Arthur Morgan did not intend to survive when he gave his hat to John Marston and stayed behind to gain his redemption. As he crawled towards his final resting place, he never intended to wake up again.
But he does wake up. Thanks to time travelers F...
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2021
Arthur's face had been glued to Tori's truck window for miles.
Today marked the first day since coming to stay with the Lintons that Arthur had been anywhere besides the ranch or Strawberry. It was also the first time since 1899 that Arthur had been anywhere near the southern end of West Elizabeth. He hadn't been south of the Upper Montana River since the Blackwater Massacre, and it was still hard to shake the feeling that lawmen and Pinkertons could pop up at any minute with guns drawn.
Still, Arthur enjoyed the scenery and just how much the landscape of the Great Plains had changed. Gone were the endless seas of brittle, yellow grass, punctuated by the contrasting green of sagebrush. Now, golden corn stalks stretched across the rolling hills, as far as the eye could see. There were giant fields of soybeans, cereal grains, and fat, red heads of milo that seemed to stretch to the horizon as well, but these were less common than corn.
"Not much longer and there'll be combines everywhere out here harvesting all this grain," Tori explained, breaking the long silence that had long since fallen over the truck. "Nowadays, it only takes about a dozen men to harvest a field that size, and they can get it done in about a day depending on how many combines the farmer is using. I come to Blackwater often, and I've seen as many as seven combines in a single field before."
Arthur tore his eyes away from the window and looked at her. "What's a combine?" He asked.
Grinning slightly, Tori answered, "A combine is a large piece of farm machinery. The farmer drives it through the field, and the header picks the grain and consolidates it so it's easy to deposit into an auger cart, and then onto trucks for shipping. Combines can pick pretty much any type of large row crop, even sunflowers. The only row crop they really can't be used on is cotton. There are specialized cotton pickers for that."
Arthur nodded. "Sounds easy enough to understand."
"Glad you think so," Tori admitted. "You know, when I was in college, I had a job driving combines one summer. I think it was the most fun job I've ever worked."
"I think my favorite job was bounty hunting," Arthur admitted. "It was legal work and I got to do some good for a change, bringing bad folk to justice. Or at least, folk the law said was bad. Come to think of it, I've been hunted by quite a few bounty hunters in my day. But we were bad folk, too."
"It must have been exhilarating, though," Tori replied. "I've always dreamed about what that would be like. My back to the wall while bullets fly? Sounds like quite the adrenaline rush."
"It ain't all it's cracked up to be," Arthur admitted. "I been shot twice, and I got all kinds of wounds from knives and the like."
"Hang on," Tori interrupted, fiddling with the steering wheel, "You've been shot before?"
"Uh huh," Arthur confirmed. "Twice. Once with a revolver in the thigh when I was a young man, and once in the shoulder in 1899 with a shotgun slug. That last one was nasty; my right shoulder ain't never been the same. It still hurts me sometimes, and I got a real huge, real ugly scar there that ain't likely to ever go away."
