Jack Marston is at a low point in his life. His family is dead, Beecher's Hope is in ruins, and he has nothing left to live for. Most days he spends so drunk he can barely remember anything, he kills and robs people at will, and there isn't an ounce...
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"Excuse me. You Edgar Ross?" Jack asked in a flat, cold, falsely polite voice, even though he already knew the answer. He'd have known those cold, beady eyes anywhere, eyes that he'd first seen, ironically enough, by the side of a different river as a young child. Eyes that had haunted him since the day he'd pulled his sobbing mother off his father's corpse.
At the sound of his words, the man turned, propping his shotgun up on his hip. His cold, gray eyes surveyed Jack with a look that was half confusion and half annoyance. Perhaps he sensed something familiar about Jack - he was the spitting image of his father, after all - but could not quite put his finger on it. "Do I know you?" he replied, his tone narcissistic and cruel.
Jack's heart felt as though it might beat out of his very chest. He could hear his blood rushing in his ears, and even his breathing began to quicken as he was filled with incalculable rage at this bastard, this animal in front of him. "Forgive me for startling you, sir," he said in a perfectly polite voice. The man was still carrying a shotgun, after all. Best not to anger him just yet. "I have a message for you," he finished, his eyes narrowing at the man. It was now or never.
"My name is Jack Marston," he continued, taking a step forward, watching as the tiniest, most imperceptible signs of recognition flitted across Ross's face. But they were not signs of fear. They were signs of annoyance, of anger, and of arrogance. "You knew my father," he finished. He would make Ross think about his actions. And who knew? If he expressed remorse, Jack might just let him live.
That did not seem likely, however. Ross turned fully to face Jack, chuckling lightly and nodding his head. The man believed he was invincible, not merely some old man on a river bank in a war-torn country where lawlessness reigned supreme. He did not, or perhaps refused, to grasp the gravity of his situation. Not like Jack, whose moves were calculated and cautious.
"I see," Ross chuckled, taking a step forward. "I remember your father." His jovial and arrogant manner was really starting to anger Jack, who was a loose cannon out for blood.
Jack's rage only grew in intensity as he realized Ross did not take him seriously. To Ross, he was just some hotheaded kid from a family the man had been chasing for his entire career. A small boy who had once hidden behind Arthur Morgan, clutching a necklace made of flowers. A dumb teenager who could barely hit the broad side of a barn with a rifle and did little more than waste ammunition as the U.S. Army attacked his home.
"I've come for you, Ross," Jack growled, refusing to move an inch as the anger lit his veins with a sensation like fire, hot and vengeful and mean. His mother would be turning over in her grave if she could see him now. She'd tried so hard to convince him not to seek vengeance for his father's death. It was her last wish as Jack held her hand while she died.
Upon hearing this, Ross chuckled lightly. He still refused to take Jack seriously. After all, he was the grizzled lawman who had been hunting outlaws his whole career, who had a hand in the death of the famous John Marston, and who had decorated his chest with medals which had been anointed with the blood of Jack's entire family.
