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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1884
"Welcome back to Reno, gentlemen," Dutch said happily, looking out over the town before them. Arthur smiled happily, glad to be back out west at long last.
They'd been riding hard for the past few weeks, desperate to get as far away from Bear Glen as they could. It was winter now, and Nevada was a damn sight warmer than Deer Creek, Montana. Arthur never wanted to go there again. There was something about the desert, laying before him like a vast, empty, waveless sea that made him feel alive. In the creosote and the sagebrush and the cactus, he felt more alive than he ever had, it seemed. And, he was happy.
His time with Eliza had certainly helped him heal from the pain of Mary's leaving him, but Arthur found himself thinking less and less of her as the nights wore on. She was like a drug that, once he'd detoxified himself from, he had no cravings for. Mary, on the other hand? He still thought of her constantly.
The travel had truly been good for giving Arthur time to think. He was less sad about Mary, and more disgusted with himself for the way he'd treated her. He'd failed to listen to her concerns about John and Susan and other people who weren't the kindest to her, but she'd stayed anyway, for Arthur's sake. It had to have been hell to live the way she did. If he ever got a second chance with her, Arthur vowed to listen, and not to force her to stay with the gang for his sake.
But even those thoughts were dwindling. In fact, Arthur didn't think about women much at all anymore, and he had all but forgotten about Eliza by the time the gang pitched its tents near the same place they had last time, but closer to where Annabelle was buried under a tree overlooking the river.
In the weeks that followed after making their permanent camp, Arthur went to visit her grave once or twice, sitting there in silence as he remembered her smile, her incredible skill with that gun of hers, and her musical laughter. He was unable to admit it, but her death had affected him more than he'd originally realized. She reminded him of Mary, and he couldn't think of one without thinking of the other, and of the terrible night he'd chosen Mary over Annabelle and watched Colm blow her brains out.
Dutch made an impressive show about laying some expensive flowers beneath the weathered, old cross a few days after their arrival, but to Arthur who knew the truth, it was all a show. He still thought of her as a lost possession, taken away from him by Colm O'Driscoll as though he were a toddler who'd had his crayons taken from him.
They'd come away from the fateful stagecoach robbery in Bear Glen with easily close to twenty thousand dollars, more money than Arthur had ever seen in one place in his lifetime, but had given away half of it to various churches and poor folk in small towns they'd passed through on the way here. There was still plenty of it left, but Dutch wanted to hold onto it to procure some land.
He talked often about settling here, or maybe moving south to New Austin to look into some land there, but Arthur knew from conversations with Mac that it was all just talk to calm rumblings of discontent within the now-bloated gang. There were too many members with differing ideas now, and it was getting harder for Dutch to control them without Hosea, who no one had heard from since Bessie's death. Arthur wondered where he was often, and if he was okay. He and John were both missing Hosea, and Dutch grew irritated by John asking if Hosea'd sent Dutch any letters.
