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
The snow swirled around like lovely, glittery dust notes, with all the luster and shine of priceless, sparkling jewels. In spite of the grey, drab weather, the wintery landscape was quite beautiful.
Arthur had come to love Strawberry as the only home he'd known over the years. Its rough-hewn, rustic buildings nestled in the canyons between mountain peaks were like old friends to him, and it was a further joy that not much had changed over the course of the twentieth century, despite its having changed almost everything else.
A crystal-clear stream as cold and smooth as a sculpture made of ice still rolled and tumbled its way through the center of the town from its home up in the mountains. It was almost like a wild animal, strong and unyielding as a grizzly bear and as slick and fast and fluid as a snake. Arthur couldn't quite remember how many rainbow trout and salmon he'd managed to catch in that stream, but it had fed him on more occasions than one.
The town itself had grown a bit, as had almost every other town or settlement that had managed to survive this long. Unlike Blackwater, however, it remained small and close-knit. One difference included how large the general store had grown. It was still in the same place, but was now a fully-fledged grocery store stocked such rare delicacies as pineapple, oranges, and mangoes, although Arthur hated tropical fruit. After Guarma, he couldn't stand to eat anything more exotic than a peach. Anything else just reminded him of that place, that godforsaken tropical purgatory where his life had begun to end.
Another new development in the town was that it was no longer dry. In Arthur's day, the temperance movement had managed to get liquor banned in Strawberry, but that had apparently changed a mere thirty years ago, when the city council had voted to repeal the laws banning alcohol sales in the town. Now, there was a thriving bar district, nestled along the south side of town, near the stream. This bar district held at least four or five different bars, and despite the smallness of the town, they were generally busy and bustling on Friday and Saturday nights.
In fact, on more than one occasion, Arthur had frequented these bars with Tori and Jackson. He had many fond memories of stumbling out of wooden, old-style saloon doors at Dixie's Draw and staggering, drunk and full of laughter through the chilly mountain night to the next bar in the row. The Strawberry bars each reminded Arthur of saloons in his day, with their wooden floorboards polished by the shuffles of drunken boots and the smell of stale beer and the spicy sweetness of whiskey.
But, like everything else in 2021, even Strawberry was not unscathed by the passage of time and the advent of the modern era. Its streets were paved with blacktop, and the sloshing of horses and wagon wheels through the mud was no longer commonplace here, neither were the various townsfolk who congregated outside of the buildings, talking about the weather or the latest gossip before slogging home through the cold, mountain air or mounting their horses to head back out to their farms and beaver trap lines along the Upper Montana. Mountain men used to be as common as church men here, and now there was not one in sight.
