, Hosea didn’t know when things had changed, or when their trouble started. The gang. The plan. Their most careful connivances ripped asunder.

Perhaps it was the day Micah appeared, six months before. Or the day they arrived and sent the Callander boys into town. Or the moment, in a back room, where Arthur threw in his lot to join Hosea on a job instead of Dutch, and a dark, loaded stare passed between them. The particulars of the events of three months and a day ran together in an old man’s mind. But one thing was clear.

They had stayed in Blackwater too long.

Notes:

CW/TW: Single second-hand reference to assault on a sex worker. Momentary reference to suicidal ideation. Reference to pregnancy. Past-tense angst turned all the way up.

Chapter Text

The way he told it, Hosea didn’t know when things had changed, or when their trouble started. The gang. The plan. Their most careful connivances ripped asunder. 

Perhaps it was the day Micah appeared, six months before. Or the day they arrived and sent the Callander boys into town. Or the moment, in a back room, where Arthur threw in his lot to join Hosea on a job instead of Dutch, and a dark, loaded stare passed between them. The particulars of the events of three months and a day ran together in an old man’s mind. But one thing was clear.

They had stayed in Blackwater too long.

As soon as they arrived on the small bluff with a view across the river and began to set up camp, Dutch sent the brothers to get the lay of the town, the place having changed a great deal in only a couple of years. It was no longer an outpost little bigger than Manzanita. No longer a wooden tinderbox of a town. On the banks of that river, it had flourished. Brick buildings had gone up between the false fronts. Large leaded windows lined the street, names like the Blackwater Saloon and Mrs. Wilson’s Baked Goods etched and painted on the glass in fine lettering. Windows that were now crossed by the vermiculate reflections of two brothers on horseback clopping slowly down the middle of the cobbled thoroughfare. On a dry day in February.

And on that day in February, because Mac’s horse had thrown a shoe near camp and needed to be reshod, they stopped their horses at the livery and walked to the saloon to wait. 

Maybe, then, it had started with a thrown shoe.

Were it not for that shoe, Mac would not have found himself spending that midday hour watching each successive drink invite the bravado and violence in his brother, who dragged his knife through his meat when he cut it as though he enjoyed the feel of flesh severing, just as he seemed to like the prick of his spurs in the flanks of a horse, and torturing his brother with humor of a sadistic nature. And when Davey started to tell one of his more titillating fictions in that tone that enthralled and lured to the girl on his knee and the men at the next table, Mac pushed his chair back and left, his brother’s mock-pity and smoky laugh following him, dear brother, out the door. This young man of twenty-seven who was worn beyond his years. 

He made it partway down the sidewalk, where he was about to turn to get back to the stables, figuring he’d sit outside until the job was done, feeling irksome about the cost. Except, as he walked down the brand-new brick sidewalk, and felt his own wavering image accompanying him in the windowglass, the bellow of a steamship haunted the town like an echo in a cavern. He glanced up, stepped wrong on the curb and stumbled directly into a young woman locking up the shop to his left. Mrs. Wilson’s Baked Goods. He told Hosea he would not forget the name. He saw in that split second his shocked face mirrored among the lettering as he fell. 

She was a few inches shorter than him. Dark brown hair, fixed stylish. A waist like a slim sheaf of wheat in her straw-yellow dress, and big brown eyes that looked at him in genuine concern as he staggered and crashed to a knee, his bad knee, and crumpled with a shout of pain. 

If she was alarmed by his guns at first, she pretended not to be. Twin silver Cattleman revolvers.  The cartridges lined up on his belt. The knife. The scar that had been cut into his neck once upon a time. 

He apologized, sucking air through his teeth, reminded in such times of the wrong step he’d taken that likely saved his life from the bullet that went over his head, but he’d torn something inside his knee beyond healing. He’d hardly been able to walk or ride for most of the last year.

So perhaps it had started with that.

And this young woman, with her big brown eyes, was helping him up from the sidewalk, and then shouldering him inside the shop. He protested - It’s alright, miss, my own fuck- my own clumsiness - and she angled her head at him as if she was used to men’s bullheaded excuses. They kept an ice chest in the back room, which she insisted would help some, and she turned to get it. As fine a sight leaving as coming. 

So he sat in that small shop, in an ornate white chair at an ornate white table. Honeycombed tile on the floor. A counter of confections. High tin ceilings and a fan turning overhead, churning the smell of sugar and yeast in the air. And him thinking he had never been in a bakery shop, and out of habit considering the contents of the register. 

She brought him ice and knelt and tied it in a floursack towel around his knee. “Must have fallen quite hard on it.”

“It was no good to me before.” 

Such simple kindness to his person, not put off by him, scornful of him, nor mistrusting his intentions as if she could smell his bounty on him. He could not recall such solicitude in his life. Her kneeling by his dusty boots, level with his open thighs as she tended to him. His thoughts gone wayward. Perhaps not noticing himself being admired.

“Can I ask you something, stranger?”

He nodded. She had no idea the picture she made, glancing up at him. Men went religious for such a sight.

“Carrying guns like that, are you planning on being attacked?”

“Pardon?”

“My father says a man carrying two is expecting a fight where he goes.”

“Smart man, your father.”

“Are you?”

“Am I?” Bewildered by her eyes like polished chestnut.

“Expecting to be attacked?”

“No, miss.”

When she finished, she stood up and wiped the front of her dress, and turned, and he wondered what trick had been constructed to snare him, and so completely, because his heart was leaden at the mere thought of leaving the shop. His throat dry, his mind swimming. He had known whores, and he had known a couple of the girls in the gang, and felt nothing like this, and this not unwelcome feeling made him think he must look like a slovenly dog in front of her, pitiable in dull-eyed affection. He tried to make himself acceptable. Sat up straighter. Wiped his face. Took off his damn hat. Pawed down his dirty-blond hair.

“And you ain’t afraid of me?” he called across the small room.

She pulled out a pastry from the counter and put it on a plate and set it between them on the table and sat down. 

“Should I be afraid?”

“I don’t think so.”

She huffed as she regarded him, not scornful, nor directly amused. He would realize later her cheeks had flushed as she broke off a piece of the pastry between them and pushed the plate his way, and though he’d never had much of a sweet tooth, he did the same, and the richness of almond filled his senses as he met the gaze of this pretty brown-eyed thing in her straw-yellow dress.

Davey was the charmer. Took a whore in every town. A few times, Mac had been fetched to barge in and tear his brother away when the charm faded and before he got himself shot by the brothel owner, and paid the poor bloody-lipped and sobbing girl. And beat his brother until his knuckles split, though the fool never learned.

Himself, not a lick of charm. Not a blessed drop. As she began to grin at the growing silence and broke off another piece of pastry, he was staring, a smile spreading, mirrored to hers, exposing the missing eyetooth he had lost in a fight a few years ago, though he quickly concealed it. He coughed.

“What about yourself, miss?”

“You mean, should you be afraid of me?” Her eyes sparkled like a secret, and all he could do was smile down at his lap.

As the ice began to melt down his leg and the pastry disappeared little by little, he could not stop looking in those eyes while she told him she tended the shop when Missus Wilson was away. Her friends had married. Most people seemed to find her too forward, opinionated, impatient. She had wanted to become a schoolteacher, but the position had been filled for years, and though she would leave Blackwater in the beat of a heart, she lived with her father in the house south of town, where he suffered a bad heart and worse temper. She stole time for herself to lie down by the grassy banks of the river in a certain place and read in the shade of a maple tree, in the warmer months. She had recently bought a bicycle on her own earnings and felt right smart about it.

“How old are you?” he asked.

She was suddenly intent on smoothing the fabric of her skirt, which he noticed was printed in a pattern of tiny stars.

“Is it wrong to ask?”

“No.” She looked up, sighing at herself, it seemed. “I am twenty-four.” A regretful slant in her smile. 

“Why do you say it like that?”

“It seems to have a curious effect,” she said, with false grandeur. “One tends to become an object of pity or speculation.” And leaning toward him, whispered conspiratorially, “A spinster.” Knowing smile.

No clever thing came to mind to put her at ease, to gasp in mock alarm or speak in an offhand way about age and what all folk become in time. Nothing Davey might say to charm.

“I’m sorry I asked it.”

“Sorry now you know?” 

It was a second too late he recognized her teasing, and then he could not hope to save himself.

In each way he was inadequate to her. This man of twenty-seven, given to depressions and hating the world. Outlaw. Drifter. Toothless bastard. Still the notion grew in him not to cut himself off from her. As if that ship’s bellow had been the final call of the last good thing he might catch in his life.

“No. I only meant, I’m sorry to make you say it. If it makes you feel wrong. You ain’t…wrong. You’re very right.” Cough.

Next she smiled, he wanted to hide, he wanted to touch her, he wanted to be different than he was in all ways. In all likelihood Davey was in need of a rescue before he got himself in trouble, or such was the excuse he made in his mind.

He started to speak and she started to speak. They stopped. She lifted her eyes with a new shyness that contracted in him too. He let her speak first.

“At some point you might tell me your name, mister.”

“Mac.” Cough. “Mac Shelton.”

“Kin to the livery owner?”

“No, miss, ain’t that a coincidence.”

“Ain’t it just.” She held out her hand across the table, formally. “It’s nice to make your acquaintance, Mister Shelton.”

He wiped his hand on his jeans and took her hand, completely entranced by its softness, and how she gripped him. Willing.

“Heidi.” Her name formed a little smile by saying it, a little dimple in one cheek. 

And then it was as if her last name made her smile disappear just as quickly, though for what reason he couldn’t guess. “Heidi McCourt.”

“Miss McCourt.” He shook her hand and she seemed amused by the formality. 

“Are you in town long, Mister Shelton?”

“I hope for a long time.”

She played coy, granted him a flick of a smile that lingered in her gaze on him. “Not too long. This place can catch you like a trap.”

“I fear it already has.”

He hobbled outside and waited for her to lock up, and she took her bicycle from the alley and walked beside him until she had to split off left toward home. And he paid to get his mare back and went to make sure his reckless brother hadn’t spoiled this place before they even got started. 

He gave the excuse the next few days to head back into town to continue scouting, while Davey consorted with Micah, whom he bore strangely closer resemblance to, and who seemed amused at Davey’s ways, perhaps like his own, but still unmetered by age and experience, and he could enjoy seeing the consequences spill out from Davey where he had been smart enough not to let them. Dutch remained in high spirits, invited Javier to play music, sat with them at the campfire on occasion, praised Mac for his initiative in going scouting. Used that same praise to disparage Arthur, who would glance up from that book he was always writing in or the table where he sat with Hosea, and send back a dry remark. Sometimes with more edge than any of the rest of them could get away with, and Dutch would hoot and have the final word, broadcast to the camp in earshot.

It was not scouting, directly, that took Mac to her day after day. He paid no attention to the street names when they went walking. He would stand at the end of the wide thoroughfare on the south edge of town and watch her ride her bicycle around him, her pretty hair coming undone. 

The day she rode up to him, front wheel ruddering until she brought it straight between his legs, staring at him like a secret pleasure, he stopped her by the handlebars and kissed her. An awkward thing, bumping her nose with his, hardly grazing one side of her lips. After that moment of surprise, their faces still so close she must have smelled his tobacco and the new soap he had washed with, he burned, certain he had trampled this little growing brightness like a daisy. 

“I’m, uh,” he murmured, rubbing his neck. “Sorry. Was that too -” He got distracted by a laugh and someone conversing across the street. “Too familiar?” 

The apples of her cheeks shone and she smiled in a private way. “Not too familiar. Just right, I think.” And in his speechlessness, she kissed him back. 

The next day the same, as they walked along a small cliff overlooking the lake at sunset. The back of his hand touched hers, and when she didn’t draw away he wove his fingers between hers. The glimpse he didn’t mean to get, of a gap in the buttons of her shirtwaist letting on to the loveliness within, made him quickly look away. He took a shaky breath. Though she was talking, and he meant to pay attention, his thoughts were caught up in other things and he had to pretend interest in the seagulls to keep himself settled. 

She had to get home before dark, she was saying. Her father - he was easily suspicious.

“Is he mean to you?”

She frowned, shook her head. “He is strict. A lawyer tends to have rules.”

His stomach seemed to fall clean outside of him, but she spread her fingers between his with the closeness of bodies and he didn’t know what to know. 

“But he is not my keeper. I can stand up to him.” She glanced at him and forward again as if she were trying not to be caught glancing.

“There is no doubt of that.”

It was not much longer, a few afternoons spent teaching him to ride wobbly on the bicycle, a few pastries shared, a few kisses on the edge of that grassy cliff and left them raw-lipped and witless, before one evening when he took her on his horse to the spot he had found west of town, on a hill, not in sight nor sound of any other homestead. 

It was an unfinished, abandoned house of a single built wall and three framed walls of frayed and billowing canvas he’d tied down. The roof was half-shingled, half-canvas tied over the rafters. A tiny lean-to in the back stood mostly empty. When she stepped up the rough-built steps, he parted one side of the canvas for her like a curtain, and followed her inside.

He started the small wood stove with lumber scraps from the lean-to, and spread his bed roll down on the pine floorboards. They lay there, and peered up into the rafters of the room. She asked, in a mock-dangerous tone of voice, about his guns as he took off his belt and reclined to an elbow. His twins, he told her, Pride and Joy. Won them in a poker game two years back, and they had never done him wrong. He cradled one in his hand between them. Let her hold it. Smiled when she exclaimed at the heft and he caught it with his fingertips before she could drop it. 

“Which one is this?”

“Joy.”

She smirked. “How can you tell them apart?”

“How I feel.”

He set it aside. 

"Joy, really?" she asked, teasing. 

And he did not tease. “No.” Touched under her chin. “More than that.” And she raised her eyes to him, closed them as he leaned into her and pressed his lips to hers. Her mouth unsealed to his mouth, a sigh released as if he’d robbed her breath. Same as the effect to his own person.

He pulled away, a thin bond of saliva breaking between them. She sucked her lower lip.

Too late, he felt he ought to tell her the truth about himself, and every day thereafter would guard himself against the inevitable moment she would forswear him. 

“You don't quite know me,” he confessed. 

“I'd like to know you.” 

“You might not like me then.” 

“Well then your choice is to find out or not.”

He cupped her fine cheek and kissed her.

She responded to him so eager and strong that the spark of that temporary certainty caught them both up in the fire. He kneaded her breast that fit so well and small in his hand through the stiff cotton of her shirtwaist and the layer underneath. And when she breathed harder he blindly tried to pluck her buttons apart as he kissed her hungry mouth and almost cursed in frustration until he got enough of them open to carve his hand down her chest and grip her supple tit and each sigh she made nearly killed him. 

Her nipple beaded in his hand. He glanced down, his brain like a crackling fire as he glimpsed the patterned flush beginning to rise on her chest. Her hand sliding around his waist was a rope to him, a lash. God, fuck he was hard. With his whole being he hoped she wouldn’t notice. With his whole being he hoped she would.

When he ventured to reach lower, and began to move his hand up under her skirt, instead of shrinking from him she pressed closer, her soft thighs parting for him, and she trembled at this closeness, what he reckoned no man had ever done to her before. He lowered her drawers down past her knees as she wiggled out of them, a little movement so eager and pert he smiled as he slid his hand higher. Over her hip and on her naked belly. Straightened his fingers in her coarse curls. And when his middle finger found the top of her slit and probed deeper, she panted, a dazed new vacancy in her eyes as he started to rub her bud in small circles. Slow at first, pressing when she rode into his fingers, a bit faster then, and when she seemed to need more he slid his middle finger along her slit, and was amazed at her shock and the feel of her strength giving way when he found the tight focus of flesh there and slipped inside her. Her body rose to him. 

It had been awhile since he had fingered a girl, and he told himself not to go too fast at first, and he watched her body perk and lift and seek him as he curved his finger in and out of her warmth. Himself aroused by the roundness inside her, the juice that made her passage slippery, like nature itself knew acceleration was how it was accomplished. 

The other girls had been rough. Or drunk. Or paid-for. A dead-flesh feel inside them, or slicker than eels within, begging, thirsting for anyone to plumb them as long as they could come.

Here in his arms, she was a depth untouched as he touched her now, her heat, her permissive softness. He had to glance at the rafters and concentrate on the joinery or he was at risk of spending in his goddamn jeans at every distressed whimper that escaped her, every jut of her hips.

Her moans began to sound fearful as her slick came up like a spring with her sighs, and streamed and shone in his whole palm, a soft wet noise that qualmed her around his finger, shy. 

I - I don’t - her voice a shiver.

He stopped his hand and tried to understand the worry in her face; had he wrecked this poor girl unthinkingly. He wanted to tell her it was a wonder to him, and to beg her to go on. Bathe herself in it. Soak in his hand. Let him draw out her slick until she had to suck his mouth from thirst. 

But she would think him to be the degenerate he was. 

Instead he leaned forward and gently cupped her between her legs and kissed her with every poor reassurance he could give. 

She must have sensed his silent heartfelt asking, for she unclenched her legs, still guarded. Calmly, as not to spook small game, he rounded up on his side. Propped her on his arm. Together with him she watched as his hand slipped down the slope of her thigh to her and his finger slid into her again. Saw his breath rise to feel it. Her clear viscid slick drew out on the rays of his hand, and her hips came open as he coaxed her. 

He curled his finger inside, and her moan, the sudden roll of her waist drove a lusting ache through his cock and he roughly kissed her panting mouth and held her tighter. Gave her his tongue and slipped his ring finger in. When she broke away for breath, his head rolled heavily against hers. 

Her moans began to come in rugged gasps as she rocked on him with involuntary need, rocking harder, harder, faster, his fingers plunging deep, her cheeks and temples pink. And suddenly she arched. So strong he had to grip her to his chest as she wailed and her cunt filled with slick like water and smacked wet in his hand, and she succumbed to the unstoppable wanton urge to die this little way, and he experienced the most impassioned moment of his life to make her come. He gasped with her as her arms locked around his neck, and he murmured you’re alright, that’s it, you’re alright, absorbing every strong jerk of her body into his. 

She clung to his shirt, panting. The room around them seemed large all of a sudden as they lay there, quiet. Then, like an altered consciousness bled through her, she released him, leaving two starred wrinkles in the fabric, and lay back, her head heavy on his arm, her body still undulating from her breath. Her skirt rumpled up past her bent knees.

There was no more astonishing creature than this girl in his arms. He didn’t want to move, for fear she would get up and leave him, ephemeral as a moth. He wiped his hand on the side of his jeans and dreaded right then she would regret him.

“You okay?”

She nodded, then smiled a little, gazing sideways in thought. 

“You ever feel that before?”

“No.” She seemed shy to look him in the face at first, but when her eyes flicked up she was full of this new light. 

“What is it.” He had to touch her cheek.

Her lips curved with her impish admission. “I'd like to feel it again.”

He grinned. “You might want a minute.”

And when she rose up on her elbow to kiss him, and sought to hold his hand that he’d been keeping over himself, her fingertips brushed him and she noticed him hard. His breath trembled. He had to lick his lips.

He thought to conceal it, but did not, and the throb of risk that plunged in his gut only made him harder. Her small hand hovered at the waist of his jeans. He observed her, letting her do as she pleased, and when she first touched him, steadiness and clear intention in her eyes, he swallowed dry. 

When he didn’t discourage her, she touched him more boldly, her light fingers grazing then caressing the strained fabric over the underside of his twitching cock. She watched in trepidation and desire as he unbuttoned himself. Her gaze searched his, reflections in those dark eyes like stars, her own breath rising. 

He lifted her hand and brought it near, let her slip under his fly to know what was natural for a man. As she wrapped her fingers around his taut skin and brought him out, he felt an unimaginable yearning when he saw the look upon her face and his own size captured in her hold. 

“What do I do?” Her soft voice so curious, he felt guilty to answer, but he believed he had never wanted anything as much as he wanted her hand. 

“You stroke it.” 

Her eyes rounded when he spat on his fingers to slick himself, and then lightly curved her fingers on him, and gripped her moving down, and up, and the skin of his cock shifted under her grip so tight and good his leg twinged. 

She got up on her knees beside him. He let go of her and sat propped back on his hands, and closed his eyes at her next stroke underhand, like she was stabbing a blade into his gut, and his head nearly fell back. How different her grasp was from the hurried, efficient hand of a whore, knowledgeable as to the fastest way to a man’s peak. Instead, her hand was inexperienced but willing, and she had a searching look to her, like discovering something she vaguely knew deep down, and now had the reins of. Digging, finding his pleasure. Inconceivable to him. It aroused him completely.

Her teeth set avidly on edge as she tested her next stroke, longer, down on his base, and he thought his heart would stop as she leaned forward to collect a dewy measure of spit on her own fingers and slick him further. When her eyes flicked up to see the effect, his hips pumped and his stomach hardened with a sharp exhale, his heart suddenly pounding like he’d almost gone over the side. She released her grip, the warmth of her hand still radiating around him.

“Did that hurt?”

“No.” He panted a bit. “Don’t have to be very gentle.”

Christ, the explosion in him with her squeeze. His jaw fell open, his stomach seized again. She watched him as she stroked him harder, as she observed his breath, his tightening muscles, his rising tendons, his troubled face. Her big brown eyes watching him reach heights so sweet it seemed wrong a man should reach them alone. Seeing the gleaming, weeping head of his cock surfacing purple through the grip of her lithe fingers and thumb, he thought he must be slated to die next, having received the fulfillment of one of man’s most profound sights.

He thought, in the buzz of his full stimulation, to warn her, Hheid, I’m close -

“What now?”

He put his hand around hers through the final stroke, and his breath caught and her lips parted and she jumped a bit in shock as he came in his guarding hand, his hot spend dripping over her fingers, her wrist, until he felt drained, and dreaded to open his eyes and see revulsion in her face, half prepared to find himself alone. 

But she sat examining her hand, shining with his result, feeling it on the pad of her thumb. He hastened to put himself away and find his bandana and wipe her clean, but there was no disgust in her eyes. Haltingly, he lay down and she lay beside him. Without meaning to, he drifted to sleep, and woke in a rush, not knowing how long he’d been out. She was idly twisting a button on his vest.

"Was that how you like it?"

His fingers crawled through hers, tussled crablike with her for a second, and won, his hand capping her hand while he tried to think of something brash or clever to say, but only his brother’s voice came to him and he halfway flinched to get it out of his ears. 

Except this time by some mercy he caught her paying attention to him, dissolving all traces of Davey from his mind. Simply gone. And that clear mahogany gaze made him consider what he’d ever done right. He reached over and stroked her cheek with the back of his finger. “I loved you doin that to me.”

"Loved me?" Her eyes went wide and she playfully put her hand on her chest in shock, and he threw his arm around her and pulled her to him tight. He wanted to keep the sound of her laugh like a treasure.

“Suppose that is what I said.” 

She nestled herself closer yet. He stared up at the canvas shroud and hadn’t known there was an eternity to wish for himself until then.

The three of them slowed their horses by the church outside of town. Inside, the muffled singing of the faithful went on unaccompanied and plain. Late winter in that place was damp, chilly, brown, and for their part, aggravatingly fruitless as far as opportunities went. And it had put Dutch in a precarious mood.

Between Arthur and Hosea, he gazed up at the steeple of the church for a while before he dismounted.

“We’re stopping here?” Hosea dug his fist into the muscle of his lower back.

“Just a short visit - you can stay in your saddle, old boy.”

“What, you finally realized you needed savin?” Arthur waved out his match and smirked with his first drag.

Dutch walked across the road toward the church, waving his outstretched pointer fingers to conduct the muted song inside. “Maybe we could use a little divine intervention, Arthur. For all our empty luck.”

Hosea got down as Dutch’s path turned him toward the steps of the church, but then he veered to the right, into the churchyard, checking the headstones as he went, and Hosea stayed back by Arthur and the horses.

When Dutch appeared to recognize one of the headstones, he stood in front of it for a time, scanned the view from there as if judging their eternal settlement, or getting the feel of a person laid to rest in the plainness of those rolling hills, under a slate-gray sky. The congregation inside the church held the final note of their hymn. After an unsettlingly long silence, preacherly tones rose up, hollow and cautionary, enough to make a person feel guilty having done nothing wrong.

“Visiting an old friend?” Hosea picked his way over in the wet grass, Arthur straggling behind and reading epitaphs.

“My mother; I heard she’d been buried out here. Strange feeling, to see the evidence.” Dutch’s voice was flat, perhaps signaling a turn for the worse in his state of mind. A sharp breeze whisked through them.

“Never pictured you as a child, Dutch. Figured you was born at thirty-five and just stayed that way.” Arthur finished his smoke and pitched it into the grass.

“Figuratively, perhaps.” Dutch crossed his arms over his chest, checking the ring on his index finger. “Two weeks, gentlemen. Two weeks since we arrived in a town so corrupt it doesn’t know what to do with the new money being thrown around, and we have perhaps twenty dollars to show for it. I’m losing patience by the day.”

“The start of every new job has a hiccup where you think you lost your touch,” Hosea said as a sexton poked his head around the back of the church, and folded his hands in front of himself, looking somber, nudging Arthur to do the same. “But it always comes back to you, remember that.”

“We need a job to even get that far.”

“Maybe you ought to be the one to have some of that faith you’ve been preaching about.” 

“Very funny.” Dutch stalked back toward the horses, leaving them to follow. “Micah has the one halfway decent potential lead. The rest of you have some catching up to do.”

“Trust that snake and you’ll be lyin here next, Dutch. We all will.” 

Dutch reached The Count and rolled his neck and shoulders when he got up, too irritable to look at either of them. "You see a snake; I see a man with the right material to do what needs to be done. Spend a little less time in judgment, Arthur, you might do the same."

Hosea held onto his saddle horn, bracing himself before he got back up, and prepared to share a few words on the subject of judgment, but Dutch leaned up eager in his seat.

“What’s this now?”

Below them, close to town, all three of them took interest as Mac Callander rode in with a pretty girl perched behind him. He slowed to a trot, likely sooner than necessary, prolonging her tighter hold on him with the bounce. They’d all done it one time or another.

“Go get an eye on that, Arthur.” Dutch lifted a knuckle in their direction. “Doubt many leads are coming from that direction.”

Hosea batted his hand in the air. “Aw, let the boy have his fun -”

“And before you know it, she knows who we are. We can’t afford complications before we have so much as a plan.”

He got up and going with his last word like a dig of spurs, and led the way back to camp, riding with such irascible commands even The Count started to resist him. 

They lay together, just lay in the warmth of the wood stove and the glow on the canvas around them and the silent thrill they would get from a touch, a word, eyes meeting. He held her to his side, one hand behind his head, and thought about how he could get lumber to finish the walls. Lost in thoughts of a whole life that sprang from that.

“Does it feel the same for you as for me?”

He twisted his neck to peer at her.  “Does what?”

She blushed, and pushed her hip into his.

He settled back, cleared his throat. “I reckon.” Felt his own ears go red.

She lay quiet for a while, her head on his arm, and it was impossible not to notice her face, her eyes peering sideways up at the rafters that way she did, her mind always thinking. He pressed his hand on her lower back and she stretched closer, a little nip of curving gratification at the edge of her mouth.

Her voice was halting, experimental, when she asked, “And the same to…have relations?” She glanced up at him.

He tried not to smile. 

She dropped her gaze with a smirk of awareness. “Did I say something wrong?”

He scratched his cheek in thought and felt a roughneck to explain. “The people I know call it fuckin. Bein impolite.”

She gave a nod, lips pursed at her own naiveté. For a minute, scraping at her thumbnail, she seemed embarrassed. Then in the blush of the firelight, her proper neck straightening, settling on his arm, and her expression like discerning an unfamiliar sound, she seemed to mull it over. Her lips were the exact color of raspberries, was the only thought in his fool head when she asked,

“Do you want to fuck me?”

It was as if the floor dropped under him. Or the house came down around him, shrouding and tangling him. He coughed.

“Want to?”

She waited.

Jesus fucking christ, he felt wrong. Wronger than a weasel in a henhouse. Not to say it hadn’t been on his mind in all the time he’d known her. “Do you know about it?”

“I suppose.”

“I mean the workings.”

“Everyone knows that.”

She waited.

“What, now?”  

With her little shrug, her expression so sweet and hesitant and wanting, he forgot for a moment all the common prohibitions in the first place.

“Well shit, I’d…” No, he’d ruin it. The thought of her dismay at the plainness of the act was enough to dispirit a geyser. On the other hand, he supposed if he should have to leave soon, at least he would have a few minutes to look back on. No. 

“We should wait.” His disappointment felt damn near virtuous, a disagreeable sensation, like a buildup of pressure in his middle.

“Why?”

“You should think about it. Overnight at least. You might feel different.” Seemed a sensible enough idea.

She nodded slowly, her eyes somewhat narrowed at him. 

“You must think I didn’t think about it all last night.”

His poor heart.

And them in that ramshackle half-finished house. All pine board and bleached canvas walls waving flimsily on the breeze, glowing in the firelight under that sky. But the most spectacular sky he’d ever seen. He got up quickly, stepped past her so fast she seemed startled until he untied the rope holding back one of the tarps over the beams overhead, and the stars seemed to spray across the sky as the canvas pulled away.

Feeling cheap to offer her what anyone could see, he stood, his arms out, frowning at the plainness of the room. “It ain’t a bed of roses.”

“What a relief. The thorns and all,” she said a bit sly as she watched him feed another log in the stove, strip off his boots, come back to kneel by her. 

“Just, uh.” His voice shook slightly, and he cleared his throat. “Are you sure?” 

She raised her chin. Exposing the long mast of her throat.

For the image that arose in his mind, he was surely going to hell. He swallowed. “You’re one of them good girls.” 

“You’re going to make me start to think you don’t want to.” A hint of uncertainty came up rosy in her cheeks, her searching eyes.

He appealed to the judge above as if this was the sole evidence as to how he came to have no choice in the matter. All he saw were the multitude stars spread over the dark perse sky. And despite the questions fighting in his mind, why him, why now, he reckoned a person could learn not to question a chance so rare.

As she sat there with her head slightly tilted, her brown eyes somehow not despising, he feared to speak affection. In his life, it seemed to be the point at which the things he loved disappeared. Instead he moved closer and ran his knuckles down her soft cheek. Her eyes closed, she leaned into his touch. 

When he kissed her he felt a rogue or a thief to lean her back, to put his weight on her body, to slide back on her. To crawl between her legs, plowing her skirts out of his way, prying down her white drawers, in amazement at what was happening as he bridged up over her, and skimmed his growing erection against her. The soft sounds she made turned raw and dusky, as if she genuinely liked the feel of his change and wasn’t fooling. When he unbuttoned her blouse and kissed her breast and took her nipple in his mouth and sucked, her pretty moans shot through him like the grounding zip of wires.

Her hands left his back and traveled underneath, to his stomach, trembling as she felt for his fly. At each release of a button, a new thrill, a new haste, his hips rocking as she undid his union suit and her knuckles grazed him. He silently begged himself to hold on. But then her hand slid inside, found him rigid and hovering, and eased him out. He went goddamn swaybacked to feel his length laid on her belly.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

He swallowed. Took a few breaths and tried to recover while there she lay under him, gazing up, making it difficult. “More than alright.” And seeing her smile, he practically collapsed to kiss her.

The tacky friction of skin on skin and scratching hair hurt in a way he suddenly needed as he buried his shaft lengthwise between her lips, and when he felt a hint of slip at his base, his eyes rolled back. He groaned and nudged his dick back and forth to her own little thrusts that sought him.

He pulled up on her lower back, easily moving her, so that she rode down his ridge. Her slit so wet now, fucking christ he couldn’t slow. He rubbed his shining, pressured head there and let her feel it. Her chin lifted, exposing her throat, and her hum with that discovered pleasure destroyed him. How could anything sound so nice.

“Will it hurt?” she panted. 

“Suppose it might. A little,” he panted back. He had to close his eyes a moment. Hold his breath. Her entrance began to ring the tip of his head and he feared he wouldn’t be able to restrain himself much longer. 

“But I reckon there’s a reason folk keep at it,” he said tightly. He tried to smile on the side without the missing tooth.

She kissed him, and gasped against his cheek as he pushed inside her and she gripped the shirt at his back, her legs shaking. His cock quickly swelled in the snug pressure of her cunt. He had to hold still. Breathe. 

Did that hurt? he whispered.

Her head tipped back as she took a breath and didn’t speak at first. And her smile, when she was finally able to say No, firmed into his lips as he kissed her again. And she sighed a sound so pure he was beyond any point of redemption.  

He shoved her gently at first, and the canvas of the bedroll bunched underneath her, her skirts and the bedroll and the blanket together, and he felt solemnly he should not rush, he should bear up and prolong the act, and for a while they moved in the natural way of things, how he figured upstanding folk did it. Not like whores and the men who gladly abandoned their dignity to get off. Their foreheads rolled chastely together as he slid along her body and tried to catch her open mouth with his.

But soon he was hastening to the breaths he drew from her, chasing his high on every thrust. Rougher in his hold on her. Feeling depraved as he teased the rim of her cunt with his cock, hard as hickory and soaked in her slick, gliding out and goring in several times just to feel the squeeze through her inlet again.

The carnal current that started in his hips became a strong and uncontainable need, and on the slippery edge of the notion that he should take precautions, he was overcome. His back forced him down and he fucked his full length up into her. She quivered under him and whimpered his name, and that was all it took. 

With a strangled grunt, he poured himself inside her, long spurts that pulsed up from his balls and left him locked in the grip of the most intense pleasure he had ever felt, until he was slack-jawed and spent. 

He opened his eyes in the final softening twitches of his deed, realizing how close he held her. When he pulled out, the blood of her virtue marked him. Her chest rose and fell as she panted at the sky above. 

Then suddenly her lip trembled as her hand slid between her legs, and his heart simply cracked. And an old defensive anger in him began to rise; he thought he had prepared her. So love and frustration mixed in him in the tunnel of her silence and he was nearly ready to storm off in a temper when she turned her head to him, her eyes full of importance, or demand, or want beyond wanting, and she scattered his anger like a gust through fallen leaves.

“I’m sorry, I -” he started to say.

She grabbed his hand and he rocked off-balance when she planted it between her legs, breath rising and trembling, and he obeyed and plunged his two fingers inside her. Her hand curved behind his neck and pulled him to her, and she kissed him as her pelvis rolled forward with his deep extension inside her. She moaned against his lips.

When he straightened his wrist, she began to nod and bite her lip and whine a little as she endured the unstopping fuck of his fingers. His cum slid out thick and milky in his hand, glistening bright in her dark hair, and she watched feverishly as he fucked it back inside her. Suddenly her hips drove forward, rocking opposite his thrust, so rough that his knuckles surely bruised her; his spend and her slick drenched his palm and smacked against the rosy flaring petals of her cunt. She couldn’t keep up, and opened herself, gasping and keening in the neverending thrust. When it seemed like she couldn’t take any more, he hooked his fingers under her bone, and with a lurch and a ragged cry she came. Her body heaved into him. Her pink cunt clutched him over and over, and as it waned he withdrew and held her inner thigh.

She shut his wrist between her legs. Lay back panting at the stars. Weak and shaking like the newly born. In a blink of awareness, she turned her face to him. He ran his unarrested thumb over her lips and she kissed it, pressed there like a claim.

She was insatiable. 

He waited for her every afternoon by that unfinished house on the hilltop overlooking the lake. Caught her in the grass, fell gingerly on top of her. Fucked her within the privacy of their canvas walls, every way she wanted, ways he had never imagined. They made a bed on the floor of an old feather mattress he found that was not too musty. They would tie back the canvas of the shack on that tawny rise on the plains and lie there watching big purple storms rolling in. They talked of where they would go, and she told him about a place in California where the trees were so big you couldn’t ring them holding hands as ten of you. They picked raspberries, gave names to the grazing bison, and lay naked together relishing the ways they came alive to each other again and again. At dusk, she would dress, pin back her hair, kiss him once more, and leave him there to miss her.



The day she asked him to take her to the town social he nearly committed the mistake of hesitation. Shifting with that prickling sense that venturing beyond this secret place out in the open would make it vulnerable to what he knew lurked in town. She waited for his answer with growing confusion on her face until he kissed her and said he’d be proud to take her.

After a haircut and shave, he purchased himself a new shirt, what the tailor said was a modern print, in a dark blue, and had the boy outside the ferry station polish his boots. When he was finished, he walked to meet her, and picked a twig of crabapple blossoms. She was waiting for him at the gazebo in a peach-colored dress, and touched one of the blossoms to her lips with a smile. He stole a kiss before they turned the corner.

He turned in his guns at the booth and paid a quarter for their tickets and followed her in. Electric lights crossed overhead in the trampled courtyard where barrel tables were set up on the margins to make room for the dancing, and a string band on a small platform off to the side played lively tunes, and he felt anonymous and he felt free among strangers to be seen accompanying Miss McCourt and not looking a brute. And though he didn’t know the steps, she taught him, and dancing with her under the golden lights, he could’ve been any shop owner, he could’ve been a carpenter or rancher, and considered those ideas of a life like selecting a proper shirt.

She declared she was thirsty, and had to sit for a minute, and so he went to get some lemonade while she kept their place at one of the little tables. He waited in a line at the booth and glanced back, appreciating the fine sight of her in the glow of the lights, and passed by the figure in the shadows leaning against the wall.

“Didn’t know you was such a good dancer, Mackenzie.”

He whipped to his left and glared, and stepped out of line. “Fuck off, Morgan.”

Arthur smirked dryly as he stared out at the lake turning rose-colored in the late evening. “Aw, lighten up.” He shook out two cigarettes and held one up, his head cocked in an expectant truce, and Mac took it, slipping over to the wall out of sight.

Morgan shared his match and eased back against the wall, one boot up on it, and they stood shoulder to shoulder under the photographer's shingle. 

“You’re missed in camp.”

He snorted. “They send you to spy on me, that it?”

Arthur shrugged. “What did you expect? Folk start to wonder when you ain’t come around in a while.” He smoked, and nodded toward the corner. “Now it all makes sense.”

“Is there talk?”

“There’s always talk.”

“I won’t have her bothered by any of them.”

“Now it’s them, is it?”

He glared but could not deny it, and Arthur kept up his swagger long enough to make his point.

“No one’s gonna bother your sweetheart. I'll tell em you found a good poker table. Or if they do cause a problem, say the word. Maybe I’ll get to drown Micah in that lake after all. Or your dear brother.”

“He behavin himself?”

“Do you wanna know?”

The lightness in him went out. Mac shook his head. He had no stomach to finish his smoke, and ground it out under his boot. “I gotta get back.” He pushed off the wall, found no place for his hands without his gun belt, and felt gawky facing Arthur that way, who stood perfectly still and waiting. “I’m gettin out soon. It’s my news to tell Dutch and Davey, not yours.”

Arthur nodded. “Course, brother.” He blew a stream of smoke out at the lake. “Happy for you.”

“Alright then.”

It was strange, formal, Arthur reaching out to shake his hand, looking him in the eye with his grasp, more serious than he usually saw him. “You know what you’re doin?”

“Much as anyone.”

“Need money?”

“I got some money.”

“She pregnant?”

“Fuck off.”

He shrugged. “Better know what you’re gettin yourself into.”

“Why do you care?”

Arthur harshly sucked his last drag and dropped it, stepped on the end, sniffed. At the time, Mac didn't make much of him not meeting eyes. “Just do the right thing. You get one chance or you spend your life makin up for it. I’m sayin as your brother.”

He nodded, sullen, and Arthur nodded, and Mac watched him walk up the street toward Georgia and the light behind him cast a tarnished gleam, like a secret exposed to air, and a familiar melancholic desertion awakened inside as he paid five cents for a tumbler of lemonade and carried it back to where she sat, so pretty and lively, laughing across the table as someone called out to her, joking back. What she was doing, taking to a bitter failed man like himself, he felt suddenly suspicious to wonder. 

When he sat beside her, she leaned toward him, propped her chin on her fist. “I started to think you’d got lost.” But she smiled, and her smile faded as he stared distantly in her eyes, and all around them blurred the dancers and the muted song.

“What’s the matter?”

He rubbed his eyes. “I thought maybe I ought to take you home.”

Her forehead gathered in consternation. “We just got here.”

“Your father will be upset if you’re out late.” Though they hadn’t been careful in weeks. His heart felt tight, ready to split like trampled fruit.

Two dancers stumbled too close and he flinched and she playfully shoved them back out toward the floor, smiling as they swung away, then turned back to him and put her hand on his. He nearly drew away.

“I don’t want to go home tonight,” she whispered.

“Heidi,” he started, but had to clear his throat.

“Mac.”

“We can’t keep at this.”

The first hint of hurt threatened her face. “At what?” 

He picked at the rough weathered grain of the tabletop. Wanted to stab his knife into it so deep he couldn’t wrench it out again. “I ain’t told you everything.” His voice shook. 

She sat still for a time in the glare of those wire-gutted bulbs, passing a glance all around them, and drew her hands to her lap, and sat up straighter. “Then you better tell me everything.”

He felt too warm there, under the lights, all them dancers jostling and the music loud and the fiddling shrill. But she was the one who stood, and held out her hand, knowing everyone around them would see when he stood and reluctantly took it, and she led him past the dancers, and out under the banner, and across the street to the dark gazebo away from all that festivity. And made him sit, and sat beside him. In the failing light, the dark shapes of ships across the lake seemed to move toward slow, inevitable collisions.

After a while, she reached for his hand and he could not bear to feel her touch and pulled his hand away. She huffed.

“Now you really have to tell me everything.”

Where would a man begin. Her father, a man of the law. What a cruel joke, like his fucking luck. If it meant he would hang, he figured he would prefer it to living the rest of his days denied this one thing that had ever mattered to him. A memory of a time when he was a different man came to mind. He’d stood at a door, knowing lawmen waited outside, and checked his guns, and nodded at his brother. Somehow that had begged less courage than this. He summoned a breath and spoke, facing out at the water.

“My name ain’t Shelton. And I ain’t only passin through.”

She waited. He felt the volume of every breath she drew and exhaled, changing the atmosphere between them like the sundown sky. His rough hands clasped in the span between his knees like he was shackled already.

“I’m an outlaw, Heidi. There’s a price on my head.” 

Still, she said nothing, and maybe she was panicking inside, maybe about to burst into tears while he sat there wondering what damage a confession could do to a kind and good person.

“And you can hate me, turn me in, do what you got to. But I loved you, and that was always true.”

He wiped his cheek on his shoulder.

She must have been sad to hear it, not to say heartbroken. Maybe her feelings were never matched to his. 

“You don’t love me now?” Her voice was a test. Steady and clear.

That thought alone tormented him more than the thought of a rope around his neck. “You make me worth somethin.” He dropped his head to his hands, pressed the heels of his palms in his eye sockets to stave off the crush of loss.  “I love you so much I’ll die for it. I would rather hang than disgrace you.” All the times he wished he could fall through the earth, never more than then.

“And I love you.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“I heard you.”

“I’m a wanted man.”

“You ever kill anybody you meant to?”

“Never in cold blood.”

She sniffed. Her fingers curled tightly around each other. “Acts toward women?”

His stomach turned, that she’d think it, that she was within all rights to. Of his brother, he couldn’t say the same. “Never.” He looked down. “Them few I been with was willin, I’m sorry to speak of it,” he mumbled. “You oughta know.”

She bore his truth with a deep breath, slowly letting it out. “I never deluded myself, thinking I was your only.” 

A ferry gleaming firelike on the lake glided on its course, no telling how near or far away it was in the dark.

She spoke as she faced the lake. “If you could get far enough away, could you leave it behind you?” 

And god damn hope. What it could lead a desperate man to do, risking more than his own self.

“By myself, bein honest, I’d do no better.”

He startled when she pulled his hand away from his face, feeling repulsive, as if he’d stain her in soot to be touched. But warmth spread through him as she shelled his fist within her hands. “Well you wouldn’t be by yourself.”



 


 



Six hundred and forty acres. 

A channel of prairie land rolled out southwest of town, bronzed yet from the grasses of last year, not softened by the new spring. A small herd of bison rested in the distance, a few rare and impressive specimens who had not been shot with all the rest in the years when the whole western plains smelled of rotting flesh and horrific mounds of skulls stood twice as tall as the wagons passing by them. 

It had been that long since Hosea had been back in this region, and now the rotting flesh was gone, and a succession of weathered telegraph poles and weathered surveyor’s stakes plotted a direct course through it, as if carried on waves to the horizon, though nothing more had been done in some years. 

And right in the middle of a square mile of land in the middle of the surveyor’s field, on a gentle hump in the land, stood a curious little house. Modest even if it were finished, but downright squalid in its current state, three of its walls still canvas, and weathered and bleached by a succession of harsh seasons, frayed on its loose edges and appearing to breathe in the breeze, bloating and sucking in. Lit within like a sunwarmed peach by the two souls that not long ago had slipped inside carrying a lantern, to his great interest.

He turned when he heard a horse slowing up, and waved at Arthur dismounting.

“You just wanted to take in a pretty view together, did you?” Arthur yawned as he let down Georgia’s reins and turned around, stretching his back.

“Got a prettier one for you. That real estate deal in town - the one you could smell a scam on high as fish bait - might actually pay out.”

He waited for his full attention, which took some time as Arthur clamped his tobacco pouch under his arm and set about rolling a quirly. “That so?”

“Some development firm in Saint Denis I’ve been hearing about bought up a huge piece of land west of Blackwater years ago, anticipating a railroad. Word is, they’ve been negotiating with Cornwall’s people for it. The area’s already surveyed, got enough timber stacked up to lay track all the way to Armadillo. The land agent out here is, naturally, happy to cater to millionaires and their money. Who never noticed or never cared he’s double-dealing, reselling it in parcels on counterfeit deeds to a bunch of poor immigrants and settlers who haven’t made it out here yet.”

“What’s the angle?”

“Blackmail, my first thought. But there’s an interesting snag.” He pointed down the straight line marked by posts and stakes along the route, to the little house on the hill. “That little piece of construction there is a holdout. Sits on a square-mile claim, smack dab in the middle of the surveyed area. Ain’t been touched in two years. Owned by an Armand Gallier of Saint Denis. There’s a patent deed in Gallier’s wife’s name. Recently deceased. I have to admire the balls it takes to stand in the way of a railroad.”

“Why’s he stopped?” Arthur’s voice was muffled as he tipped his head to light his smoke, and waved out the match.

“Waiting for the right price, my guess. Or forgotten. Or scamming more innocent folks.”

“You thinkin of workin both angles?”

“Perhaps. We’ll squeeze our share from the local agent for now; I’ve an appointment with him Monday. Considering Cornwall, barreling as he is up north through Indian territories, I don’t mind the thought of keeping him hanging on some legal hooks. All that money that’s supposed to be coming in on that ferry threatens to pave the way in both directions.”

“What’s my part in all this?” Arthur gazed out at the line of telegraph poles stretching as far as the eye could see.

“Why, you,” Hosea announced, taking a wide step toward him and clapping his meaty arm, jostling him, “are an immigrant farmer from Austria-Hungary, recently arrived.”

 “Wish I hadn’t asked.” His face went lax, unamused.

 “Not a word of English,” he continued with the same gusto.

“Hosea.” 

“Takes a certain kind of character to come across an ocean on a hope, and you were always a bit of a fool and a daredevil.”

Arthur looked at him dryly, as if he had expected anything different. 

“And he’s about to learn that the deed in his possession to the plot of land he purchased from the agent in New York is fraudulent.”

“Get Strauss to do it.”

“Even he would say you can be more convincing.”

He wrinkled his nose and glared off at the little house in the distance. “I’m wearin my own clothes at least.”

“Of course not. I’ve got your setup in town - here’s your key to a room at the saloon - do you think you can manage not to speak to anyone, or do I have to put you in a tent among the settlers camped up by town?” 

“What’s German for whiskey?”

“Not one word.”

He sighed, and snatched the key, less irritated than he let on, getting to stay in town and all. He turned it over in his hand. “Dutch needs to talk to you, back at camp. Callin everyone in ahead of this ferry job.”

“He’s welcome to come and lodge his disgruntlement any time.”

“You’ll be waitin a while.” Arthur mounted up and leaned on his saddle horn viewing out over the lake to the east.

Hosea groaned lightly as he hoisted his boot in the stirrup and hopped to pull himself up on Silver Dollar, and rolled his cracking, aching neck around. “Then while I’m waiting, I’m going to enjoy a bath, a hot meal, and a bed.”

He waved Arthur past him on the road.

“After I have a little talk with the squatters.”

“Need backup?”

“No, I think I can handle this one.”

He trotted up the hill toward the humble shack. Being within, those two could not see the lantern they made on that hillside against the jeweled evening sky. Simple canvas glowing, two silhouetted souls. He made as much noise as he could, approaching. Inside, a hush, the clatter of someone getting up. Boots on the floor. 

Hosea dismounted and one by one pulled off the fingers of his gloves, listening to the whispers inside.

Then the click of a hammer cocking back.

“Who’s there?” Mac’s voice was harsh and big, a working tone, effective at motivating stragglers, holdups, his donkey-headed brother.

“Put your gun away and get out here.”

Mac ducked his head between the canvas sheets and his eyes shot open wide when he saw Hosea. Somewhat mortified, he eased out, still buttoning his shirt. “What’re you doin here?” he whispered.

“So this is where you’ve been off to.” Hosea pointed with his clutch of gloves at the shack. “Seen better days.”

Mac glanced behind him and walked farther away from the shack, and Hosea followed after a few paces, humoring him.

“I want out, Hosea, that's the long and short of it. I'm takin her and goin to California and I won't hear one word -”

“Cool it, son, I'm not going to stop you.”

Mac opened his mouth and shut it. Took half a step as his bluster died. “Well what’d you come out here for?”

“You look like you’re trying to keep the damn moon a secret.” He nodded at the glow of the shack upon the hill in the dwindling light.

“Well I didn’t expect anyone else out watchin in the middle of nowhere. Careful, there’s buffalo shit.” He rubbed his neck and squinted up at him cautiously. “Dutch?”

“No. Not yet.”

The boy sighed a whole containment of unease.

“You got anything else to tell me about it?”

Just as quickly, it seemed to build up again. Mac ran his hand hard down his face, turned as if somewhere outside that western rim of distant mountains he might find some kind of peace. And told him they thought she was with child.

Hosea nodded soberly. “What have you got?” 

“About thirty-five.”

“Jesus what have you been doing this whole time? That’s not nearly enough.”

“Hosea I ain’t askin for help.”

“You’ll need it, no asking to it." He watched the boy's strong shoulders stoop somewhat as he avoided Hosea's attention and fixed his mind on the dark teeth of the distant range. "I’ll see what I can scrounge up. Don’t do anything yet.”

“The ferry job’s comin up. I can -”

“Ain’t worth the risk. I’ve got another deal that will pay, just gotta wait until Monday. Can you hold out? Make yourself scarce?”

“Yeah.” He shakily rubbed his forehead. “Just…”

“Worry about yourself. And her. You got bigger matters on your mind. Let me take care of it.”

“You don’t gotta do that.”

He realized, then, feeling drained with pity, as Mac avoided looking him in the eye, the boy was embarrassed. His only life for some years had been spent earning and putting into the camp till. Keeping little. Bailing his brother out time and again. No time to earn for himself, not enough to count, nor energy, after all else, to build something of his own. Now this fool’s errand that trapped them all in waiting, by that new seduction in Dutch’s ear, promising the future.

“Ah.” Hosea batted the air and put his gloves back on, and cleared his throat, coughed. Damn damp air by that lake. “Bessie and I never had a family or I’d’ve stayed out. You got something worth living right for.” He poked his chest to get his attention. “So you must.”

Mac bobbed his head, facing down. Sniffed. “I know.” And he looked up, resolved, and nodded.

He would think back later on the sight of Mac walking toward that radiant shack and its innocent life inside, with his big shoulders stooped, and wonder if he should have been more forceful in telling him to stay away or if, by meddling, he had ignited an old fire. If, somehow, any influence at all from the gang, no matter who by, placed a certain pressure on the kid’s head, to do everything, keep everyone afloat, out of duty or loyalty, or fear. That, left alone, he would have done right. He would think back and consider what would have happened if he had given him money right then, everything he had. Given him Silver Dollar. Sent them on their way that very night. What else might have happened in Blackwater, if anything at all.

Late the next morning, Mac rode into town warmed by her chest against his back, her arms around his waist, her cheek against his shoulder, her eyes tired but full of bliss, the ring on her finger plain. Gold. He reasoned he would buy her a new one, not stolen from a trembling finger on some train, as soon as they were settled. For now, the promise was more important. He gave her a kiss before she opened the door to the bakery and she flashed her hand at him as she went inside; her smile beamed brighter.

He stepped back, his mind busy at the thought of when the camp would be quietest and he could collect his things, encountering no chitchat or endless questions as to his whereabouts. Arthur could ride out for days, sometimes weeks, without complaint. He figured he could argue the same for himself. When he turned, he stopped as short as his own heart. His brother leaned against the wall in the alley, facing him.

Davey grinned like some jesting harbinger of death. “Hello.” Then his grin fell like the last little cup of sand draining in an hourglass, and in a clap of movement they scuffled. When Mac tried to dodge, his knee buckled and Davey easily wrestled him around the neck and shoulders, defenseless. 

“I see what you been up to now, what a fine soft peach that is for such a little worm,” he drawled.

“Get the fuck off, Davey.” He grappled at the arm squeezing his windpipe. “Ain’t any business of yours.”

“Oh it rightly is, honey. It sure is. A brother counts on his own to watch his back when it’s needed. Haven’t been able to count on you in some time.”

“It hasn’t needed watchin.”

“Dutch wants to see you, as you ain’t been around so much. Some of us wasn’t sure you was even part of the gang anymore. After so long, a man deserves an explanation.”

“That’s mine to handle -” Mac’s voice was cut off by a sharp jerk from his brother.

“You had enough time, though, ain’t you.”

Something herbal and cloying emerged on his brother’s breath, a new dope that gave him the appearance of being half-asleep and amused at most things, bored and cynical and a mind made up as to the darker motivations haunting a man’s every choice. There was no room for understanding in his brother’s eyes. 

So he put up no further resistance as Davey pulled him to his feet and shoved him toward Sookie, and rode with him out of town, those couple of hours, across that rocky river ford, and up the hill into camp. 

Heads turned when they saw him, and the camp was quiet with preparations underway. Sean standing watch was grim as they passed, Javier too. Jenny greeted them dismissively, and veered out of the way of Davey when he jumped down and tried to have a word between them. 

His brother shoved him toward the tent, and Mac limped, stretching his leg as he walked, through the middle of camp, where the guns were cleaned and laid out, and Jenny and Lenny sat together at the table studying a map of the ferry and glanced up as he passed, and Bill knelt by the carriage tightening the brackets of the hubs and hardly raised his eyes but to glare, briefly, grudging as ever. 

Mac stopped a few feet from the wide opening feeling as exposed as a rabbit in a grassy field, cradled in the dovetail of iron sights. Near the tent, Miss O’Shea hurried out and blew past him, fighting tears and so furious that she bumped his arm and said nothing.

“Mac.” Dutch spoke his name without the warmth of familiarity, closing his book over his finger as he looked up. Mac figured he couldn’t expect more from him. In the chair opposite Dutch sat Micah, a blunt and unwelcoming stare on his wan face, but he sat up when Davey ambled in and offered him a smoke.

“Dutch.”

“How’s that poker table paying out?”

“Some days it pays. Some days it takes.”

“A lot like life sometimes, ain’t it.”

“I guess so.”

“We’ve missed you, planning.”

“I’m real sorry about that, Dutch.”

“It’s alright, son. But I need my best guns around setting the example. Doing the legwork. Taking the reins. It’s a big job in two days. We need everybody.”

“What about Arthur?”

“And you on safe duty and Davey manning the docks, keeping an eye out for any complications. All this time you been spending in town, by now you’re well familiar with those complications?”

“Of course.” But he was never sure of Dutch’s meaning. 

“People are always the biggest complication. Unpredictable in a tense situation, as you know.”

“Right you are.”

“This is a professional job, my boy. Not any paltry stagecoach, not a small-town bank. This is real money we’re talkin about. It holds the promise of things we’ve only dreamed about until now. And cash like that comes heavily guarded. So I need every man we have and his full mind on the matter at hand. No doubts. No hesitation. We don’t let up until we are well on our way, no matter what gets in our path.”

“Yes Dutch.”

He struck a match and his mouth popped on the end of his cigar as he coaxed the flame to catch and crackle into an ember. He waved it out. Through the thick curl of smoke that poured up his face from his open mouth, he stared at Mac, expressionless. As if he knew.

Mac’s heart thrashed in his chest like a trapped squirrel. 

“See you tomorrow at the docks.” Dutch kept his hands on his knees, and sat there very still, all-seeing, like a king surveying the field of the battle to come and feeling smiled upon.

He backed away feeling watched, as if his twisted insides showed through his skin. When Micah stood, his muscles jumped, ready to fight to the death. But Micah merely reached into his billfold and pulled out a slip of paper, a ticket aboard the Colonel McKnight, and handed it to him. 

“There’s your invitation. Board on your own, tomorrow, between noon and quarter after. Go to the saloon and wait.”

He walked to his tent and saw no friendly face, but he did not want to talk to anyone. Even John only glanced at him sideways and turned back to his bowl of stew. In his tent, he sifted through his trunk, his gun locker, his small chest of old clippings and trinkets and reminders of times that mattered little to him anymore. In the end, he packed some clothes in a saddlebag, and chose not to take his heavy coat to avoid questions. Not even a photograph. Then he got to his mare as fast as he could get without drawing attention, and fastened on his saddlebag.

The snap of a twig behind him made him leap near off his skeleton.

Davey stood by the edge of the trees, smoking, and raised his eyebrows when Mac turned, his fingers splayed out from the grip of his right gun.

“Whoa, skittish ain’t you.”

“You know I hate bein snuck up on, you asshole.”

“Now hey now. I only want a word, me to you.”

Mac held Sookie’s reins and she minced a bit, and showed him the whites of her eyes. He shushed her.

Davey swiped his nose, and hung his thumbs on his belt. “I know we ain’t always got along, and I’m to blame for some of that, bein difficult, I will own it.”

Mac stared dead off to the side.

“This job. Like Dutch says. Gonna take all of us. We need your hand on the safe. Javier is good, but even he says no one cracks a safe like you, nor faster. Hell, even I’ll admit it,” he joked, stupidly; his way of joking spared no one. “And Arthur, well,” he shrugged. “Seems he went and found himself another occupation. So we need every extra gun.”

“Make your point and fuck off, Davey.”

“That cute little kitten you got on your arm, I got an eye on her.” 

No wildfire matched the sudden rage in his heart.

“So I’m gonna make this plain for you, my brother - no surprises, no misunderstandings.” 

He sauntered closer, his hands held out appeasingly.

“You do this job tomorrow like you’re told. Then you can go on your happy way. No one will count on you no more.”

He stopped, and took a fistful of Mac’s collar, and dragged him up close until he saw the flecks of tobacco spit flecked in his blond mustache and the scar from his lip to his cheek he had given him as a boy, when Davey had one of his violent spells, blaze-eyed, uncontrollable, as if possessed, and now mostly overgrown by his beard.

“You don’t,” he said, his eyes going cold in threat. “That’ll be the biggest mistake you ever made. I won’t just track you down. I will be in every shadow you see. Every knock on your door.”

And Mac wrenched Davey’s collar harder, jerked him close, off balance, even as Davey put a hand on his gun, even as Davey’s boots squared up to fight, and made himself clear too. “You lay a hand on her, you won’t know what killed you.”

Davey snorted, then chuckled, his eyes wide in mocking fear until he let him go, and smirked to watch Mac back away trying not to limp or grunt as he mounted his mare and left.

He checked behind himself the entire way, and when he reached the shack and found her there, he threw his arms around her shoulders and couldn’t let go. 

She laughed a little into his sleeve. “What’s got into you?”

“Has anyone come by here?”

“No -”

He stood her back from him to see the truth in her face. “Anyone at all? You see anyone around?”

“I haven’t - why are you angry?”

He flinched away in self-disgust and unclenched her upper arms, but she stepped with him.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothin,” he said, and he would wonder why. 

“Something’s got you all up.” She picked up the fold of his collar. Ran her fingers over the nub of thread where a button was now missing. She noticed the taut shape of his lips, and his cracking, restless hands, and her face was not fooled.

“Must’ve got spooked.”

“You’re a terrible liar, I’m coming to find.”

He hooked a strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s just a matter I need to see to. By Monday evening, we can leave. Can you be ready by then?”

She nodded, but even the thrill of leaving didn’t break the worry in her eyes. She let her fingers slide down the placket of his shirt, pausing on each button. As if to decipher them in some way like the first.

“You’re in a sweat.”

“Long ride -” He rested his forehead on hers. When he closed his eyes he briefly thought he heard his brother’s voice, singing an old tune. He stiffened, listening, but caught no singing on the breeze.

“I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong.”

He was already burying his face in her hair, the smell that gave him solace like sunlight. His mouth sought her neck, then roughly kissed her jaw, her cheek, until she turned to him and he could have her mouth he needed, he burned for. Her tongue slid in and rooted for his, live and strong. By the time he broke away, he could hardly breathe.

She held his face in her hands. She wrapped her arms around him. Can we disappear she mouthed to his ear and kissed and sucked a place on his neck.

One more day. He capped her soft head and slid his hand down her neck and didn’t notice they were swaying until his knee twisted and pained him. Her quick hand caught his side to steady him, and her touch stayed on him, guided him back a step. Another. 

He tugged her blouse up from her waistband and lifted it off over her head, and undid the buttons at her skirt as he sat on the chair, and at her sweet swollen breast he kissed and suckled like he had a need beyond what he could control. One, the other. Holding her, bearing each in both hands in turn, consuming her softness as if it could be taken away otherwise. He came off her deep pink nipple, shining wet and hardened from the chill, and drew that delicate nub down his face, to feel her on his cheek, the slope of his nose, his eyelid, his brow, before he pushed the chair away and sank to her feet, baring her stomach and resting his forehead on her belly, and kissed her, and held her there.  

Her fingers spread through his hair. 

He cleared his aching throat. “Are you feelin alright?” His face crumpled briefly and he hid himself against her skin.

“I’m fine.” Her voice was patient with concern, and she lowered to her knees before him, and took his face in her hands and kissed him. And again. Their heads pitched the other way as if they could consume each other more deeply.

He writhed out of his jacket, his vest and suspenders, leaving her mouth only when he had to and finding her again like a magnet. When she reached under to push her skirt down her hips, she brushed him and her hand lingered, and he blinked and breathed up at the canvas as if he’d come to in a cloud. He guided her to their mattress and took her down with him, lay her naked beneath him, her legs already parted around his waist. By then her hands were opening his fly and when she stroked him he was painfully hard and starting to rut slightly against her hands working at the buttons, and his head ached for the slip of her raw skin.

A terrible dread swept his guts like a wound. Though he tried to concert himself, she lay so open there, some two months full of his child, unguarded, and reached up to stroke his face. Everything he had in the world. 

The canvas walls flapped loudly in a sudden gust like a great and flightless bird.

In a reflex, he wrenched her by the hips and turned her under him, caged her with his arms and body, and hugging the slope of her back he pushed inside her. He fucked her until his only thought was of the frantic sighs she made and he kissed her sideturned face, breathless, and he came. And slowed. He lay heavy on her back until he could move, and stiffly got off to lie at her side but he kept his hand on her hip.

Tomorrow, he told her, as they wove their fingers together. Get everything packed and on his horse. Best stay out of town. On Monday he would meet her here at their makeshift house, where she would be waiting. Take no chances. Ride west overnight. Cross the Montana. From there, wherever she wanted to go. Wherever in the world. That place in California where the trees were so big you couldn’t ring them with your arms, even holding hands as ten of you.

 

 


 



There would be talk of a man who resembled Trelawney, but he had been in Saint Denis for months and had no plans in the area. 

Newspapers would report on the sighting of famed gunslinger Landon Ricketts. Where such information, or even hearsay, had come from, no one in the gang could account for. By some citizens’ recollections, he had been on the ferry itself. By others, he was merely passing on the road, and dashed in to aid the Pinkertons before leaving, not waiting to receive their thanks.

Rumors spread of a young man walking through town -  no, riding - carrying two leather bags in his hands or strapped to his saddle. Dark blond he was, some recalled - no, brown. It was from those rumors that word eventually spread that the cache from the ferry job had been hidden somewhere on the outskirts of town. Gardens were excavated. Cellars ransacked. Attics searched and searched again. Everyone turned amateur treasure hunter in the hysteria of the moment.

Someone in the gang thought Sean had jumped overboard, but Charles, who was nearest to him in the engine room, had turned away when they were fired upon, seared his hand on the door to the boiler, and lost track of him. Jenny had been caught against the outer wall when the shooting started. Javier, who carried her out of town, had not noticed when she stopped breathing, and had to stay out of sight with her by the side of the road until he could recover enough to keep going. 

John had complained when Davey brought a girl on board right from the start, a young woman looking nervous and roughed-up, a bruise on her cheek, but she remained silent, and stood defiant in Davey’s grasp, and why he’d done it, no one knew. He’d kept her fast in his grip, even when Micah asked what the fuck he was thinking, and uttered the word guarantee. Micah could not further clarify. Only that the girl was the start of their trouble, and it was the path they had gone down, and barely escaped with their own lives. Javier recalled thinking it strange, that she had tried to run back onto the ferry, but then there were Pinkertons everywhere, and bullets began to fly like a rain of burning sulfur.

When asked, Dutch would say nothing on the subject.

It was around one in the afternoon that Sunday as Hosea and Arthur were standing casually across the street from the land office when the shooting started. Where Arthur had been sullen in his itchy woolen clothing, badly playing his part, once they heard the first pops of gunfire, he changed. Hosea felt a jolt to his heart to witness it. How deadly serious he became, but calm, his quick eyes and quick mind. Checking all corners. All windows on the street around them as he gripped Hosea's shoulder. "Get to Dutch. I’ll find the others, meet you on the road." In one motion, it seemed, he had swung up onto Georgia, and she cumbered in her hind legs and shot down the street; it was a sight to see.

“They were waiting for us.” Dutch gasped at the cellar door and dropped two heavy leather bags at Hosea’s feet. He held himself up by his knees as Hosea keyed the lock. “Goddamn waiting.”

“How in the hell do you think they knew?”

“I ain’t sure of anything right now. We’ll have to see who makes it back. Christ, we’ve never had so many guns shooting at us. It was a massacre.” Blood-flecked and damp with sweat, he leaned against the brick, still breathing hard, and stared at the blade of sky overhead. “What’s done,” he mused, leaving a strange silence that made Hosea look up. “It had to be done.”

“You never had to go through with it.” Hosea jiggled the lock open and kicked in the door. 

He caught Dutch eyeing him up and down, that peculiar inner stillness in his features that appeared when he was haughty and feeling someone had missed his point.

But Dutch appeared to stow his thoughts, and wiped his face on his sleeve and checked his guns. “Get to camp soon as you can, or meet us at the fallback. I’ll get everyone packing up. Once word spreads, the entire region will be locked down, crawling with bounty hunters, I will promise you that. I give us half a day, if we’re lucky.”

“I’ll head back when the coast is clear. Watch after yourself.” 

Hosea’s hand was wrenched in Dutch’s hard handshake, his friend’s eyes wide and searching. Like he had passed through fire unscathed and couldn’t fathom it. Agitation that had never been present before. The blood-smeared features of his face still flared with exertion, the frenzy of escape, the certain excitement that chased it at the first hint of safety, and he clapped Hosea firmly on the shoulder before he released him and left down the alley, his gun drawn. 

For one unbelievable moment it seemed they were going to get away with their lives, botched job be damned, and Dutch’s stride, always so cocksure even in times like this, made him shake his head. 

He threw the second bag down into the cellar, about to head down to get it stored, when a figure stumbling in the street stopped in the frame of the alley, staring far away. Just stopped. By his profile he recognized Mac. No one had ever looked so lost.

“Jesus christ, son, get out of the street!”

Mac swiveled his head.

Hosea ran and yanked him out of plain sight, and the man could hardly keep his legs under himself. Soaked to the bone. Unarmed.

As Mac dropped to his knees, he grabbed Hosea’s vest, and Hosea crouched there facing him, dragged down by his weight.

“Breathe, son, you hurt?”

Dazed, Mac shook his head. A hole in the outer thigh of his jeans squelched in a little swell of blood.

“You been hit, Mac - anyone else?”

Mac stared ahead like the magnitude of his answer was beyond man’s ability to speak, and he began to heave breath again.

“Who? Wake up, now -” He smacked his face, spoke sharply.

He just turned his face to him and he crumpled, holding his head in his hands.

Hosea glanced from Mac back up the empty alleyway, and to the street. Then he yanked him upright, and hurried him back down the cellar steps and through the door and down the staircase where that single bulb burned. While Hosea raided the workbench there for something to bind his wound, Mac patted his chest, and reached in and pulled out a stack of wet bonds, and holding them became enraged and whipped them against the wall, and a gritted sob bled through his teeth, bowed him over, scoured his throat like sand. 

Hosea grabbed him by the neck and pulled his head to his shoulder, halfway to smother the sound as Mac shattered with rage and his leg gave out and he slumped heavy in his arms. And told him what he feared he had somehow known the second Dutch walked away.

“Hold onto it, hold onto it, hold onto it,” he heard himself speaking in his ear. He held him, petted his wet hair and gripped his neck and felt the weight of grief in Mac’s weakening frame. There had to be a reason for it. No reason would make sense of it to this man.

Up on the street outside, panicked voices. A galloping horse rushing past and fading. Hosea set Mac upright and looked around.

“Jesus christ, you dumb kid.” Hosea swiped the stack of bonds up from the floor, twisted around to search their immediate surroundings, opened the trash can and rooted around before he pulled out a brown paper bag, fed the bonds inside, and stuffed it back inside Mac’s shirt, giving it a rough pat. “Keep that hidden; god knows you’ll need it.”

As Mac sank to the floor, Hosea pointed at him sharply. “Stay in this room. Do not move from this place, you hear? I’m coming back.”

Hosea would think many times about that moment, his decision to leave him there, whether he had missed something Mac had said or some detail in his face showing he did not hear him, but for all the times he reflected on it, in the end there could be no other outcome.

The purity of a man’s choice, when everything had been taken from him, seemed like something he should learn from.

When Hosea was gone, Mac wept. He grabbed at his empty holster and wept harder, his forearm over his eyes as he knelt there breaking, seeing her face, seeing the spray of blood from her face. 

And felt the suck of breath he’d drawn before the crack of a gun split his heart in half. Her name he’d screamed and his unconscious running before the guard barreled into him and they plunged overboard. Gunfire had thundered like running footsteps overhead as he struggled to get back to the air, his guns lost, hat gone, and shock beginning to take hold like ice in his veins. He didn’t remember surfacing, and he didn’t remember getting to shore, and the sound came back to his ears as he woke to himself beating the guard off him in the mud at the water’s edge, beating him senseless, slamming his head on a flat rock before he staggered up and away. He had limped through town not knowing where to go.

In the quiet cellar he listened. Whistles echoed shrill up in the streets, the bell of the fire wagon, some shouts, some running steps. But they faded.

Slowly, he got up. Feeling as if he floated. He moved like a man half-dead already.

Such a bright day, like all his days there, and distant sounds of violence and the faces watching him pass made no difference to him as he walked up the alleys to where Sookie was hitched. Numb with shock as he went out of town to their place on the hill.

The canvas flapped free in the breeze like an abandoned place. A sail that had lost its hold of the wind.

He sat on the single chair in the shelter that had been theirs so briefly. The canvas-colored light changed little through the hours. His clothes gradually dried. His wound throbbed. A fleeting view of the flat and constant lake appeared every time the canvas on that side rolled up and let out. He stared at the lake reflecting the sky turning lavender and the first stars coming out early. The prairie grasses bowing. Birds swooping in a cloudlike formation. Sky darkening, about to reveal its flush of stars she would never gaze at again. Four riders coming up the hill. 

When he saw them, it was by instinct he started to run, off the platform and around the back of the house, slowed by the sudden realization that he did not want to at the same time a spear of pain ripped through his chest and he saw his own blood spurt ahead of him, and his legs gave out in a sickening way in the arc of his momentum and he fell headlong into the tall grass. He lay grunting in the dirt with each impaled breath, unable to move. 

“Got one.”

“Who is it?”

“Looks like one of the brothers.”

A horse’s step, the boots of men, approached at his sides. Someone grabbed his arm and rolled him over, and first he saw the pale stars in the violet sky, and then heads blocking his way. Silver shields on their chests. 

“Which one are you, Mac or Davey?”

He could not draw enough breath to speak; each one seemed to push out more than he could draw, and he began to writhe for air.

“This your place?” The man’s voice shuddered like they stood in a stone hall. “Take him inside.”

When two of them each grabbed an arm and his back twisted as they dragged him, his chest seemed to let him suck a full breath and he lost it again in coughing. They dropped him on the floor and he went stiff in agony. His leg and hip began to soak warm under him.

“Leave me with him for a while.” 

“But Milton wants -” 

“He won’t get anything out of him when he’s dead, you moron. Sit him up.” 

“He’s pissed himself.”

The agent crouched in front of him. Studied him. He held out his canteen and trickled a little water into the side of his mouth, and corked it again. With a kind of curiosity he reached into Mac’s shirt, avoiding the blood, pulled out the paper bag, and patted his shirt closed. Mac struggled to draw spoonfuls of air in his perforated chest, wheezing, gurgling, not enough breath to spit out what rose in his throat as the agent flipped through the stack of bonds.

“Look at this.” The agent shook his head and smiled with relish. “Your cut? Or were you skimming?”

He closed his eyes. All he saw was her. The uprightness in her living form coming unpinned as she collapsed at the end of Dutch’s gun.

“Where’d you stash it, Callander.” The agent spat to the side. “Tear this place apart, boys.”

His head grew heavy and his chin rested on his chest.

The agent fanned it in front of him and cocked his head in mock curiosity. “Folks said they saw someone headin out of town this way. Couple heavy-lookin bags. You know anything about that?”

The light in the room was strange. “It’s in -” he choked and a thick line of blood dribbled off his lip, “in hell, go find it.”

Tears dropped onto his shirt. He watched his blood soak the dark blue fabric, the encroaching fate he deserved for what he’d drawn her into. Heidi, forgive me -

“What was that?”

My sweet girl -

“You’re breaking my heart, kid.”

“What’s he saying?”

I’m sorry I loved you Heidi I’m s-

“Where’s the rest of it, Callander.”

His eyes were slow to open, his brain slow. A chill crept up his legs and his body to his heart. But at last he raised his head, leaned back on the wall, and coughed a spray of blood in the agent’s face. “Fuck you.” His tears fell, and the shadows swept in sudden. “Fuck Dutch.” And he saw her beautiful, ruined face as his last breaths trembled. “I am damned.” 

By the time Hosea reached the house on the hill, it was not yet sunrise and he had waited from a distance until the agents had left. The prairie grass clung to his boots with dew and the morning birds chirped incongruously in the dark chill. Sookie wandered and grazed a ways away, her saddlebags packed tight, and when he caught her he found them ready for a journey. A man’s clothes. A woman’s clothes.

Through the separation in the canvas and the slight undulation from the breeze, he could glimpse the hunched form of Mac’s body against the back wall, his legs spread out in front of him. 

He parted the canvas and stepped up to the pine floor, and his boots thumped hollow as he walked toward the body. A goddamn tunnel shot through his chest. Feathers swirled like a dusting of snow on the floor from the bedding that had been slashed and searched. A chair overturned. A few floorboards pried up. Several lengths of lath on the wall ripped off. The woodstove kicked over, its ashes spilled and scattered with the feathers.

“You poor fool.” Gingerly, he got down on the floor next to him. Mac’s face was frozen in its usual expression of deep thought elsewhere. Even as a teenaged kid, he’d looked the same, so serious, so distant. Worked a week in a saloon, never touching a drop, just to earn his brother’s bail money. That boy, shot, too, he had heard. All of them scattered, lost, plans failed yet again, worse than they ever had. And it meant nothing. And took everything from these young lives. 

Then after a time he got to his feet and turned around in the middle of the barren floor. He walked to one of the flaps of canvas and held it open with a straight arm. One perfect square mile around him of untouchable prairie stretched far, toward the foothills in the west, rolling to the lake in the east. Bison grazed nearby and stirred up clouds of dust where they wallowed. 

The kid’s hands in his lap lay cupped one within the other. Drained of color. When in a just world they should have been holding the reins of his horse and the means of his own life and over all else the hands of his love.

What had they done.





 

Chapter 27: The Last Trail Part I

Summary:

"We are on a fated road, Miss Riordan."

Notes:

Please see end notes for cw/tw.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

On an evening in early December, a rider slows into Valentine by the north road in the light snow. Bareback, with braided war bridle. His legs, dressed in buckskin, hang long off his pony. The paint on his face has sweated away. He wears a dark woolen coat with brass buttons, and a breastplate of hairpipe. 

The woman at her water pump is first to see him, and leaves her bucket and retreats to the house. Her husband steps out a moment later in his union suit and suspenders, barefoot, a shotgun across his chest, but by then the rider has reached the jail and the sheriff at the corner post watching him. 

After an exchange of words, the sheriff steps back into the office and returns with his gunbelt fastened, locks the door, and comes to stand beside the rider’s pony. He does not move further. The rider slides down and stands eye to eye. The sheriff moves first.

They walk up the north street in the snow sticking to the mud, not yet cold enough to freeze in the many tracks forming puddles like mercury in the light from the windows. Folk gather at porches and alleys. The beggar slips as he stands from the steps, clinging to the side of the saloon.

The gunsmith joins them. Soon the preacher catches up. A ne’er-do-well means to walk alongside him, an O’Driscoll still looking for a fight. When he hisses a word at the rider, spit spouts from his lips, and the sheriff holds his arm out to move him. The rider hardly turns his head.

“Mind your business, you pissant,” the sheriff mutters, but when the fool tags along in back he does nothing.

The blood on the rider’s clothes is not mistook for aught else. His hair is bound in one braid down his back, himself unarmed but for his knife. 

He eyes the men waiting under the eaves of the rail station as he hitches his pony. Then the five of them walk up the ramp, after a clutch of time deciding who should go first. The sheriff takes the lead. Then the rider. Then the gunsmith, preacher, and pissant.

At the counter they crowd up around this matter of interest and others join them.

The rider faces the telegraph operator through the grille. “I have to send an official message.” His drawling voice, deep and vaguely bored, surprises them all.

The operator cocks his head. “Half-day’s ride and then some, down from you lot. Bacchus Station is closer.”

“No one was there.”

The operator squints. “No one -”

The rider shakes his head.

“Just the one then?”

“Just the message.”

The rider removes a folded piece of paper from his pouch, lays it on the counter. As he slides it under the grille, they all lean over his shoulder to see.

“You’ll need to send it to Saint Denis.” The rider says it wearily, as if expecting resistance.

“It’s marked Washington.”

“Washington by way of Saint Denis.”

“Why would you do a fool thing like that?” He chops his hand down the countertop. “Emerald Station - Annesburg - Richmond - Washington is the line. It’d be three times the cost your way. Saint Denis is to Rhodes - Memphis - Louisville -”

“There are no lines north of the rail to Annesburg.”

“Say what?”

The members of the gathered crowd glance around uncertainly.

“The lines are cut.” The rider stares straight at him, makes no smile or gesture toward greater civility.

“No lines at all?”

“No lines.”

In light of his audience, the operator seems to accept this shock as with all other mysterious ways of the world, formally adjusts his spectacles down his nose, and pokes his pencil tip on each word, counting to five. The pencil stops, falls from his fingers. He takes off his spectacles. Plants his palms on the countertop.

“Go on.” The rider places a dollar on the counter and slides it to him. Another. The crowd leans so close the sheriff has to warn them back.

The operator’s pencil stutters on the paper as he counts the rest.

FORT MCNAIR.

FORT WALLACE TAKEN. PRISONERS ALIVE. SEND YOUR EMISSARY TO NEGOTIATE PEACEFUL TERMS.

 


 

There were official accounts and their calculated sums of the cost to replace the materiel lost. The number captured, the number slain. The total, in US currency, estimated with great accuracy, of the loss of a military fort.

Accounts of the battle itself were a concoction of contradictions and misinterpretations, fed by accounts of those who were not present, and influenced by an authoritative hand.

Around the great fire and in state rooms, the truth was passed along but a few times before rumor changed it, like smoke, in the air. 

Of the thirty warriors, only the name Eagle Flies would be remembered, as both a proud warrior and treacherous villain. The white captain, the turncoat Pinkerton, the mysterious group of outlaws rumored to have assisted in the assault on Fort Wallace, were lost in ignominy. 

The boy’s name was not even recorded.

But mortars blew the forest to matchsticks that day.

——

In a cold depression in the hillside by the mouth of a cave, far away from the explosions and gunfire and the smoke that filled the forest, Abigail lay on the cot with Jack and curled his hair around her fingers. Still all their plates and spoons to pack and John’s shaving kit and her sewing kit and Jack’s few whittled toys from Hosea in and around the tent. But he wouldn’t sleep, being a handful that night. He had always picked up the mood around him like a dog picked up burs, and untangling him was a labor; only time would accomplish it.

She told him about another boy named Jack, just a little bit older than him, who lived in a famine land. And how, from a handful of beans he had bartered for with the last of their possessions, he grew a stalk as big as the biggest tree he had ever seen, and it grew up in one night so tall it reached into the clouds.

Susan lay Pearson’s knives on a square of hide and folded the top and bottom in before rolling them up and tying them and handing them to Tilly to stow in the wagon alongside his leatherworking awl and needles and maul. A man, run off without his tools. Another time, far back in time, she would have felt bitter, damning in her mind the sort of character to leave himself behind like a casing. The assumptions that form the man, the arrogance, to think he can pick up a new life any time in any place. And has no need of that which he can find elsewhere, or he can take on a new life and trade with little more than a lie and not much cunning. She had seen them come, and seen them go, and die, finding out on their terms what it meant to jump from life to life. By now, the bitterness toward it had diminished some; now, it was merely the dull satisfaction of a truth confirmed.

Jack was a very brave little boy, and climbed that stalk one night and poked his head above the clouds, and far away there stood a big castle. In that castle, there lived a giant, and he was rich and greedy.

Dead leaves scuttled through camp on a cold gust. The Reverend left his bag of clothes, his communion case with the tiny vial of wine. Uncle left his banjo, and the wind and leaves occasionally busked the strings and released a lone twang into the air. The only two men not gone were the loafabouts brought in by Micah, and they oversaw them all like guards, although, in mind of two kinds of guards, the ones who protect and the ones who imprison, their presence weighed on the air. 

Missus Adler kept her damning eye on them at all times. She was like a dog who could sniff out poison. During the day she practiced her knives with such viciousness the trees all took on the shapes of enemies. That night, when she sat by the fire she cleaned her knives and honed them, her unsmiling features sharpened by flame as she watched. 

——

The echoes of your first shot shuddered through the gorge as you swung your sights to the left, extracted the casing, loaded the new cartridge from Ten Crow, and swept the treeline for the warrior, whose name you did not know. In your sights, you found him, his hair braided in two hanks and wrapped in otter fur, his steps smooth and silent as he slipped through the trees with the bundle of dynamite under the wrap of his vest. But you breathed in sharply when he staggered to a knee, followed by the late quiet clap of the shot. He put a hand down. He collapsed onto his side.

“What is it?” Ten Crow strained to see, standing on his toes. “What’s happening?”

Jesus christ.

“Why aren’t you counting?”

Goddammit, get up. Get up.  

After a breathless moment the warrior raised his head, and you fisted sweat from your eyes as he dragged himself toward the wall, still clutching the package in his vest.

“You’re supposed to shoot.” Ten Crow’s voice wavered and he reached out to nudge your arm but pulled back.

You emptied your chest, and your clavicle sank with the plate of your breastbone and you closed your eyes to fight your pounding heart. Come on, dammit. Please. You opened them. And brought your crosshairs up, cradling the warrior in the crescent of your field of view. Carrying him as he crawled, willing him forward. Separating yourself from the awareness of this task and its disastrous result. Made yourself an instrument again, where you had no soul to speak of. You held your finger along the trigger guard.

As the warrior edged on his stomach in the snow, the soldier on the catwalk overhead walked with him, his rifle up to his cheek and aimed down. Another soldier rushed from the opposite tower when he called for him, nervously aiming out into the dark, keeping his head low, easing closer, and shouted to the other soldier still aiming at the warrior below. Toying with him. Firing into the ground on either side of him. 

They likely had no time to be surprised when he reached the wall, and winged his arm to the sky, and rolled back from the bundle of white-washed dynamite just as the soldier fired, and you fired and froze in the long desolate echo before the explosion ripped through the darkness, illuminating for one gasp the audience of bright aspen trunks combed with shadows and the figures creeping through them. 

Ten Crow shouted in triumph. And you dropped, gripping the rifle across your pumping chest, and wiped your face on your arm. Your side ached through your middle and back. From cover, you scanned the woods. Gunfire sparked through the trees and the snow fell thicker then. The shouts of men, of triumph, of rage, of pain, all rang out maddeningly the same, and from that distance, if you saw Arthur, if you saw Charles or John, you could not discern them from the warriors and the trees. 

——

Two stolen treasures this giant kept. A goose that laid an egg every day made of solid gold. And a pretty girl who played a harp and sang. She was chained to her harp, and played when he commanded her to, and he would fall asleep.

Abigail did not tell him the chant about the blood of an Englishman. The boy would have been up all night with such thoughts. As it was, he was wide awake, gazing into the dark of the tent, listening. 

In the endless forest, two women clutched their satchels and bunches of their skirts as they ran, making no sound but the same frantic rustle of frostbit leaves and brush as any other fear-sprung creature in those woods. The moonlight flooded bright silver through the naked trees. When Mary-Beth tripped over a fallen branch and stifled her own cry, Karen doubled over, skidded to a stop, and staggered back to help her, and without thinking of it they kept their hands locked as they ran. When something fell from Karen’s satchel, they did not turn back to find it.

They had left behind clothes, books, a pair of white buttoned boots Karen had worn until the leather was floppy and scuffed tan at the heels and toes but she still kept them crammed with paper and wrapped in a pillowcase. Susan did not pack them. Couldn’t fault the girls for running; couldn’t keep them in her heart. Why Tilly didn’t flee with them, she would never puzzle out. Tilly, who stood at the wide mouth of Dutch’s tent, facing all the accouterments they must pack. His rugs. His books. His trunk. How small she was, how thin lately, and young. And when that brute rose nearby, that granite, snub-faced brute, from the table where he whittled, and did not sheathe his knife, she turned. She did not cower. Susan set down the crate of dishes and cups.

While the giant slept, the little boy crept in the shadows of the great hall and was careful not to startle the girl. He told her to come with him, escape her confinement and servitude. She refused. 

He said, But you are in chains. 

She said, I am loyal; I sing only for him. He will free me once my singing has pleased him enough.

——

When the blast at the gate lit up the forest to their right in a brilliant pulse and it began, Arthur’s heart hammered with pride and a swoop of fear, but in the snowbright lull that followed, there was only dread, like the stillness of a frozen lake, a deadened space in his mind about the choice to leave her side for even a moment. The rounds clapped and popped and buzzed through the ominous quiet, bearing doubt as to the ones firing and the trueness of their aim. Disembodied yells and shouts like souls butchered from themselves in the dark. 

Dutch waved them over down the road from where Arthur and John and two of the warriors deboned a wagon from its axle, setting its wheels at ungovernable angles, and others unloaded the railroad ties and crates it had carried there. They left their dam of clutter, and when they approached, Dutch gripped a young warrior by the shoulders and pointed him with his cigar to the three others crouched in cover with their rifles ready. Two of them gray-haired, and two not quite eighteen.

Arthur followed him to the edge of the road, as Micah, Bill, and Javier now stood by their horses, and he checked each of them in turn.

“Thought we was holdin the road.” 

“Change in plans, black lung.” Micah finished rolling one of his smokes and licked the paper. Neither Javier nor Bill spoke nor even looked him straight in the face anymore.

“The fuck are you talkin about?” John walked down the row of them. “Javier?” Only Bill glanced up, as if he didn’t mean to.

“Looks like runnin.” Arthur kept his eye on Bill. Never could hide much or lie too well. Stood there ready to mount up fidgeting uselessly with the buckle of his stirrup. 

“Well I wasn’t plannin to run, but now you gone and mentioned it.” Micah lazily lit his smoke.

Dutch pulled The Count’s reins from the branch. “Our clever young fighter over there informed us there was a wagon sent away south of here several hours ago, and by the size of its guard would appear to be carrying the quartermaster’s purse, likely payroll, anticipating hostilities.” 

“You’re leavin?”

“Engaging in a skirmish, son. We’ve done what we can do here; this is their theater. Rifles, dynamite, cutting off the access; I’d say we’ve all but handed them victory -”

“They just got started.”

“And we are wastin our hard-earned advantage stayin here.”

“Dutch -”

But a high whine above the trees lifted all their attention skyward, and there was no time to comprehend it before a mortar punched the hillside. Earth and rocks flailed into the air and the horses reared, shrieking, snapping their tethers. John cursed and tried to calm Old Boy, fighting to get his tether free, and darting out of his way. Another blast slammed the roadside and they all clambered for cover as hit after hit began to pummel the open space around them. A highsoaring aspen tipped and slowly fell, groaning, in a grand faint, and bounced to a rest between them and the others, all catching and calming their horses. The warriors headed for the trees under firing range and waved the rest of them to follow.

Arthur ran to Georgia, unsheathed his rifle and smacked her rump hard, and waved Old Boy out of his way to help John to his feet.

“Meet you at camp!” When Dutch veered away with a split-voiced shout, the four of them turned south together, dislodging from them like a hillside of soil, and in the near-constant siren whine and boom of the mortars John grabbed him by the coat, steering him away from the open road and into the trees.

——

In the smoke and chaos that followed, there was nothing you could do but run. Once you climbed your horses out of the gap, you found yourselves riding through a scene too preoccupied by its own hellishness to notice you. As you neared the reservation trail, a group of six or seven uniformed riders crowded the road ahead. You quickly veered to your right around the side of the rail station and motioned for Ten Crow to follow, and watched around the corner as they turned up the hill, and so you could not send him that way, and took him with you.

Around the back of the station, you passed Orly cowering against the wall, loading the magazine of his carbine with shaking fingers, ignoring the rounds he dropped. He faced up at you, confused with fear, and tried to cycle his lever and ejected an unfired round.

Just then an explosion in the middle of the forest sent a tower of smoke high above, your horses spooked, skidded in the snow. Ten Crow’s horse capered frantically as gunfire cracked and faded through the forest. You gave a sharp hup to Apollo, and both horses rode hard, as if they could escape chaos by moving in a straight line. 

When you approached the east road, the concussions from the mortars drove you back to the crossroads, and there was no sign of Arthur or John. Only their roadblock and the deserted road. 

Two horses lay dead, a soldier pinned beneath one, moaning, and you ignored him until he raised his pistol at Ten Crow riding past. Instead you left him with a bullet in his temple and one in his chest.

A young Wapiti warrior sprawled face-down in the road, at the end of his red despairing tracks from the edge of the woods.

When you spotted Charles with another warrior, reloading and pointing lines toward the fort, you called out to him.

“Where’s Arthur?” You shouted over the noise, twisting around to see him as Apollo turned on alert.

“He’s with John - I’ll find them!” He did not flinch when a whine sailed overhead. “Have you seen Paytah!”

You shook your head and started to dismount. “I’ll come with you -”

“No.” He loaded his sawed-off and crammed it in his belt, and abruptly ran to Ten Crow’s horse before you noticed what was happening.

Where Ten Crow was sliding down from his pony, his bow in hand, and Charles reached him before he could run. Pulled him close by the arms. Crouched in front of him, shaking his head. Speaking a few words in his language to his lost-looking face. The kid’s whole body gripped up when another gut-shocking blast hit nearby. Charles shielded him in a giant embrace and you grabbed his pony’s bridle.

He cupped his cheek. Peered in his round and switching eyes watching the stories of battle brought to horrifying life in the fire. Charles touched his forehead to his own, and looped his necklace around him.

When he stood, Ten Crow pushed himself back onto his pony.

“Take him -”

“Where in hell -”

“Beaver Hollow - please, Nell.”

Before you could speak, another mortar barrage drove you farther back, and you watched Charles running in, and you felt the echo of each blast in your whole body, a flung-feeling, all of you blown apart from each other in a rain of sparks.

Apollo drove hard over the miles, scrabbling up trails as you urged him, skidding down embankments as you worked around the roads crippled by Dutch and his dynamite, and he didn't resist and didn't falter. Long after you’d come down out of the snow, cracks of gunfire shuddered in your head, mortar blasts exploded in your chest. 

Ten Crow did not complain, nor did he ask you to slow or to explain, but from the sound in his sighs you wondered, did he feel the same empty chamber inside.

There was too much time to think. To imagine the worst in horrific fantasy. Those stretches where you could ride by two, you asked him what his words were for the simple things you saw, snow and bird and horse, and gradually coaxed a smile from him as you struggled to pronounce them. But you faded back to silence when you had to ride file on the foot trails, and there was nothing to say after that to overcome the things you’d seen.

——

Tilly stood before Dutch's dark tent and all the articles inside, and raised her face as the brute approached. 

“What’re you doin,” he growled. He had a barnacled voice, thick and husky.

“We have to pack up his tent.” Hers was clear and trembling like a droplet at the tail end of the word.

He stared at her in long scrutiny, taking in her dress of thin yellow summer cotton. The necklace Nell had given her long ago, a small puddle of silver on her chest. His breath was loud through his mangled nose; his dead gaze fell over her like a net.

“So pack.”

Two heavy, mechanical clicks broke the silence. 

“Get away from her.” Susan held her shotgun level, one twitch from making its dark bores the last things he saw. Across camp, Abigail slowly ducked out from her tent with John’s old revolver in her hand. Sadie with her carbine hurried down the hill from her lookout and stood beside her. 

“Whoa there.” The skinny one darted up from his bedroll, blinking as if he was only half certain he wasn’t dreaming. “Joe, what’s goin on?”

The big one snorted as he watched them all. The type of man who was not softened by a woman’s fear but drawn by it like a beast prowling closer, baring its teeth. Facing three guns, still he didn’t move, and he stared at Susan as if he had yet to see a woman use one successfully. And glowered at Tilly where she stood, his inadvertent shield.

——

On Guarma, he had fired a Hotchkiss cannon in battle. The power of the machine as he cranked it and rained a bombardment of one-pounders at a warship had thrilled him and almost made him lose his guts with the first ground-shaking shot. Rang him like a goddamn tuning fork. The way it felt in his chest, like he’d been eaten away like rusted metal, it was the first time he thought he might be sicker with more than what he had dismissed as something tropical. Lost air with every blast like a punch to the stomach, and firing ten of them at the ship in succession left him breathless and coughing, blinded by the massive clouds of smoke released from each shot.

The mortars falling in the forest hit like the long-delayed result of each shot back then. As if they had traveled around the world to their true target all along and now peppered the winter ground with black eruptions of dirt and shrapnel. The men in the range of it shouted to each other and scrambled for cover, and through the smoke and the snow he saw Charles yanking John toward cover by a huge fistful of his coat at his chest, and when he sprinted toward them, they disappeared in a huge exploding blackened moon that blew him backward. 

The woods fell silent. He lay on his side at the base of a tree, and blinked, agog, waked to the tingle of the snow on his cheek. He dragged himself up. Called for John. Charles. Small pings and cracks hardly made an impression in the aftermath, until he realized, dumbstruck, they were still firing. He ran, wheezing, one arm clutching his chest through the cratered forest, climbing over fallen fractured trees, a dead soldier lying among them as if no more or less expendable. 

He slid to a stop in the snow.

The captain sat in dazed silence against the trunk of a birch tree as if he had stopped for a rest. One leg out. One knee bent up. His right arm hanging limp at his side. Bullets occasionally dug into the dead leaves and snow around him, but he sat unflinching. 

Arthur crashed to his knees beside him, pushing the captain’s forehead back to see his face. “You awake there?”

Monroe opened his eyes, his cheeks pale, blinking slow. “Mister Morgan.” 

A bullet zapped into the dirt between them.

“Let’s get you off this rifle range, friend.” He grabbed him by the collar and dragged him in two great heaves backwards to an old ditch, and they tumbled down together clawed by roots as they fell, a few bullets shearing the rim as they went over. Arthur rolled onto his back, gasping. Near him, Monroe didn’t make much of a sound, and when he could move Arthur turned to his side and pulled himself back to him. Careful not to shift him too roughly, he leaned him back upright against the incline of the ditch. Around them lay rusted cans and old cartridge casings and worn-out boots and broken wheels. The skeleton of a horse further down stared at them in longing.

“Where’re you hit?” He searched under Monroe’s collar, his chest, his armpits, his belly. The wound to his groin was obvious when he glanced down at blood seeping brightly in the snow. He pulled his kerchief out and pressed it hard to the wound. Monroe made no sound of pain. 

“Get yourself to safety, Mister Morgan.” The captain closed and opened his eyes. The ditch around them was a dark wound in the snowy earth, like the groove of an ax blade dragged through. Above them, trees rose tall and arched overhead, bare and white against the cloudy night sky. Snow floated in the air.

“We landed in a good spot. Let’s catch our breath a minute.” He smirked ruefully at himself, then watched Monroe’s expression dawn in a quiet way. The tension around his eyes releasing as the understanding took hold. 

Monroe stared up into the trees. Swallowed hard. “You know for a moment I wondered, was it better to lie about the boy. How deep it’s ground into us, to feel justified.”

“You did right, captain. Let the army see what they done.”

He smiled sadly. “They won’t see.” His eyes closed for a while. His shallow breath came quicker, and he began to shiver.

Arthur looked down at his hand, soaked and warm in blood. No one around to help. No tying off this wound, his pulse ebbing through a quarter-sized hole. 

“Let’s get you comfortable, captain.” He shifted, despising himself the moment he took his pressure off the wound though the captain didn’t seem to notice it. And he leaned him back against his chest, pulling his coat over him, far as he could.

“I admit,” Monroe puffed, “I fear it.” He let out a trembling sigh, reaching a hand up, and Arthur took it and held it. 

The captain’s hand clenched on his over and over, pawing to hold on, until Arthur gripped him harder. “I ain’t gonna leave you.” Yet at the same time, he resisted the uncanny apprehension of being pulled under by a drowning man.

The captain’s voice weakened in a pained flinch of tears. “They said, ‘you’re going to be stationed in the most beautiful place in the world.’” His eyes fixed on a rotted burlap awning built into the wall of the ditch like some kind of human burrow long abandoned. “There’s no undoing this.”

“You tried.” He realized his bloody thumb had been soothing back and forth along the captain’s cheek. And saw then Monroe’s ice-blue gaze gone still. The quick, light breaths gone quiet. The grip of his hand now slack. 

He wiped his nose on his wrist. The long trenchline snaked away in both directions. He thought of Lenny. Hosea. Mac. All the bodies they’d left behind. The edges of the earth several feet above him made a jagged frame of the night sky. It was a while before he realized the gunfire had ceased, but for the rare distant crack quickly answered.  

He held Monroe a while longer, not closing his stare until some time had passed and a man would not feel abandoned in the last imperceptible moments of his life. 

And in the distance, a single piercing yell, ringing high, was loosed into the air, and the woods lay silent thereafter.

 


 

In the near-dawn light, on the last trail up to camp, you slow to a sound. A buzzing sound in the cattails by the river. And see the white spew of maggots flourishing from its open mouth, the dog, Jack’s dog. His body so turgid with the gas of rot that his front and hind legs stick out stiff in the air from his taut body. 

Though heavy-hearted shock turns to alarm as soon as you see the flesh erupting along the cut at his neck. 

Ten Crow sees it too, and knows to watch up the trail, check the bluffs above you, the thinned brush by the river. You draw your guns and keep them ready the rest of the way, and ride in front. When you finally climb the last slope up to camp, you quickly help him to brush the horses down and cover them, and send him to Arthur’s tent to rest and warm up.

There is no cook pot hanging over the fire in a cloud of steam. The logs of the main fire have gone white and disintegrate over the few dwindling flames and the embers still glowing. The dog is dead, the camp too quiet. 

This is no place to linger in.

A large figure rises and lays a log on the fire. He does nothing more but to stand and watch. You stop and stand his opposite across that desolate camp. At this rate he’s one twitch from eating a bullet. 

As Ten Crow approaches Arthur’s tent, the brute watches him too. So you stay there, palms hovering over your grips, until he leans down, showing you his hands, to set another log on the fire and sit once more.

You jump slightly when Tilly approaches from the girls’ wagon, her own face tired, shadows under her eyes, her blanket around her shoulders. She holds something out to you. Before she can speak, you stop her. 

“Sadie around?” you whisper.

She nods up the hill.

“Can you be ready to leave soon, if you have to?”

“Of course, Miss, but -”

“Good.” You turn to head up to the post but she catches your sleeve.

“A letter, Miss. Came some days ago.” 

You stop, backing up in disbelief as she sets it in your hand, the paper still warm from her pocket, wrinkled, bent. With mumbled thanks you look down. 

Miss Nell Riordan, c/o Tacitus Kilgore.

She watches your stiff fingers fumble to pull off your glove and tear under the fold, and her own fingers pick nervously at the fraying cuff of her dress; she stays by you as you try to read the lettering of your own name through your cold tears, as if the severe peaks of the M or the upswept tail of the last e offer hints as to the hope or pain delivered within. Your hands shake as you open it, and you curse when you rip the envelope. 

“Did we win? Miss?”

You look up.

Her rounded eyes, slightly puffy. Her mouth a lift of summoned hope. Suddenly the echoes of the battle, the mortars, the gunfire in your ears are overcome by the uncertain silence that follows. With a deep breath and sigh, you try to smile.

“Either way, we’ll have to be strong today. Won’t we.”

Although her shoulders sink, she nods, and backs away as Grimshaw calls for her help at Pearson’s wagon. 

Dear Nell, 

I am so very glad you asked me. We rarely have the honor to repay mercy in kind. I have inquired - 

You immediately stow it in your satchel, as if a fateful wind or lurking thief would pluck it from your hands. This paper filled with the power to shatter hope or keep you going. You fasten your satchel well.

To your left, the canvas of the Marstons’ tent draws to the side and Abigail ducks out, her traveling clothes on, and she quickly embraces you, as if she can’t help but mother.

“I didn’t see them when we left, I’m sorry,” you say over her shoulder, watching the brute at the fire.

She nods in thought. “When do we leave?”

“Soon. Sadie on guard?” You step back.

“Just went up I think. What’s wrong?” She leans to catch your eye.

The brute keeps his dull flat stare on you. Grimshaw busies herself at the wagon but keeps a shotgun in reach, and something about her there, brusque as ever but watching all, reassures you now. 

And somehow it’s curious - Cleet walking across camp from the mouth of the cave toward the river. Dawn not yet surfaced from the depths. You’re distracted by his hasty path until he’s out of sight. Abigail watches you watching him.

“What’s wrong.”

She quickly checks back at her tent, and at you.

“Get your things together,” you whisper.

No certainty resides in fear. Whether you act too soon or make theater of nothing, whether you call your own destiny to you by nerves or gall. The woods are so silent the creaking trees echo, and any movement stirs the leaves on the ground.

“Something’s wrong.”

——

In the memory of mortarfire and gunfire, the air is full. A gasp drawn in and in, in wait. The snow has stopped. No birds chirp in the ashen dawn, and fog rises up from the gorge so thick, a warrior appears to wade through milky hip-deep water toward the fort. 

Arthur drags himself over the lip of the trench, his lungs sizzling in his chest as he crawls away from the edge through that broken landscape, trunks snapped and splintered in jagged, buckled shapes, a gray slurry of snow and black dirt among them like cavities dug up with a prospector’s zeal. He calls for John. His broken voice, John’s broken name no different from the other calls emerging.

He finds his hat near the roots of a tree and scoops it on and falls to a hand, and a fit comes on that crumples him. 

He wakes, shivering, as he’s set down by hands he doesn’t know, and gazes up at the loghewn door of the fort that hangs blown off its hinge cockeyed. When it moves, angling back and then plumb, the world spins and he breathes through his nose and the heatwave of nausea. Boots pass him, and buckskin shoes. 

When he rolls over, he stops inches from a gray face frozen in wonder, snow already collected in his open mouth, and he shoves the body away.

Suddenly strong hands drag him back, and Charles is there pulling him upright, wrenching him to his chest and helping him to stand, both of them sweated through, greased in blood and grime, clumsy and rocking in exhaustion. He hears a catch in his breath, as Charles tells him he sent Nell away, and he almost buckles in his arms. Thank you.

Then he stands alone suddenly, cold on his chest. 

All around him there is a great turning, the trees or warriors twisting to face in ritual sameness as someone emerges from the fort. He turns.

A figure in his sight blurs like a borderless man, sunbacked and wavering. By his walk he knows him, Eagle Flies, before he splits in two, Eagle Flies and Paytah, a soaked bandage around his throat, a sash of blood across his chest. In his arms, he carries a bundle wrapped in a blanket, dirt-dusted between them. The hint of sweetrot precedes them, it hangs in the fog. 

He struggles to a stop, knees bending, and Charles steps up and takes the boy, carries him to a travois, lays him with another body. 

He backs away and the horse moves forward with its light cargo, and helps Paytah back toward the fort.

“You’re stayin?” he asks, noticing the message that passes between them. Paytah, his neck still bleeding, focused only on the walls in front of him. 

Charles’ head bows slowly, and he nods. “I saw John run east; I didn’t see him after that.” 

“Be careful, brother.”

He looks down at their arms locked together, and is jolted with the beat of his friend’s fist on his back.

Now in the haze he can’t see a damn thing. He finds himself on a road, Georgia under him. He passes a beast on the road, half a man, half a horse, like the first sign of life in a place he’s only heard of, and never thought existed, until he sees how the soldier was crushed.

Among the trees he don’t know what this cloud contains to surprise him. Accounts were well-known, of men riding off cliffs in such a fog, horses losing footing when they couldn’t see the trail. Most beautiful place in the world. Each jarring step contains this pair: the risk of death and the relief of sure footing. But each further step becomes a ration of luck running out.

When the fog burns off in the morning light, there she stands in the distance on a shaded porch, her hand making a shelf over her eyes. She wears a dress. She picks up her skirts and runs to him, dew darkening the hem. His vision drowns in a splitting bud of sunlight.

Sir, sind Sie wohl?”

He coughs a spattering of blood on the frozen ground. Somehow the sky spreads overhead not bright and blue but dim, and he’s back in that fogsmeared haze. Hands reach under his shoulders. Mere shadows passing, distorted and vague. Trees at right-angles, antlers, webs of bones and ribbon swinging from branches. 

“Komm hilf mir -”

He wakes on a small cot. It wobbles when he tries to sit up and he grabs the sides as his axis tips. Hands press on his shoulders.

“Bitte, sir, Sie müssen schlafen. Bleib zurück; er ist sicher krank.”

“I need to - where’s Nell -” 

“Nein, er hört nicht zu - hol mir das Tonikum - bitte, Sir -”

A bottle is held to his lips, a liquid tarry and bitter, and he coughs and fights someone who tries to hold him down. “Where’s Nell.”

“Er kann kaum aufstehen - fragt nach einer Frau, glaube ich.”

The voices of ghosts in the trees.

He opens his eyes to a searing shine quickly snuffed in shade, and squints up at his own left boot raised high overhead, caught in the stirrup. A hind hoof stamps inches from his face and he is dragged a couple of feet further until his boot tugs free and his leg drops, seizing him up in a fit of coughing on the road. Georgia gives a shivery grunt as she nudges him with her nose. He lies there until he can finally breathe, and carefully pushes himself to sit, crawls back up the road and grabs his hat. 

A sustained buzz remains in his fist like a captured dragonfly. As if he shot a man and can’t account for it, or had he shot the woman whose foreign voice had talked to him so kind? The misgiving, and the real possibility, sickens him, and it fades into the fog of his many sins. He drifts in a heavy half-sleep and sees Nell waiting for him. She would wait too long. Damned stubborn, and always would be. 

A man’s laugh brings him around. Far away. A few others laughing with him, down the hill on the roadside. 

He finds the strength to push himself up to his knees.

One of them lights a cigarette and talks muffled in his cupped hands. “Yeah but they’re makin a move though.”

“How would you know?”

“Sent a whole detachment to Blackwater.”

“He say why?”

“What army did you come from, that they tell you why they’re sending you someplace? They ask your permission, too?”

They laugh.

He gives a near-soundless whistle to Georgia. When she steps alongside him he grabs the stirrup, hangs there a minute, and hauls himself to his feet, then into the saddle. Turning west, she scuffles some scree down the hillside, and the soldiers shout after him and take a few warning shots as he gets up into the trees and gone. 

On this unknown road on an unknown day, just keep movin. 

Get us home, girl.

——

Grimshaw witnesses in disapproving silence as you hitch John’s wagon and Abigail shoves a few final articles in the back. Only a crate of Arthur’s possessions; there is no time for his trunk or his gun locker. He’ll be upset if he thinks you took the time. And the brute by the fire never seems to sleep 

Sadie saddles Bob and Apollo. Jack stands rubbing his eyes and Ten Crow stands with him, head and shoulders taller, yet both of them small and quiet with fatigue and cold, breath steaming, clutching blankets around themselves. Frost glistens like dreamstrewn dust on all things, frozen in time, perhaps a time you will look back on, and wonder whether Jack will remember any of it. 

“You’re staying?” You step over the hitch and get up gingerly on Apollo. Your side aches, stiff and bruised.

“They’ll be back soon enough. You know my mind, Miss Riordan.” She lifts an eyebrow in an expression that has commanded saloons and saloon girls most of her life, and now watches as her camp empties. Tilly walks over with a small crate of canned food from Pearson’s wagon, and suddenly spooks.

The brute stands among you all, gun in hand.

“Get back,” Grimshaw spits, and grabs a shotgun from her table and shoulders it fast and straight. “If you don’t take five steps back this instant I’ll fit you with a new hole.” 

She eases in front of Tilly and supports the shotgun with her right hand while she reaches back to shove her away. “Miss Tilly, you get your things and get on that wagon.”

His face is mashed in a permanent sneer and he growls from his thick throat. “Y’all best stay.”

You walk Apollo toward him, and force the brute backward with a thousand pounds of horse beneath you. “Hands up, you piece of shit. You won’t survive that slug. You sure you won’t come with, Miss Grimshaw?”

“I’m sure, Miss Riordan. I’ve chased off worse than his kind.”

She firms her stance, like she’s getting comfortable with that cannon in her arms. Like she knows more about leaving than she would say, and about those who are the last to stand watch over a place.

“You girls move on now. I’ll hold them until the others return. Can’t promise Dutch will understand.”

Sadie hands the reins to Abigail on the seat and speaks up to you.  “We’ll make for Emerald Station; best you ride ahead and try to find them.” 

“Don’t wait; I’ll catch you up.”

Over your shoulder you nod as she salutes two-fingered from her brow and steps up onto the spoke of the wagon, and you click, and Apollo lunges up the hill, his ears high and eager. The wagon grinds behind you, Miss Grimshaw’s voice filling the camp in its familiar throaty command. 

It will never leave your heart, why you didn’t feel it in the air, and whether it would have mattered. 

A glint, a dart of movement out of place, a twig cracking, a hint of tobacco, whether it emerged in Sadie’s face or a shiver of Apollo’s ears or his hide, or reflected in his eyes. 

But nothing could have signaled your senses in time.

In the deafening burst of a single shot, Apollo lightens in front before you can rein him. He rears with a scream that sprays from his throat, his forelegs tearing long and wildly at the air. You slip back over his rump as he towers with a second strangled scream, pawing before he topples backward, flops heavily, huge and flailing, and slides to the base of the hill on his side.

The light of the sun converged and blazed the moment before it sliced under the horizon across the lake. 

You couldn’t hear Hosea over the ringing of your ears as he spoke with his head down then raised his face to you.

You gape, airless, staring through the crisp clutter of leaves and moss on the ground and the blur of the world beyond them until you are able to gasp a massive breath. And you sob in pain when you move your left shoulder. Then wake again from a black slice of time to Apollo’s shuddering grunts not far away.

A dull boom goes off somewhere behind you, thunder blistering inside your chest, a shotgun blast, and the bang of a revolver. Screams. But it’s all so distant, so muted, so far beyond your control, it hardly seems real.

You try to lift yourself to see the struggling mound of him as his head reaches and falls, his ears pinned, and you try to calm him as you inch closer. Shhh Apollo, I’m here.

Blood gurgles from his neck, into his mane, and he froths pink at the mouth and grunts wetly, and somewhere behind you, harsh and hurried steps rustle through the leaves.

Sweet boy, be calm now, shhhh such a good boy. You lay your head on his neck, his muscles twitching, and his panicked nickering settles down with your touch, under your cheek, your hand petting down his hot shoulder, his muscled chest. And tears stream down your face and turn everything a smear of roan and crimson and white and mud as you reach for your gun. 

But the kick to your stomach is sudden and tosses you to your side, and you grunt in breathless pain. Before you can flinch away, a black boot rolls you onto your back and lays on your throat, crackling your windpipe, and you can’t see the figure who looms through your tears and the dirt in your eyes as you shove against it with your right hand and all the strength you have. Your heels gouge the ground, hips rising, twisting. In a desperate blind snatch, you release the boot and his weight starts to crush you the instant you grab your knife and slice across his calf. He jumps away with a furious shout and you roll on your side, barring your throat with your forearm, straining for air. A hammer ticks.

“Don’t shoot her!” 

“Please help my horse -”

“Bitch goddamn stabbed you!”

“I said do not shoot her!” 

With the muzzle still pointed in your face, the knife is wrenched from your hand. The other man’s black boots scrape to a stop near your face. The heels rise as he crouches. Two gloved hands hang limp off his thighs. One of the hands reaches down, cradles your cheek, turns your face to get a look at you as someone else strips your guns from your holsters. The man tips his head to see you right-side-up. Dark hair and mustache, greedy marbled eyes, cold as the metal they seem to reflect.

“You shot my horse,” you seethe, spit spraying.

Almost solemnly, he nods. “Well, you would’ve gotten away,” he says, as if to a child, except his eyes have a shine in them like veins of gold that in their cutting clarity show you beyond a doubt you are not of his kind. With the back of his finger, he wipes away a couple of the flecks of your spit from your cheek. Then he stands when the tenor call of another voice calls out, and fear rises with your breath.

“Miss Riordan.”

A light kick stings you, your body curling, and you open your eyes to see the bowler-hatted figure of agent Milton staring down.

Apollo’s pained chatter slows and weakens. Sweet boy I’m right here.  

“Looks like your limb came unpinned in your fall.” The one with the boots leans over you.

He looks back at Milton. “I watched Cornwall’s cowhands one time break a whole passel of wild mustangs out at his ranch. They’d get thrown about like ragdolls. Collarbones snapped, wrists broken. Shoulders would happen so often, they could undo it themselves. Seemed to happen every time they got up to break the most spirited ponies -” He reaches for your arm.

“Nonononono-!”

He grabs your wrist, braces his foot on your ribs and pulls and ratchets your arm at an angle, and you scream as your shoulder drops into its socket with the sharpness of an ax. You roll away from him, clutching your arm, nauseated, panting in the dirt, staring wide-eyed through the weeds. Beyond them, a man is forced to his knees. Ragged now. Hunched. 

When Orly lifts his eyes at you it is only for a moment before he bows his head.

“Now, Miss Riordan, we’ve given you far more time than you deserved to consider your choices. Even carrying your child, you’d rather protect these men and their failed ideals - I am often astounded at the depravity of men, but it seems there is a lowness in women even I cannot divine.”

You hold your arm and fresh tears flood your eyes before you can stop them. Someone hauls you to your knees by the collar of your shirt and shackles your wrists in front of you.

Over by Pearson’s wagon, Tilly kneels next to the lifeless huddle of Miss Grimshaw. Picks up her hand. Abigail and Sadie stay together by the wagon, two men in badges keeping them at gunpoint. A third man without a badge prowls the camp, inspects a trinket from the tailgate of a wagon, stows it in his pocket. Kicks something. Moves on. A fourth man, a fifth walk in.

Milton wanders up to Abigail, and the tendons in her neck rise. “Where’s the boy?”

“Safe from you.” Her nose drips blood and Milton fishes in the back of the wagon, pulling out a handkerchief from among the effects, daubing her nose, smearing the blood on her cheek as she stands still, glaring at him. 

Milton nods, glancing at the other men. “Search the camp,” he drones, and veers back to you, tossing the handkerchief away.

“Do you know who this man is? Can you guess?” He takes off his bowler to wipe his forehead, sets it back on. “Mister Harrier -” He beckons behind him, and faces you again. “This man works for Leviticus Cornwall. And this is Scarlett Riordan. Of the O’Driscoll gang, and Arthur Morgan’s consort.” 

The one with the boots stoops when he gets to you. Smiles a bit, stretching his mustache in a small spasm of civility before his expression deadens again and he shakes his head. 

“There is a whole goddamn army after you. Biggest foxhunt I ever saw.” 

Milton strolls around them.

“Missus Sadie Adler, is that right? You were once just a victim yourself. But look at you. Your involvement in the Sisika prison break is a capital offense.” He walks away to let that notion take hold, and waits, pretends to inspect the wagon. “Stand up right now, tell us where they are or where they are going, and I will grant you mercy. You will be free to go.”

She stares ahead. Shoulders straight. The corners of her jaw twitch. She sniffs.

He steps closer. “Are you expecting them to come?”

Sadie and Abigail both look to you anxiously, as if you can tell them whether to speak or stay silent.

He bends to Sadie’s ear. “Are they coming here?”

She closes her eyes and jumps when he shouts, “Answer me!”

You gather enough breath to speak, and call over, your voice hardly a rasp. “We don’t know where they are.”

“Mister McElroy. Mister Ross. Watch the roads. Shoot the last man if they come together.”

Two Pinkertons in bowler hats split up for the roads into camp. Men in military-like uniforms without badges, seven or eight of them, make a fast and ruthless search of the camp, kicking over trunks and crates, ripping up canvas walls from their stakes. They hold identical double-actions. They have jaded, cynical, war-broken faces. They are men who have seen suffering and do not hesitate to cause it. Blackened inside by their experience, the softness rotted out, leaving only bloodthirst like dogs kept half-starved.

Milton stands, and speaks to all of you. “You do not win this battle. You either lose well or you lose the hard way. And make no mistake, you will lose. Just because you were not on that ferry does not spare you from the consequences. If your men are too coward to show themselves, then you will pay.” 

“If you touch any of us, you’re dead men.”

“Keep your threats. You might have once saved yourself and your child but no longer. You disgust me, Miss Riordan.”

You feel a snap of heat within as he gives you a derisive glance. Rage bursts from your heart like opened skies. When Milton looks away, you scrabble to your feet and lunge, tackling him at the waist. He hits the ground and you pull yourself onto his chest and feel no pain at all as you beat him with your shackled fists and your unbound fury. Spanning his throat between your wrists with your chain. His face reddens, purples, and fear blooms in his eyes. When something beats the back of your head, you fold over him. A fist grabs your braid and throws you, limp and stunned, and you scrape and swim in mindless motions up to your hands and knees before a kick to your hip rams you to the ground.

When Harrier reaches your side, he seems to join the congress of trees that darken the sky, towering in judgment of you.

Milton steps past him, disheveled and enraged, his pistol raised, and heels you onto your back. He wipes his bleeding nose and sniffs through his swollen passages and spits off to the side. His furious voice is tight with restraint.

“This is your last chance.”

You stare at his hand on his gun. Has he killed many times? Milton's grip is not tight enough yet to fire his caliber, but the leather of his glove creaks, and crowds his trigger. His arm is steady, and straightens in a damning way as his elbow locks. His eyes, once only dismissive and blank, now darken with focus. Something in him goes dead with appetite. 

Abigail flinches and Sadie watches in bridled, panting fear. Tilly closes her eyes. 

And Milton turns, and your stomach drops when he curiously aims at Orly’s temple where his blood has dried, flayed like ninetails onto his cheek.

Orly shrinks at the touch of the muzzle to his skin. “Milton don’t do this-”

“What would Agent Johnson have to say?”

He shakes his head, tears falling, and blurts in desperation. “Arthur’s alive, Nell.” His nose drips; he does not care. “I saw him when it was over.”

Milton’s glove tightens around his fist, and he glances between you, as if impatient for the outcome of your exchange.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. Nell I never told them about this place.” He calls out forcefully now, tears running through blood and dirt, and turns away from the muzzle in his face. “Believe me.”

You stare at him, panic rising, your mind a welter of memory and promises and the raw instinct to fight. 

Grief rucks his brow and his eyes squeeze shut when Milton fixes his stance. Orly faces the dirt at his knees.

Your voice breaks. “Stop!”

Heads turn. 

“I know where it is. Stop!”

Orly shakes his head and his mouth quivers. 

“It,” Milton warns.

Your eyes burn. “You goddamn know. The money.”

Harrier steps forward, turns his ear to you, leans closer. “Well you had better be specific.”

“Blackwater. I won’t say another word until we’re there. You kill him or any of them, you might as well kill me; you’ll get none of it.”

Milton breathes tightly and drops his gun arm to his side. He trades a stare with Harrier.

“Then we go to Blackwater,” Harrier says, calmly.

“We have the advantage here; if we leave, give them time, they’ll have a chance to regroup. Or get away scot-free.”

Harrier trains his attention on you.

“They won’t run.” He shakes his head at you, because you know it too. Then he adjusts his gloves and snaps his lapel straight. “And I hate waiting.”

Milton scratches the back of his head, then swipes his pistol toward the wagons with a scowl at one of his men. “Load them up!” 

Someone hauls you to your feet by the back of your shirt. The soldier holding Sadie slaps her sharply twice when she resists, and when she knees him to keep away from her gunbelt, he hits her in the side of the head. She falls into Abigail, who grasps her and keeps her upright, and Sadie is too dazed to fight him further while he quickly unbuckles her gunbelt and shoves her toward the wagon. 

When he grabs a fistful of Abigail’s hair, she shrieks and cowers in pain. 

You shout at them as you are dragged back. “Goddammit stop! You don’t need her -” 

The soldier pushes her toward the wagon where she lands on hands and knees.

“She hasn’t done anything!” You kick one of them and receive a hard punch to the mouth and fall back into the one holding you and slip to your knees.

When the soldier hooks his arm around Abigail’s waist to lift her, she shrieks in such terror everyone around her freezes. It’s a terrible sound that breaks from the tomb of her chest, released by a terrible key, and she fights him so fiercely she manages to drop from his arms and claw a deep gouge in his cheek before another one clubs the back of her head and she curls in pain at his feet. They pick her up and pitch her into the wagon bed. Sadie reaches out carefully to touch her shivering back, shushing her. 

“You.” Milton shouts and points at Tilly, who lets out a small whimper to be called out, half-standing, half-crouching, still holding Grimshaw’s hand. “You stay here, and when they show, you tell them where we’ve gone.” He takes out his handkerchief and wipes his greasy pockmarked face. “Tell them they have three days to reach us and turn themselves in or they will find their women hung on the road like the slaves of Crassus. Tell them Agent Milton did the taking. You tell them that.”

She sinks back as he bellows. In the space between you, that half-spent shotgun lies cold and cocked. You shake your head. She blinks in understanding. One of the soldiers prods you up to your feet and toward the wagon.

There, Harrier steps around you standing at the tailgate, watching Milton’s rant with a slightly bemused rise of his brow, and then moves his gaze to you, blinking as if sharing his opinion on something undignified. He picks up your shackled wrists and rotates the iron rings, weighing them with your hands in his. 

Somewhere on the frozen earth between a war and here, Arthur rides to you. 

Harrier breathes through his nose, watching you with his calm and pitiless eyes. “Are you afraid?”

You wipe blood from your nose and from your eyebrow on your right shoulder. The scrape on your cheekbone throbs. 

“No.”

“You're shaking.”

Georgia’s hooves beat heavy and hard and churn up the road beneath them. 

Through the weld of your teeth you can hardly speak. “You killed my fucking horse.”

Harrier frowns in acknowledgement and takes a glance back at Apollo. “I know it’s unfamiliar to you. But this is where the consequences come to bear, for what you have done.”

“What are the consequences for you? All you've destroyed. The blood on Cornwall’s hands.” 

His expression is strangely neutral as he scratches his jaw. “Well we're the winners. So there are none.” Then a coldness hardens his face to you. “I think you know that already. Everything you’ve walked away from.” 

You’re lifted and shoved into the back of the wagon, and Orly is forced up with you, and two agents get in front, driver and shotgun to guard you, and take up the reins.

With a final look at you, Harrier vaguely smiles. “You think about what you’ll tell me. Plenty of time for that.” He slams the gate shut and locks it with the pin, slaps the boards. 

Then he calls out to the wagon as he mounts up. “Let us accompany you, ladies. It's many miles to Blackwater.”

——

Up the road ahead in the fading light, he knows it's John by the tilt of his head, his crooked shoulder, but in relief, exhaustion overtakes him; he can hardly call his name.

Marston turns, and spurs Old Boy up quick to reach him. “What happened to you?” he calls. “Been searchin everywhere.”

He slows Georgia to a stop and has to take a moment, clearing his throat, drained by the unexpected crack of sorrow and ease in his mind, then sits back heavily against the cantle. “Couldn’t find you after that blast. Had me…worried,” he mumbles.

“Couldn’t find you either. Don’t think I’ll hear right for days.”

He smirks as he hunches to get air, leaning on his pommel. “Where are we?”

John reaches over to lift his canteen, still full, uncorks the top, and hands it to him. “Ain’t far from that old tomb you found.” He waits, seriousness in his lean face, as Arthur drinks and sputters to keep from coughing. “Only a few miles to camp.”

“Well get on, then.” He waves him ahead, still coughing, but after everything, it feels better to be moving toward her, and whatever awaits them. Better with John at his side, as if all their disagreements and knock-down fights over the years was possible because underneath they never doubted the other sticking by them. He’d call all that bad blood a waste, but there was truth in those arguments. Something earned by getting past them, he reckons. And he will sleep in the back of that wagon all the way through New Hanover. After he sees her, but that is a feeling too strong to imagine, a volume of relief that turns to agony without her, and so he asks John what else he knows, and while he talks his mind drifts. 

 

It’s John who stops first, when they reach the top of the hill into camp, and in reflex Arthur drags Georgia back. She skids on the rocks, spooked and too constricted to turn. At the bottom of the slope, the sight that ignites his instant rage. 

Dead. Saddled. Shot through the neck. 

He’s already dismounted, gun drawn, stalking wild-eyed down the hill, past the carcass and the leaves and scree Apollo scattered. Nell’s rifle lies on the ground; he bends down and snatches it up by the strap.

Marston’s wagon, gone. The girls’ wagon still there, packed, abandoned, unhitched. The fire ahead burned down to ashes smoking. 

Behind him, Marston runs to the untrampled grass where his wagon once stood, to his empty tent, and rushes along the perimeter of camp, shouting for Jack, for Abigail. Alarm breaking in his voice.

“Arthur!” Tilly sits alone near Pearson’s wagon. Beside her lies a body draped in a sheet of canvas. She staggers to her feet but can’t seem to move or look away from the covered body as if it might be a desecration to leave it unguarded. 

He holsters his gun and reaches for the shroud with a crush in his chest before pulling it back to find Miss Grimshaw lying stiff and gutshot.

“Where’s Nell?” He grasps for Tilly’s arm. A shotgun angled across a short span at the body of one of Micah’s bastard thugs who lies flung back, limbs splayed straight, half his head improved in a lumpy spray of gruel. 

“A bunch of men took her and Abigail and Missus Adler. Agent Milton  -”

“The boy?”

“I think -” she stammers, “I think the boys hid in the cave - the other boy -”

John sprints toward the mouth of the cave and shouts for Jack, his voice ringing, fading.

“Where’d they take em.”

Tilly sniffs, trembling as if the shock is only beginning to dawn on her. “Blackwater. Arthur -”

The clamp of his jaw dampens all sound beneath a low and turbulent rumble. Throbs of his pulse rushing in his ears.  An old feeling stirs in him he’d thought long gone, crawling back in each breath. 

Up ahead, by the fire, Micah roams into view, his palms propped on his gun grips. That skinny shitheel Cleet walks with him. 

Arthur steps away, moving her behind him before he charges ahead.

“You.” He points at Cleet as he barrels straight toward him. “I want to know where the fuck you were hidin when all this went down.”

Cleet shivers his head innocently, backing away. Looking down, Micah stops Arthur with two badly calculated hands on his chest, and regrets them too late. Arthur shoves him back with murder in his eyes, and Bill and Javier step up and drag him away just as Dutch’s voice booms. “Arthur.” 

They all stop as if commanded.

In his barren tent, Dutch sits with two small crates stacked in front of him in a makeshift table, one silver gun set upon the top. He wipes down his other revolver with great calculating patience, and in the silence following his bellow, they all watch a man oil his gun as if he is offering them a demonstration. He begins to set it down.

And curls his hand around the grip, contemplating the sight of his fingers falling one by one.

“How did she know.” Dutch fixates on the ground before him.

“What are you doin -” Arthur draws up, eyes on that gun.

As if it has revealed the truth to him, Dutch gazes over at the grip in his hand. “I am told that right now, at this moment, your girl is leading the goddamn Pinkertons to Blackwater.” He tightens his grip and the barrel noses onto a deadly plane. “To our money.” He looks up, eyes of onyx black unsparing. “So you need to tell me how she would goddamn know.”

Bill and Javier glance sideways at each other, at Dutch.

In his rising rage, Arthur struggles not to succumb to a fit and speaks low, barely contained. “Damn the money.”

He jerks against their strong hold. 

“She just saved our miserable lives.”

Dutch’s nose wrinkles as he grips his gun. “How did she know.” He stands and steps out.

When they let him go, he falls to a hand on the table, coughing, fighting to get air. “This is wastin time -” 

“I told you, Dutch.” Micah eases around to Dutch’s side. “From the very beginning.”

“You got no idea -” Arthur muffles a long hacking cough into his shoulder. 

Dutch’s hammer pulls back two goddamn clicks. A third. “What was the plan, Arthur.”

Bill and Javier step away. Hands draw back to their hips as they check around. Micah. Cleet. This span between them stretching tight.

He sniffs, smiles despondent, exhausted, into his upper arm as he wipes the blood from his mouth, and pushes himself upright. “To get out under all that smoke, Dutch.” He leans Nell’s heavy rifle against the table, steps away from the table and stands one heart-pounding flinch from drawing his Schofield. 

“Arthur!” John’s voice echoes from the cave.

He strides out into the light and through the center of their circle with a quizzical glare around, clutching Jack to his chest, and Ten Crow follows, both boys dirty, wet, shivering. Ten Crow takes a long look at the body of that dead brute as they pass through the scattered crowd. 

“The kid says there was a dozen men, maybe more. Milton and someone else.”

Arthur does not break his stare with Dutch until John is past him, and then turns his back on them, steering Ten Crow in front of him toward his tent.

“Keep it cool, Marston.”

The kid’s teeth chatter.  “Did you see my brother?”

Arthur muffles his cough and thinks of Charles’ head bowing as Paytah insisted on staying. “He’s fine. He’s with Charles.” 

He heads to his trunk and digs through it as the kid watches, holding his chest and shaking, asking what else he knows. But there are no answers, and he learned as much when he was his age and saw his father on the scaffold, the shroud put over his head, then the rope. 

“John,” he mutters, just loud enough. “You recall a time in Livingston?” 

Marston glances over from his tent, his face quickly turning severe. 

As if he is not listening to the movement of the men behind him, Arthur drapes his old blue winter coat with its matted shearling and fur, blood stains on the bottom hem from a forgotten time, heavily on Ten Crow’s thin shoulders, and speaks loud enough for John to hear. 

“Paytah needs you to stay away from the reservation till it’s all clear. And I need you to go with Miss Tilly and Jack. Help them where they goin - can you be a man right now?” 

Ten Crow nods, but his eyes are on the scene behind him, and Arthur shares another look with John. 

“Livingston.” John rubs a hand over his mouth and cheek as he crouches by his son, unprotected, and does not look back toward the cave or the fire or the men. He scoops up Jack and heads for the horses.

Arthur settles an old hat on the kid’s head. Flicks the edge of the brim to get his attention back. Feels the scorching focus of the five men behind him.

“There’s bounty catchers and soldiers on the road, kid; watch for em. Take what you know how to use here. Quick now.” He points to the back of his wagon and pushes the boy toward it, and calls over his shoulder. “Miss Tilly, you take this too.” 

His heart races as he checks his old Cattleman, loads it, half-cocks it safe, and puts it together with the rest of his cash, the food he has left, in a crusty old saddlebag and shoulders it, and walks them to the horses. 

“You can’t do that, Morgan.”

Micah follows, waving Bill behind him as if that bitter asshole will be of use.

“Kids is easy pickins. They talk.”

Arthur points Tilly toward the horses and turns around, steps up to Micah, little caring about Bill behind him, and walks him back. “Think real hard now.”

Micah chuckles.

“I see one hand lift as these kids leave and that man will not survive it. Do you hear me.”

Raising his empty hands, Micah backs up jaunty and loose.

“Arthur, I -” Tilly hesitates, and steps back as he returns and begins to saddle up a bay pony. 

“You’ll be okay. Long as you stick with Ten Crow and don’t stop for nobody, don’t shoot unless you have to.” He cinches the girth tight and boosts her into the seat. Adjusts the stirrups to her feet. Grips her small hand. “I’d trust none better than you.” 

Over by the hitch post, John stands Jack in front of him, crouches down, talking to him while he takes off his coat, bundling it around the boy. The boy nods. 

Murmuring okay, Marston sweeps his knuckle on the boy’s chin and then stands, lifts him up onto the saddle with Tilly, and Ten Crow chests up onto his horse with a bow and full quiver on his back. 

John jogs with them up the hill and stands scout for a while, until their hooves have gone silent, and then he wipes his forehead on his sleeve as he stands there. Sets his hat right. He turns.

Now a strong wind picks up and unsettles the half-deserted camp, dragging leaves over the graveled ground, an empty can, spent casings, a bloody handkerchief. Marston descends the hill, and together they move toward their tents, walking fast. Five men slowly gathering across from them. 

“I hope I heard you wrong, brother.” 

“Don't do nothin. Just get ready.”

Arthur sets his hat aside, peels out of his sweatdamp shirt and puts on a dry one. He lifts his old jacket from the trunk, the leather many times scarred, stained in blotches of blood and soot like the tracks of his path on the earth. Nell’s blood. 

He shrugs the jacket on. The hide is stiff at first but begins to warm back to his shape. He throws his spare left holster over to John. A duster. Their movements are swift, unquestioning. Here a box of cartridges, here a bootknife, here a Cattleman carved with skulls. He checks the cylinder and barrel. Clean enough for dirty work. 

This hulking crawl inside him, it is restless now. He stands by his shaving kit with a stack of cartridge boxes on the barrel top and fills his bandolier, stretching his neck to feel that old and monstrous brutality rise, unfolding wild within. Welcome it. Bridle it. Power that knows no self-preservation.

When he hears their steps approaching, he does not stop, and Dutch stands like a man about to call him out, arms at his sides, all his purpose and readied attacks suspended in his unspoken final warning. 

“Hosea.” Arthur swipes his nose on the back of his hand and jams shotgun shells in the high-gauge loops. “Hosea told her.”

Dutch snorts. Disgust flinches over his face, and confusion, and a glare. “Lies, Arthur -”

“Oh he told her.” He slides the last high-velocity cartridges in their loops one by one. “He knew that score would be the end. We’d always be runnin. One word and she could’ve freed herself from all this. And she never did.” 

He picks up his sawed-off, breaks it, and loads two slugs. 

“Not back then.” 

Snaps it shut. Sets it down.

“Not after the bank job.” 

Lifts the laden bandolier over his head and shoulder. It settles heavy on his chest like ballast.

“Not when they almost goddamn killed her.” He takes up his Litchfield, coughing a few times, and his knife. 

When he raises his face to Dutch, he dares him by the wrap of his fist on the handle to stand in his way. And Micah beside him.

“You got no idea what she lost keepin everyone safe. What we lost.” He has to look down, hearing himself say it, opening the chest of grief he keeps. All the things forsaken for what he’s done. The cold blade of his knife shines like the flash that travels down his spine, to his limbs.

“This would’ve been a slaughter if she hadn’t told em now.”

The calculation tics in Dutch’s cheek and lip as he hears him. “Arthur - my brother.”

He shoves the knife in its sheath and slings the Litchfield on his back. “You brought this on our heads when you let that snake into our house.” 

Micah shows his hands. “Whoa hey, cowpoke, I’m on your side -” 

“Like hell you are and you never was -”

“I just fought a goddamn battle on the side of the godfuckin indians, and so forgive me if I’m gettin a little tired of you insistin I’m some rat. I landed on Guarma, same as you.”

“That’s enough!” Dutch holds up his hand again, speaking slowly in warning. “No one could have known what was to come.” 

“We knew.” He coughs quietly. “Hosea knew.” 

He takes another step closer before Dutch can interrupt. “I have been loyal to you my whole life. I’ve fought for you, even when you didn’t deserve it -”

Dutch shakes his head with a bitter, disbelieving smile.

“And I’ll be damned for it. Never asked much in return. But this one time, I need your help -” He coughs into his arm, and struggles to withhold the desperation in his voice. “You owe me that at least.”

Dutch stares at him from the shade of his hat brim, breathing in dead-still restraint.

Arthur turns his head, to where John stands ready, watching for any signal. Over by the hitches, Georgia steps impatiently, beginning to paw at the ground. Her lather laces the edges of the saddle blanket. He picks up the sawed-off.

“I’m goin to Blackwater to get em back. If you want your money you will ride with me now.”

Dutch’s face hardens. A transformation he has witnessed a few times in his life. Something unmasked and unpretended. His jaw locked. Something gone dead in his eyes before he gleams in the donning of his guile.

“Of course, old friend.” Dutch lifts his acquiescent hands. Speaks dangerously bold to the ones behind him. “You heard him, boys. We’ll do as Arthur says.”

Arthur meets eyes with John, who nods and makes for the horses. 

He walks to the table, and takes up Nell’s rifle, and calls out as he thumbs the wing of the stock. “There are soldiers in Blackwater. They’ll be ready for us. Be ready for them.” He hangs it on his shoulder.

And he turns back to Dutch, and watches past him as Javier and Bill draw long guns from the gun chest in Pearson’s wagon in sober silence, Javier’s gunbelt glinting silver. John shoves a carbine and rifle into his saddle scabbards. Micah and Cleet, oddly obedient and foolin nobody, accept rifles from Bill. 

Dutch doesn’t join them; together, they wait for the rest of the men to get to the horses. Arthur fits his hat on.

Now he growls unpretended too. “It’s been a long time together, Dutch. A lot of history we put behind us, doin what we had to.” He nods to himself, blows a couple shaking breaths as he withstands the laboring surge of an old life inside returning.

“Next time you aim that piece at me, you better pull the goddamn trigger.”

For a few breaths they stare each other down. As if in some unspoken fateful pact. Then he follows the others to the horses and slides his rifles in his scabbards and mounts up, rolling his shoulders and his neck. Beneath him, Georgia knows something stirs; she is restless and ready. He hardly has to ask her forward. She moves by his will alone, and by such, she will not falter, she will carry him to hell and back.

 


 

Inside that old abandoned hunting cabin, with thirty rifles crated and stacked by the door like a stronghold, and the huge buffalo hides spread out by the hearth, you got out of your damp shirt and trousers. Arthur made you sit by the hearth in the light. There, he knelt and peeled off your wet and bloody sock, revealing the broken nail of your big toe where you’d kicked the crate in fury. He clipped off the torn piece of it like a scale with his clean knife, gave it a quick wash of alcohol. Your leg jumped, and he apologized. Clumsily, he dabbed it dry and wrapped a plaster around the raw skin, swearing when it bunched up. You jumped again when he touched between your toes, and this time his eyebrows lifted in teasing, as if it was a discovery, another place where you were tender.

Sadie sits with Abigail speaking low words of distraction and comfort, drained of certainty, drained of hope. She rubs her eyes. Across from you, Orly leans against the side, shaken with every bump and clatter of the wagon over the road, glancing at you as if to impart his mind in all its torment.

“How was he?” you ask in a plain voice, and glare at the guard sitting shotgun when he looks back. 

Orly hesitates, and seems to calculate no harm in answering. “With that other - Charles, is that his name?”

“And he was alright?”

This time, he sighs, his eyes coming back to you a second time, a third, as he keeps checking the sole of his boot coming untacked. 

“Please don’t stall.”

“He wasn’t wounded, judging at a distance. He was getting on his horse.”

You hold your left arm to your chest and clutch the collar closed, and try not to think of the unknown. Which surrounds you. What you know is the slab of boards you sit on. The three others in the bed of this wagon. The wheels grinding on the frozen road and tearing you apart.

The wind from the west drives in your faces, and snow collects in a dust at the base of the grasses and in the margins of the wagon tracks that have furrowed the land. The lowlands and their last traces of green, the naked trees in their frozen longing, grasping for their stripped cover. The flat land of the plains drops away to the wind-worn formations of the heartlands, shoulders and ribs denuded from the earth, blurred in snow. 

At first you don't know if the sound you hear is anything more than the old axles of the wagon, but you seem to feel it in your throat. The middle of your chest, the soft tissues inside you. Over the wind and the creaking wagons, you can’t make it out specifically.

But as you drive on through that bone-stripped plain, the sound becomes more distinct. Like the slow returning footfalls of a giant. A deep dull thunder, answered by a metallic susurration like a great whoosh through the air. Slow and even, echoing off the exposed rock on all sides. And growing louder.

“Stop here.” Harrier rides up and points for the driver, and the wagon slows. “Hold up a minute.” He dismounts, and Milton, riding alongside, comes around, his shotgun perched on his thigh.

“Mister Harrier, we must carry on.”

“Is it not your job to offer protection, Agent Milton?” Harrier does not face him as he unpins the tailgate. "I suggest your men watch the road behind us.”

And to you, he beckons, grabbing your right arm and dragging you off the wagon bed and up to the crest of a gentle hill at the roadside.

The oil fields seem to rise out of the terrain, half a dozen derricks newly built towering over their newly settled plain. The sludge around them holds its own heat, and the air wavers strangely clear above those blackened pools like rippling water. 

Beyond them, you can see the station at Cornwall’s refinery where a long train has pulled in. Car after car lets off its load of soldiers, forty at a time. They cluster in swarms on the tracks. Horses are led off the cars in the back. A larger contraption is guided down from a flat car, covered in canvas and handled carefully by eight men. Another. Crates are piled onto wagons led by mule teams. Two hundred men or more now forming up as officers on horseback shout orders.  

Harrier pulls out a snuff pouch, takes his time removing his gloves, digging out a pinch, thinking late to offer it to you. When you ignore him, he contents himself to lift an underhand dab to his nostril. Sniffs. Flutters his fingers clean.

“Pride does not win wars. Numbers do.”

He scratches his nose, and watches the activity below seeming proud. 

“I wanted to show you that.” 

A cavalry of forty or fifty men mounts up. They do not converse or laugh or stretch their backs or wipe their faces, and the men stop to salute the officer in front as he parades his men through the columns of soldiers parting for them, up to the road facing north. The tarp is removed from one of the larger contraptions alongside the train, what looks like a Hotchkiss gun, and the men lift it onto its cart and begin to strap it down. You close your eyes.

“Well you showed me.”

Harrier takes another pinch, and turns west. In the distance stand the massive gates of the Twin Stacks, and he observes them a while, blinking serenely.

“Do you know what I do, Miss Riordan?” He works his hands into his gloves.

Two Belgian horses are hitched to the Hotchkiss cart.

“I study land. In all its dimensions.” 

He nods toward the Twin Stacks.

“Quite literally as far as the eye can see.”

The Belgians strain forward, heads down. 

He crosses his arms to appreciate the landscape a while longer despite the driving wind, as if he is satisfied by his own calculation. 

“We are on a fated road, Miss Riordan. And this is the gateway. Hordes of settlers coming through every month. There is no stopping it.”

You turn back and he catches your left arm, forcing you to yield in pain and stand beside him. 

“The ones who refuse to accept it will be run over; they only demonstrate their stupidity by standing in the way and suffering to fight what’s coming." Then he smiles in a curious way. “And you’ve held the power to stall a share of it for well over a year.”

He grandly slices his hand in a line from the oil fields through the bluffs.

“When we first planned the railroad in this section almost ten years ago, we were going to send it straight down the middle. Most direct route to Blackwater. Now at that time there was an indian woman who had made a camp at the top of the southern stack. They said most of her tribe had just been wiped out at Wounded Knee, and she had no husband or children or had lost them; who could say. But she was alone.” 

You try to jerk free and he grips you tighter.

"She was a young woman. Although I find it impossible to guess their ages. She would not leave. She ignored us, and she cut her hair and rubbed ashes on her face and chanted; the men were haunted by it. She would not be scared off. Even armed guards could not persuade her. When they forced her away and strewed her fire and tore down her shelter, she moved to the north side and went without.” 

“I’m cold -” Though it’s dread you feel now, prickling your skin.

“The day the heads of the company came through to drive the first spike of this new section - Cornwall, Spence, Leland, Jameson - the names that will be remembered for carving their marks in this territory -”

“Make your point-”

“- she leaped from the edge of that cliff.” He levels his stare at the void between the bluffs. “Two hundred and fifty yards from where we stand.” 

He stands silent a while as if he’s watching it happen again. Then he seems to wake, sniffing, wiping his nose on his glove.

“They get it in their heads they will make this proud symbolic resistance and somehow be rewarded. But she might as well have wrestled time with such a gesture. The railroad ended up swinging north to Valentine for political reasons. So your little uprising, it will not matter, either.”

The giant bluffs rest eternally parted, disappearing at the edges in snowmisted shades of sage and gray. Your shoulder throbs, your bruised cheek burning against the snow. Your heart so far away.

“That isn’t why she did it.” Tears slip down your cheeks, chilled in the wind.

Despite the ache in your arm, you wrench yourself from his grip, turn away from this man you have known the likes of several times in your life, and you know by now that tone of sneering satisfaction, that disregard for pain, and you stop one last time to view the oil fields and the army issuing from them, heading north. The mule carts bearing mounted guns and the horsemen and the shouts of men to order. You watch as the last of them begin walking on the trail, and they move as one crooked machine snaking up the hill. You stare back once more at the bluffs, and a wave of wrath swells through you galvanic. 

“It's three hundred yards.” 

He huffs, but then his head slowly straightens and there is a change in his face, a coming into focus. You meet his eyes with focus too, and let him see your darkness through the stillness of your gaze, before you walk back to the wagon bed, where Orly and Sadie help you up.  

The wagon rocks and jolts along this familiar way, drawn backwards through time. Through high plains that slope to grasslands, dusky and dry in the season, and the snow becomes a hard rain overnight, and clears.  Where you finally arrive at the river and the silver revelation of the lake it runs to. 

Sadie sits with Abigail and tries to sleep under a single blanket they share, while Orly faces up at the canvas in defeated silence as if the final vesicle of hope has split.

And you stare at the bed of the wagon between your boots where you sit silent, your shoulder stiffening, and wonder can this be done. What you must do now.

The wagon tosses you sideways as it dips into the river, and the four of you brace yourselves higher to escape the freezing water rushing in. A few small articles float playfully in the wagon bed, a basket, a bowl, a nightdress blooming like a mushroom, as if to taunt you, these things you thought you needed once. 

The horses and wagon process at a leaden pace out of the river and trudge up the hill, dragging a sheeting train of water, and slowly come over the top, where the grasslands roll out before you in breathtaking vastness. Telegraph lines stretch between poles like trusses leading to the edge of the distant mountains, and far ahead, across the hair-raised plains, like the first glimpse of a fabled kingdom, the steeple of Blackwater spears the sky. 

“Be good to him.” Hosea spoke with his head down, and then turned as the last fiery light on the lake reflected on his face.

“He’ll think of you first, over all else. His own happiness, his safety, is the last thing on his mind, when it comes down to it.” He handed you a familiar book, and you slid it into your satchel. 

The water suddenly rushed and rippled over your feet at the shoreline as if waked by some force far across the glass.

Together you watched that sungilded city on the other shore. And there was nothing precious in the last words he said to you. Only the weight of an old man’s remaining hope. “Look after my boy, Red.”

The slab of slate clouds hangs heavy over Blackwater and beneath it the fog rolls off the lake volatile and flushed with the fumes of imminent dawn, as though the approaching steps of horses and the rumbling wheels of the wagon will set off a charge beneath. The road that leads there is long and well-traveled and carries you to the strong and furious beat of your heart. 

“I will.” 



 

 

Notes:

Minor character death. Derogatory language/attitudes and violence directed at Native Americans; no slurs. Animal death. Violence. Blood. Threatened assault. Implied past assault. Mention of suicide. For those who have asked for specifics, see the very bottom of the end notes.


Sorry to hit you with another chapter! Idk, I've never written redbird before; it does what it wants. But I promise it won’t be so long before the next one [eyes the sky for falling rocks]. I’m just not going to curse it by placing a bet on delivery. Anyway, midnight oil will be burned. Also early morning oil.

Reddeaddoofus should be held partially responsible for how fucking feral I feel at the end here and on into the next chapter, after sending me You Look Like Trouble, and I hope it hits you the same. Please check out her works. She and specifically her longfic Red Dead Pursuit are also partially responsible for sucking me into ao3 and the fandom. She and the always-incredible peonylanterns (please read Talking Bird and her other works if you haven't already had the pleasure) and of course the ineffable bruisedambition.

Thank you for sticking with me over that last stretch! WIP readers are made of patience and honey and whiskey and gold dust and gunpowder, and you’re the best of them💖

[3/8/24: Putting up a few edits while this is still a WIP! The Cabin got a makeover. A few more bits and pieces here and there will go in - nothing that affects plot, just a little housekeeping, cleaning up things that annoyed me, etc. If you've read and enjoyed Redbird up to this point, please know it means the absolute world to me, and I'll try not to leave you hanging too much longer. Also, if you didn't see it before, here's a little teaser from the next chapter🌺]


[Content warning details: Deaths: Monroe, Grimshaw, Apollo, Joe, Cain. Nell is injured and choked at one point. Abigail's reaction to her arrest suggests history of assault. Story told of a woman who died by suicide, jumping from a cliff.]

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