Arthur had thought the last couple of months were bad, living with the pain that seemed rooted so deep in him that it seeped into his very bones, breathing sometimes akin to inhaling fire, and the slowly healing shoulder wound besides aching like he was still sticking that file into it to dig the buckshot out. There was no respite to be found in sleep, because the misery upon waking, and the dreams that chased him, were just another shade of the hell he was in. Waking this time, this went beyond all that. Everything hurt too much to bear, and his chest felt like a damn inferno raged inside of it.
Then the coughing started and that was even worse because there was nothing left, no energy in him to brace against it, and so everything turned to a dark red haze even behind his closed eyes. There it was again, the searing stab of pain, the blood and rot in his mouth. He turned his head enough to spit it out, gagging, but the all-too-familiar taste of iron lingered on his tongue all the same.
Now things started to come back. The ridge, the fight there. That piece of shit Micah sneering, Hope you're ready for hell, while they were fighting. Looked like this was it. He should have figured it was all too little, too late, and a short while of trying for something better didn't much make up for all the bad he'd done. Not that he'd ever deluded himself that it did, but some part of him felt stupidly disappointed that it hadn't mattered at all.
"Are you awake?" The voice was too mild for devils or demons or whatever they were supposed to have down here. Though maybe that was deceptive. He'd been around enough con men and liars, been one himself to some degree, and he hadn't heard much preaching in his life, given Swanson hadn't inflicted that on them. But hadn't they said old Lucifer himself was a fallen angel? Though to judge from the tone of it, unless Lucifer was a woman, they'd got that wrong. "Mr. Morgan?"
"Awake? Just about," he managed, figuring it was best to face the music. He opened his eyes, pushing to his side just enough to turn to face the sound, though it made everything flare again with pain, bright explosions of it like fireworks. It was a woman sitting there all right, and he squinted blearily at her, not quite able to make her out yet. "Where am…?" Apparently every word hurt too, and he heard the thready, crackling croak that he barely recognized as his own voice.
"You're at the Wapiti reservation," she told him, voice low and soft. She knew his name, though. He'd heard it, and not imagined that.
Wapiti, then, and he somehow wasn't dead. He'd sure as shit felt like that was all said and done up there on Bluestone Ridge, collapsing on that rock and gasping for every breath, blackness creeping in on the edges of his vision for what had to be the last time. Closing his eyes and simply letting go, content to drift away. Wapiti seemed impossible. John? No. John had gone to his family if he damn well knew what was good for him, but how else had he gotten here? "How?" Who?
"Mrs. Sadie Adler brought you here this morning. You're in Mr. Smith's lodge. Charles Smith. I understand he's a friend of yours."
Sadie Adler? His tired brain couldn't keep up with all of this. She'd been at Copperhead Landing like she'd promised, looking after Abigail, Jack, and Tilly. She ought to have been nowhere near that ridge. "Mrs. Adler…"
"She's here. I'll wake her. She told me to when you woke up." A dark shadow blocked his vision for a moment, crossing close to the fire, and lying there, he heard murmurs nearby. But the roaring was in his ears again, and he couldn't breathe. It felt like struggling to keep his head above water, as he had that night of the wreck of the Antenor, when he couldn't go any longer and slipped beneath the dark moonlit Caribbean water. He'd thought he was dead that time too, and woke up in Guarma. Perhaps this would be less of a hell than that.
It all faded out pretty quickly after that. Though as he slid under again, sinking back down into the black, he thought he heard Sadie Adler's voice saying his name.
Things jumbled after that, a blur of real and not-real and dream and memory, and he wasn't sure exactly which was which. Sadie's face, telling him it would be OK. His daddy on the scaffold in San Francisco, spitting curses at the lawmen. Isaac at two, his dark hair an unruly mess, giggling and clutching the back of Arthur's shirt as he played pony down on all fours. Thomas Downes' weary sunken eyes and exhausted face, pleading for mercy for himself, for his family, for that damn thickheaded moron Tommy Lennox, for the poor and starving. Rains Fall's gentle gruff voice, muted as if from a distance.
Hosea, staggering and falling dead in the street of St. Denis with a cry of agony in a pool of his own blood. At the tailor's, staring at himself in the mirror wearing nicer clothes than he could ever remember, Hosea laughing and saying with an affectionate pat on Arthur's shoulder, "Well, that'll fit a growing kid like you for a few months, anyway, but my, son, you shine up like a new penny."
Mary, pretty as a picture, slipping her hand into his, laughing as they walked in the summer evening. Mary, telling him that he wasn't enough, that he frightened her, that she'd marry Gerald Linton, and he couldn't accept back that ring he'd given her, even with her trying to push it into his hands with urgency.
Dutch, letting go Arthur's collar and saying with a grin, Let us buy you a hot meal, my dear boy, and my associate and I would love to discuss opportunities in our...line of work, shall we say. Dutch, staring down at him with nothing in his expression, nothing in his eyes, nothing at all as Arthur pleaded one last time, hoping that this would be enough and Dutch would do one right thing and deal with Micah, He's a rat. You know it and I know it.
Fire, burning beside him, burning him from the inside out. Lenny, dead on a St. Denis rooftop. Sadie charging into Hanging Dog, yelling her husband's name as a battle cry. That buck deer again, out in the woods, lifting its head to look at him with gentle and wise eyes. Voices and words he couldn't quite make out. A squalling baby's cry, a low murmur in reply.
He woke again with a startle, and a gasp of shock at the sudden awakening hurt his lungs like hell to boot, but the throbbing agony of his whole body had died down to a dull roar. Struggling, he managed to get an elbow on the ground and prop himself up a little, fighting a heavy weight over him, holding him down, more than the constant pressure in his chest. Was someone sitting on him or what? Looking, focusing the riot in his brain as much as he could, he calmed down, seeing it was the thick hide and long hair of a bison robe.
The next realization was that he was drenched with fever sweat and also buck naked under the robe, which, if he felt like he could give more than a few feeble wiggles anyway, would have made him hesitate to run. He'd had to run from the O'Driscolls in his filthy underwear, though, and he supposed a man did what he had to do. But he had no strength for it, so that was that.
Plus a woman was sitting there calm as anything doing her sewing, and that was a mystery worth solving. He studied her face, and it looked familiar, as did the yellow plaid shawl draped over her shoulders. The pregnant Indian girl with Weathers, the Army deserter, or objector, or whatever the hell he'd been calling himself. "Mrs. Weathers."
"My name is Red Shawl," she corrected him, but gently. That voice--so she was the one there when he'd briefly surfaced before. "My husband no longer goes by his wašícu name either. He's Snow Goose."
"All right then, Mrs., uh, Shawl?" Goddamn it, there was no way he was calling her Mrs. Goose. She eyed him with what had to be a trace of amusement at his discomfort, from the small quirk at one corner of her mouth, but she mercifully didn't yank him around with it. So he was in Wapiti. Weathers and his wife had found their way here too, clearly. She'd said something about Sadie getting him here. "How long I been here?"
"You woke up for a moment two days ago. Then the fever took you again." She studied him with a careful glance. "Much concern here for you, Mr. Morgan. Mr. Smith and Mrs. Adler have been here every moment they haven't been out hunting. Rains Fall himself has stopped in twice to see how you are."
"Hell, all that fuss over me?" Hearing that made him uncomfortable. Sadie should have left him on the mountain, anyway.
She kept sewing, calm as anything. "Shouldn't there be? You seem a decent man."
"Then you don't much know me, ma'am."
"You came to collect my husband's debt. Seemed half-hearted about it. You fought the soldiers off by his side. Then you saw me, and that our supplies were gone, and wouldn't take payment, or bother to collect his debt. Whoever sent you must have been annoyed for you to return empty handed, but you did. I also saw you and Mr. Smith coming here with Eagle Flies last week to bring him back to his father to die among his people. You're a very sick man but you fought for others still. You have friends who care enough to fuss about you. You have the respect and concern of the chief of these people, which is no small thing." She looked at him with a level, direct dark gaze. "So I believe I saw plenty about you, sir. Words can mean nothing, as my people have found, time and again. It's acts that show us someone's true spirit. And yours have been ones of honor."
Goddamn it, he had that strange feeling like when talking to Sister Calderón, backed up against a cliff by a formidable sort of wisdom. Best to shut his mouth and not keep arguing, much as he couldn't let those words settle easily on his shoulders. They sat like an ill-fitting coat, but what else could he do?
But she wasn't wrong about words. Dutch had plenty of words, twisted things around until black was white, and then went and did something else entirely. He hadn't worried about all that when it wasn't turned on him, or he thought it hadn't. Had it been turned on him too, for all these years? He didn't know, and couldn't bear to look at it. It was only when he'd stopped trusting the words, started looking at the actions, that he'd seen the light. "If you say so, Mrs. Shawl."
Hearing a soft gurgling noise, his eyes went to the bundle by her side. She'd had a huge belly when he'd seen her out near Three Sisters, and that was something like three weeks ago. "You've had your child, I see."
She nodded, reaching over and picking up the baby, gently soothing it, that little smile all soft and alight rather than amused as she looked down at the tiny thing in her arms. "A son, yes. Nine days ago." A son. Couldn't help but think of Isaac, so tiny and so perfect, though the first time he'd seen the boy was when he was two months old, because when he'd been born they'd been in Utah and Eliza at that little cabin in Wyoming. "After our things got destroyed on the trail, Snow Goose and I came here to Wapiti. We had heard they might be moving north soon, and thought that might suit us to avoid the Army. Chief Rains Fall took us in."
"Course he did." That was the sort of man the chief was. The kind who'd take in an Army deserter-objector-whatever who was sick of being a ruthless jackass to the Indians and decided to love one instead as his wife. The kind who'd shelter an outlaw wanted in--well, however many states it was by now. The kind that Arthur Morgan not a year past would have mocked as the sort to take in any kind of hard luck case with a sad story and talk, talk, talk rather than act and fight back. The kind of man, wise and honorable and caring, that he now wished like hell he could have been himself years past, rather than in striving for it in some eleventh hour turn facing his own death. "Folk ain't cleared out of here yet?"
"Most have. The ones left are those needing more time to gather strength for the journey." That made sense. Heading north in November wasn't going to be the easiest trip, but it wasn't as though they had much choice in running from the government. No more than the gang had in fleeing Blackwater back in May into the teeth of that howling gale up in the western Grizzlies. Though the Indians hadn't done anything wrong, so it wasn't the best comparison.
"I should...should be heading out. Don't want to cause more trouble for Rains Fall." He already had the Army sniffing around his doorstep, ready to close the jaws of that trap. The last thing he needed was the damn Pinkertons chasing after the Van Der Linde gang members coming here. They'd already been used as bait by Dutch, and he wasn't willing to let them suffer for his sake.
She raised an eyebrow, again giving that half-smile of amusement. "That has to wait. You can't even stand right now, Mr. Morgan."
"I can manage enough, even when I ain't able to do more than crawl," he said grimly, remembering being reduced to crawling, but determined to get to that gun and kill Micah with it as the last damn thing he'd ever do, because this couldn't stand. But he'd failed at that, like he'd failed at anything worthwhile in his life.
"You ain't going nowhere, Arthur," and there Sadie was, pushing her way through the tent flap, continuing the conversation as if she'd been a part of it all along, "even if I have to truss you up on Bob's back again."
"If I'm tied down on the horse's back to travel but supposedly going nowhere, ain't that a bit of a contradiction?" He couldn't resist a moment of sarcasm, since attempted sassing was about all he was capable of doing right now.
Standing there as she was towering over him, he couldn't see it, but he could well imagine her rolling her eyes. "That smart mouth of yours recovered just fine, huh? Let's see about getting the rest of you to come back."
Red Shawl stood, gathering her sewing into her left hand, holding her son securely in the crook of her other arm. "Is Snow Goose back with you, Mrs. Adler?"
"Yeah, he and Charles are in the smokehouse putting up the catch. Charles says he'll see if there's time to turn it to jerky before you go."
"Then I'll find my husband and leave you to it." As Red Shawl headed for the tent flap, Sadie smiled and nodded her thanks, sitting down on the wolf skin beside the fire that Red Shawl had just vacated.
She eyed him up and down carefully, and with those intent amber eyes of hers, he was put in mind of a cougar eyeing its prey. "I ain't gonna ask how you're feeling, cause the answer seems pretty self-evident."
"Still alive, for now at least. Sounds as though I have you to thank for that."
She waved a dismissive hand, shaking her head. "You've saved my life, I've saved yours. That's how it goes, ain't it?"
"I'm pretty sure riding back from Copperhead Landing all the way to Bluestone Ridge, dodging Pinkertons--woman, what was you thinking? I asked you to--"
It didn't take much for her to override him, weak as his voice was. "What was I thinking?" Her tone got that clipped edge, like a knife sharpened to razor keenness, that told him that her temper was up. Usually when he'd seen that before, numerous people ended up dead, but she made no sign of reaching for a gun or knife, just staring at him. "John found us and said you was dead for certain, and that he was fine to take care of Abigail, Jack, and Tilly from there. So me? I was thinking I'd come and bury you, Arthur, you brave damn fool."
Of course she would. Of course if anyone would be a brave damn fool herself, and do all that just to try to see him planted properly in a hole in the ground, it would be Sadie Adler and her fierce sense of loyalty. "Guess I went and made a mess of that plan by not dying--"
"Don't you even joke about that!" she snapped, pushing up to her knees to loom over him, finger pointed right in his face, and he could see her eyes now shining with what might have been tears. "Don't you even dare. Look at all of them who died already, and you want to try to be funny about it?"
They'd been his family for years, of course he cared. Trying to yell when his voice was nothing more than a hollow rasp felt about as pathetic as he was right now, and lying there flat on his back so weak to boot. So he pushed himself up a bit more only with effort, feeling the robe slip from his shoulders, but needing even a shred of attempted dignity to meet her eyes more or less on the level. "You think I wouldn't see any one of them alive again in trade for me?" Lenny, Sean, Hosea, even Kieran, certainly her husband Jake--any of them were worth a dozen of him. How they could be gone and somehow, here he still was, felt like another great joke of the world. He loved and hated her in that moment for saving his life, because what was he supposed to do with the whole burden of that survival now when better folks hadn't gotten that chance? How could he pay for that? How would he pay for it?
She calmed almost instantly in that way of someone who'd gone beyond rage, sitting back down heavily, hands resting on her knees. He watched her, staying quiet, waiting for her to speak. Waiting to make any sense of any of this. The fire hit a knot of pitch in one of the logs with a cracking pop. Some of that wheat-blond hair straggled loose from her braid, falling in her eyes. She looked tired, even more tired than she'd been at the Hollow. No wonder, if she'd ridden back to save him, got him to Wapiti, and probably been out ever since helping with the hunting and the like. "I remember Dutch saying things like that, and he could make you want to believe it, but it was more of his shit. You? Damn you, Arthur. Cause you say a thing like that and you mean it. But you tried to go and die for other folks, and it didn't take. You're here and they ain't, so what are you gonna do about it? If you hate me for dragging you here so much, then you say the word. You want a pistol, I'll give you one. I…" Her voice faltered, failed, and she looked away from him, down towards the fire, something softening in the line of her mouth that made her looked vulnerable and exhausted.
He could take the pistol. He'd stood there on that mountaintop, and what little fight he had left in him to give seemed best suited to buying John time to escape. There had been a sense of relief to it too. Going resolutely to his death buying his friend, his brother, a chance to get away and make something new of his life away from all this wreckage. Finally, no more pain, no more suffering, no more doubt. It would be all over, in one last fine and noble act, and then there hopefully would finally be peace and rest.
It wasn't going to be so simple as that, clearly. He was alive, in spite of his best efforts. God knew how much the TB could ravage him yet. It might leave him suffocating to death in his bed however long from now, unable to even speak in ragged gasps. He could end it now, and more or less on his terms.
But he couldn't help but think of Hamish Sinclair, hobbling along so well on that fake leg, determined and cheerful and funny. Probably when Hamish woke up in the surgeon's tent during the war, he could have convinced someone to slip him a gun too. Most folks would have understood the notion. Better death than living with the excruciating pain of the amputation and after, the risk of it going septic, and even if he survived all that, the guarantee of being left lame for the rest of his life, struggling for things that had once come with ease. But Hamish chose to live, to not let that loss limit him more than it needed. He might have had a crippled body, but the man had flat out refused to let it cripple his mind. He'd lived that life at O'Creagh's Run and been content with his lot.
Dying on the ridge for John's sake would have been selfless. Taking that gun Sadie offered to get him would be the coward's path, giving up to fear and doubt and self-pity. It could be that the Pinkertons might catch him yet and hang him, because he was pretty sure they'd be willing to carry him up to the gallows if need be, but no use worrying about that. It wasn't something he could control.
So--he'd fight this. If fate or God or Sadie Adler's stubbornness meant for him to have some more time, then he'd do what he could with it. Do some more good if he regained the strength for it. And probably the tuberculosis would win in the end, but he could face that notion calmly enough now, because there wasn't much left to fear anymore. He'd faced his end so closely he thought he'd seen a dark figure leaning over him as he closed his eyes, but for now, death had handed him back. "No. I ain't gonna do that." He gingerly reached out from under the buffalo robe, touching the back of her hand where it lay on her knee, risking that small point of contact. She looked up with a half-startled expression. "Thank you, Mrs. Adler."
She surprised him, turned her palm over, grasping his fingers in hers tightly. He ought to let go, not hold on too long and impose by it, but what was proper anyhow? She didn't let go, and he didn't much want her to either. Maybe both of them needed something to cling to just now, because he felt as lost and bewildered as he had washed up on that Guarma beach, facing a world he didn't understand. "Why is it you almost never called me 'Sadie'?" she asked. "Every other woman in that camp, you called mostly by her name. Karen. Mary-Beth. Abigail. Tilly. Molly. Hell, you would call Miss Grimshaw 'Susan' from time to time. I heard it. But not me."
He tried to put it all together in his tired and still-scattered mind, exactly how to explain it. "It was...Karen, them all, they'd been there for years. You was so new, and it weren't until Rhodes at least that we knew you that you meant to stick with us. It would have been presumptuous, I guess, being so familiar so quickly, especially us men. You know what folks would assume from that." All those men calling her by her first name off such short acquaintance, people would think she was anybody's. They'd given her the armor of her respectability, her widowhood, to help prop her up. It set her apart, though. She wasn't wrong about that. Some part of him at least must have imagined a life for her beyond this that he kept calling her "Mrs. Adler". Because she was someone good and decent who could be something else.
But they'd called Susan "Miss Grimshaw" for the respect of it too. Arthur, Hosea, and Dutch were the only ones allowed otherwise due to how long that association went back, and even they didn't exercise that right all the time. Susan had been sharp and no-nonsense, but she'd been kind to him too all those years, had a soft spot for him. She hadn't shared Dutch's bed since Arthur was eighteen or maybe nineteen, but she had been Dutch's woman, more or less his wife, all the same when it came to running the camp, and everyone knew it. No wonder it finally drove Molly crazy enough to make such a desperate play for his attention, to make herself matter as more than the boss-man's latest plaything, to be used up and discarded. Jesus, the poor girl. How many had there been? Susan had been the wife turning a pointedly blind eye as Dutch ran around with a string of mistresses. First Rachel, then Naomi, Wanda, poor Annabelle, Libby, Veronica...a whole long string of them, for a couple of years at most until they got fed up and left, or died in the case of Annabelle. They'd all chuckled at it, trying to dismiss it. Dutch like the ladies, and the ladies liked Dutch, until it ran its course and they got tired of the outlaw life. Or so he told himself each time. It all felt sordid and sad now to look back on it with clearer eyes, and to admit Dutch had used and discarded them.
Susan in the camp, Arthur out on jobs. With Hosea as Dutch's chief adviser, they'd been Dutch's two dedicated enforcers, so fiercely loyal above anything. Maybe in coming to stand with him as she had in Beaver Hollow before Micah shot her down like a dog, she had seen the truth herself of how badly she'd been used. She must have, for her deep faith to finally and completely break like that. But she'd never have a chance for any life beyond that.
He wondered what had been going through Dutch's mind in that moment. The near-wife taken for granted for so long, the two men he'd taken in as boys and pointedly called his sons so many times, all together and standing against him. Obviously none of it sunk in. He'd had one more chance on Bluestone Ridge to make even some small part of it right, to take care of Micah, and he'd simply walked away.
Sadie closed her eyes for a moment, but strangely enough, she still kept hold of his hand. "It ain't always easy, hearing 'Mrs. Adler' all the time. Not when them O'Driscolls made sure that's not who I am anymore." He wasn't sure whether she meant Jake Adler's wife or the woman she'd been then, and suspected he shouldn't ask. He still remembered all too clearly her coming back from washing up near the Little Creek, clean clothes and red eyes and nose from clearly sobbing her heart out in privacy.
"I'm sor--" Shit. He hadn't thought of the reminder of it. He'd believed himself kind and courteous to a respectable woman, and instead he'd been twisting the knife all along.
She shook her head to cut him off, obviously not wanting the pity. She opened her eyes, and gave him a sly little smile. "Besides, you want to talk about getting familiar, Charles and me got them wet clothes off of you when I got you here. I've seen you naked as a jaybird now, Arthur Morgan. So don't you 'Mrs. Adler' me no more."
He felt the heat flaring to life in his cheeks at that. Half-dead, skinny as a rail, and beat all to hell. Not, he reflected ruefully, exactly the way any fella fancies a woman seeing him out of his clothes, even if you ain't an ugly bastard to start. Not that there was anything of the kind between them, but it was an awkwardness all the same. But like her teasing, his own mental quip about it helped ease the whole thing off and make it bearable.
"Don't you worry about corrupting me," she went on, that mischievous smile growing even wider, obviously enjoying getting one in over him, "I been to bed with a man, you know. Got nothing in your pants I ain't seen the likes of before."
He wasn't sure whether he wanted to laugh, which would hurt like hell, or just crawl under the bison robe and not come out. Bit of both, perhaps, as he felt his cheeks burning hot with embarrassment. "That's...real reassuring. Got me all worried about your virtue for a moment there, delicate flower as you are and all." Took in as deep a breath as he could manage without it sending him down into a spiral of coughing. "All right, then, have it your way, princess." He couldn't resist throwing one right back at her, right before he got serious. "Sadie it is." He looked up into her face as he said it, met her eyes with his.
She looked back at him, giving a small nod of gratitude. She settled herself back down, squeezing his hand one last time and letting it go. A part of him wished she hadn't, already missing the feeling of it. "You want to tell me what happened up on the mountain, and I tell you what happened after?"
It took only a moment of thought on that. "Seems a fair trade." Awkwardly, he managed to roll over onto his side, growing weary of keeping himself propped up, and he found he breathed easier by it besides. He told her about riding back to the Hollow, confronting Dutch, Micah killing Susan, then the desperate flight with John up to the top of the ridge. The fight with Micah, and some things he struggled so damn hard to say. "Tried as hard as I could," he said tiredly, exhausted with so much talking, exhausted from the feelings it all brought up. "I tried, but I couldn't take him down. Just didn't have enough left in me. And Dutch...he was there, looking down at me, and I begged him. One last time. He just...left. He walked away from Micah too at least, but..." But he'd walked away, and left Arthur there to die. I gave you all I had. I did. And everything hadn't ever been enough. The shame and pain of it hit him forcefully, and he closed his eyes for a moment, swallowing hard.
"Dutch needed to put a bullet in Micah's skull, not walk away. I swear to Jesus if I ever see him again, that's gonna happen," she said grimly, mouth set into a tight line of rage. Knowing her, he didn't doubt it. "Might put one in Dutch's skull while I'm at it. Leaving John to die, leaving you to die. His two sons, he was always bragging!"
He couldn't touch the thought of Dutch just yet to decide whether to condemn him. He had enough pain in him already, mind and body both, without prodding and digging up more just yet. "A bullet or the rope, don't matter much how, but no arguing that Micah needs killing." Micah was a lot simpler. The thought that Micah was still out there, wreaking havoc and getting more people killed with his insanity, gnawed at him. He'd failed to kill the man, and so the damn rat would go to ground now, find some hole to hide away in, as rats always did, and leave wreckage in his wake. "But he's sly enough we ain't finding him for a while. And there's been enough killing and dying for a little while, don't you think?" After all, she had come back for him, or his body at least, not to finish any business with Dutch or Micah or anyone.
He heard a weary edge in her tone as she replied, "You might be right about that."
"How many Pinkertons did you have to leave dead on the road anyway?" She'd brought some heat down on herself for Van Horn, like as not, and if she'd turned that up for his sake, that made it even worse. "Damn it, Sadie, why the hell you think I told you to go? It weren't just to look after Tilly, Abigail, and the boy. I wanted you away from all this!" Before it destroyed what was left of her, while there was still something good and true in her that she could save, coax back to life, with the O'Driscolls finally broken and hunted down. Before she could no longer weep.
She eyed him coolly, not bothered by his irritation. It probably didn't help a hint of anger from a man who couldn't even stand up right then wasn't all that much of a threat. "None, actually. Two of 'em stopped me near O'Creagh's Run, but I had you wrapped up on Bob's back. Trying to keep you warm, making you look like a body besides. Said you was a dead Murfree bounty I was bringing in. Talked my way past them, and I made my way here."
She'd managed all that? One hell of a woman. But hearing she'd gotten away without causing more mayhem on his account eased something inside him. The tent flap opened then and Charles came in through, carrying what looked like a couple of bowls of stew. "Played my role as a dead body that well, did I?"
Charles answered, tone dry as desert sands, "I saw you when you got here. You could have fooled most anyone that you was dead. Fooled the Pinkertons too, it seems."
"The fools who stopped me said another pair of Pinkertons seen you was dead and put a claim towards the bounty on you already," Sadie said. "Didn't look close enough, obviously."
"Ah, so I'm confirmed dead for sure? Ain't that nice." Even as he joked about it, that opened a strange possibility. If they thought he was dead, claimed the bounty on his supposedly dead self, they'd stop looking. Was it really that easy? Another chance, handed over like a gift? All Dutch's raving about Tahiti or Australia or New York, that need for one last big heist, and all it took to escape was nearly dying and a couple of lazy Pinkertons not checking him close enough and writing him off as dead, in a hurry to score their own big payday. Seems the promise of a whole lot of money makes damn idiots of us all.
Charles sat down beside Sadie, giving him a nod of greeting. "It's good to see you awake, Arthur."
"Been a while, by the sound of it." He managed to push himself most of the way up to sitting, and let Charles shove a sack behind him for him to lean against to prop himself up enough to eat. Sagging back against that sack of flour, he steadied himself for a minute before doing anything else, heart beating faster even from that small bit of effort.
The stew was hot, and compared to the usual greasy mess in camp, actually tasted pretty good. Forced himself to eat slowly, breathe slowly, even as his empty stomach came to life with a fury, and he wanted to inhale the whole bowl of it. If he ended up choking, that would be another round of Godawful, agonizing coughing, so best not. So that left him savor it a bit. The vegetables--turnips and carrots, he thought--still had a little bite left to them, though honestly he preferred that to Pearson's cooking them down to a mush. He suspected some of the meat might be horse, though he wouldn't ask. He'd had to eat horse a time or two when things got lean, including the gang butchering poor Boadicea on the road up to the Grizzlies when she broke her leg in a gopher hole not too far outside of Strawberry. Tried to not think of Zenobia either, and how she'd died on Bluestone Ridge, whinnying in pain and fear. Faithful to the end, both of them, and they'd died too because of the mad, violent life he'd been living. At least he'd been able to give both of them a last moment of comfort, one last bit of praise. It seemed little enough given all they'd carried him through.
All of them sat there, spooning up their stew, and it was the companionable kind of silence of those who'd been together enough, been through enough, that there was no need to fill things with idle chatter. There had been so much talk these last months, and much of it empty bluster anyway. But all the same, Charles finally spoke up. "I suppose tomorrow I ought to get around to burying you. Or at least, pretending it. When you're not there on the ridge, they'll assume someone stole the body in the night--"
"You're welcome," Sadie said with a self-satisfied smile. "Ain't like we hadn't done that before. The Pinkertons already know we take our dead back."
"But if there's a grave and a marker, well, that'll help sell the story that you died there."
It was on the tip of his tongue to make some lighthearted joke about Charles making sure he got a half-dozen pretty girls to cry over his grave, but it died before he spoke it. They'd buried enough people over the last few months. He thought of Lenny and Hosea, buried side by side just outside of St. Denis, and how Sadie and Charles had seen to that. She hadn't heard that conversation in camp one day, but he had to think maybe Tilly had told her about the two men's wishes. Probably told her too that fancy of his about being buried facing to the west when she'd said she was going back for him. Lord, the woman was fearless. John got there in time to meet them at Copperhead Landing, take over protecting the women and Jack, so of course she would have felt free to go back for his body. The woman had damn well sneaked into the St. Denis morgue for Lenny and Hosea. She wouldn't balk at searching a mountain after dark to steal him from under the noses of the Pinkertons, and when she found him clinging to the last few threads of life, she'd hauled him on her horse and brought him to the one place he could be safe for a little while, long enough to hopefully be able to ride again. He nodded in acknowledgment instead. "Sounds about right."
He scraped up the last spoonful of stew, and wasn't sure how to ask given Charles was taking on enough risk with this whole fake grave business, but he had to anyhow. She'd been one of them. She'd been family. "Susan's dead too. Micah shot her down at camp right before the Pinkertons came down on the place. Could you--would you--please." The last victim of the whole piece of madness, and so few of them had known her when she was young and happy and in love, and laughed a hell of a lot more. Only he and Dutch remembered that now with Bessie and Hosea gone. Just one more life Dutch had snared and ruined and then finally sacrificed.
"I found her down at camp. Left her wrapped up in canvas so the animals won't get to her," Sadie said, voice going oddly gentle. "I'd planned to bury her after you, but, well, some plans got changed when you wasn't quite dead."
"Of course," Charles said, not even hesitating. "Is there any place she'd like?"
He had to think about it, trying hard to recall if she'd said anything at all in the twenty-odd years he'd known her. "She never did say anything special about how she'd like to be buried. But usually when she'd go be alone, you'd find her someplace quiet, nice view. Talking about how she needed to get away from all our bickering and bullshit for a little while, and appreciate something pretty."
"I'll find the right place, don't worry," Charles said. "It's good to see you awake and eating, but it'll be a few days yet before you're up." He set down his empty stew bowl beside him, and reached into the satchel slung at his side. He pulled out two leather-bound books, and handed them over. "Figured you could use these while you rest."
He read the gilt lettering on the spine of the navy blue one. "Oliver Twist", something he hadn't read before. "Mr. Dickens, huh? I was a bit of a ways into 'A Tale of Two Cities' before it all went crazy in Blackwater. Never did get back to it." There had been so much to do all the time keeping the camp up and running, and then running away again, over and over, and there wasn't a moment to spare to sit down and read for the sheer pleasure of it. Except Dutch sure was sitting around reading a lot, as usual. Hosea too, but Hosea was sick, nobody could blame him for taking it easy. And he was still out running jobs, and taking care of people in camp. Putting that aside with effort, he turned to the other book, bound in black leather, and opened it to see blank pages.
He looked up at Charles. "It was a blank book an Army quartermaster had for his accounts and left here. Don't think we didn't all see you scribbling away in that journal of yours," he said, a glint of humor in his eyes. "Looks like you lost your last one."
He shook his head. "John's got it now, I guess."
"All this time, all we done together, it's John Marston who gets a peek at that notorious journal of yours?" Sadie joked. "That's some gratitude for you!"
"I wasn't much worrying about him reading it when I was gonna be dead, you know," he protested, rolling his eyes. "I just handed my whole satchel over when I sent him off. Money, everything I had except my guns and some bullets. He was gonna need it. I wasn't."
At least he'd never see John again for it to be a source of awkwardness of the man reading Arthur's private thoughts, including dragging one John Goddamn Idiot Marston over the coals repeatedly. Good thing it was that particular journal. The previous one he'd lost in the fire had been far unkinder, given he'd been writing in that one a couple of years ago when John decided to vanish on Abigail and Jack for a whole damn year, then suddenly reappear. Not to mention he'd been far more of a harsh, cold jackass himself when writing that thing.
"I've got some money," Sadie said. "Part of what you gave to Tilly before you sent her and Jack away. Plus what I've got from the train." She looked over at Charles. "How are you fixed for money?"
"I don't need much. I'll be going to Canada with Rains Fall."
"You should take some of it," Sadie said, shaking her head. "You wasn't there on that train job, no, but you're family. You should take what you can, so you have it."
"I've got my share laid by already. So you be quiet and keep the money. You'll need it if you're heading to Mexico and Arthur can't work for a long while," Charles argued with her.
Feeling like he was being talked right past like a fence post rather than the person in question, he had to interrupt. "Wait, Mexico?"
"Would you prefer Tahiti?" Sadie asked him sarcastically.
If he never heard the word Tahiti again in his life, he thought he could die a happy man, however soon that might be. "Got my fill of tropical islands on Guarma, thanks very much. I go unconscious for a few days and wake up to there being some kind of plan, so how about you catch a fella up here?"
"I'm taking you to Mexico."
"Ah, so it's gonna be tequila, bandits, and pretty women?"
"It's gonna be hot dry climate," she said, pinning him with that sharp gaze of hers. "Lots of rest. Over the American border besides. All of them things are just what you need right now."
"Sadie…" So what, now she meant to escort him south, to stick by him? It wasn't like he'd be up and around in five days and things would be just fine after that. "I heard enough about TB back when we was running around Colorado and Wyoming, years back, since some folks had gone there to try to recover. A man's got gambler's odds at best to survive it. If you do, takes months, years sometimes until you're well again. You really wanna come play nursemaid for that long?" He shook his head, incredulous. No chance she could want that. There might be some people worth all the fuss and bother, but not him. She needed to go live a good life.
"My social engagement book ain't exactly full, Arthur."
He couldn't resist pushing her, moved by some impulse he couldn't quite explain. "I'm near dead now. You want to bury me, for real this time, if it don't work out? I ain't in the mood to be a chain around your neck. Better you leave and get clear of it all."
"Well, you ain't going anywhere by yourself, that much is for damn sure. And don't think we wasn't all seeing you burning yourself to the wick taking care of us all spring and summer long, then after you got sick, going even harder trying to give us a chance for something past all that. Me even, with taking care of that business at Hanging Dog. Now? It's your turn to be looked after, Arthur. You need someone to care for you, and I ain't got anywhere to go, no plans myself, so this gives me something worth my while to do while I figure things out. I ain't too proud to admit that. So shut up and let me help you, or are you gonna let your pride kill you?"
He'd urged too many people lately to not die for the sake of pride, that he had seen it kill too many people. Edith Downes had listened to that, for which he'd been grateful beyond words. He could do with taking his own advice. "All right. I ain't too proud to admit you're talking some sense. So Mexico it is."
Maybe Dutch hadn't been worth it in the end. But John had his back, and what higher priorities he'd had were ones Arthur could understand. He was thinking of his family, not his own skin. Here, with Sadie and Charles, he had two people who still did have his back, who hadn't written him off as dying, useless, crazy. Looking at them, he couldn't help but say, "Thank you." He'd have to do his best to live up to that faith.