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
Sweat beaded on Arthur's brow. He reached down for the metal water canteen he'd clipped to Cheyenne's saddle and took a long, slow drink.
The air outside was cool enough, but he'd been working hard. The cattle milling around in the round pen were nearly done being worked, but Arthur was so tired he almost wasn't sure he could finish the job.
Coiling his lasso, Arthur patted Cheyenne and sighed. "C'mon, girl. One more time," he murmured.
Cheyenne breathed heavily. She was tired, too. After all, it was her job to keep tension on the lariat while Arthur leapt down to tie the legs of the calf he'd just roped. Nearby stood a container full of liquid nitrogen and a branding iron.
According to West Elizabeth law, all calves had to be branded before being sold as a way to track disease and ranch of origin. The Double L chose to freeze brand all dark colored calves, meaning a branding iron was soaked in liquid nitrogen until it was dangerously, intensely cold. The frozen branding iron was then applied to the calf's rump just long enough for the cold to kill the pigment in its skin and hair follicles. When the hair regrew, it would grow in white instead of dark-colored. Since most of the calves on the ranch were either black or smoke-colored due to their Angus heritage, freeze branding was very effective*.
For the white, purebred Charolais calves, however, freeze-branding wasn't an option. These calves were typically branded the traditional way, with a fire and red-hot branding iron. This typically required multiple people. Freeze-branding, however, could be done by one person. Today, that person was Arthur.
Spurring Cheyenne forward, Arthur looked around for the next calf. Cheyenne watched the calves too, her huge, brown eyes focusing on the animals' every move. Her sire was a national champion cutting horse, and she had clearly inherited his incredible cow sense.
Her dam, on the other hand, hadn't been anything special. She was just the average, run-of-the-mill ranch horse, except she was the only broodmare the Lintons owned who wasn't a purebred quarter horse.
In fact, the Lintons still had Cheyenne's mother. Her name was Lady and she was older and retired from breeding, but she was still a bit of a pet around the place. Like Cheyenne, she was a dunskin**. Her mane was the same creamy, buttermilk color, with a coal-black mane, tail, and legs, and she had an obvious black line down her spine and zebra-like markings at the tops of her legs, as the black faded to cream. According to Jackson, she was half quarter horse and half Nokota.
Cheyenne's Nokota heritage didn't surprise Arthur one bit. She acted just like the Nokota horses he'd known in his lifetime. In 2021, the Nokota was on the verge of dying out, with less than a hundred living horses tracked in the breed's herdbook. In 1899, however, there had easily been a couple thousand. They were hard to find outside of North Dakota and Ambarino, but Arthur had known a few, and they were nearly always the toughest, smartest horses around.
