The Angel Butcher of Rio Bravo: An RDR2 Story

ii. The promise of money

John.

John Marston felt little, but what he did was acute. A burning pain on the side of his face, where the wolf had bitten him. An aching hunger in his gut, a constant roil. And a cold so fierce that he thought he might already be dead. He looked out to the white void beyond the cliff where he'd hauled himself, so pitiful that even the wolves had left him.

It was becoming more likely that no one was coming for him. A different, deeper pain that he had a hard time admitting was the hardest to sit with, dying on the mountainside. He supposed he'd cried wolf before, the irony of the idiom not lost on him. What did Abigail owe him, did any of them owe him, when he'd run off right after Jack was born, choosing a dangerous, solitary life over not just fatherhood, but brotherhood, too?

But, Tine. She was too new to the gang to have felt any kind of betrayal; in fact, he was the reason she'd joined. It might be enough to compel her after him, he thought, briefly hopeful. Though, after the disaster in Blackwater, being a part of the Van der Linde gang was hardly a gift, either.

John closed his eyes against the startling white before him, took careful, staggered breaths through the searing pain in his cheek and chin. Behind his eyelids, scenes from his life flowed into one another in bursts - Dutch lifting his twelve-year-old self onto a horse, Arthur teaching him to shoot a gun, meeting Abigail by the campfire - coalescing on a dingy saloon in Gillette, close to the end of his year away from the gang.

He had been sitting at the bar, a letter from Abigail - in Hosea's handwriting - hot in his pocket. Jack had said his first word ("hi"), and he was missed. The letter damned him, and he tapped two gloved fingers on the bartop, indicating it was time for another whiskey. 

The portly bartender drifted over, a bottle of the cheap stuff at the ready. He refilled his glass while looking over his shoulder, having already found John unworthy of conversation. John watched the whiskey reach the lip of his shotglass, then spill over it, the bartender distracted. 

"Oh, no," the man whispered, finally remembering the task at hand and righting the bottle, attacking the spilled liquor with a dirty rag. "It's the Butcher." John caught the terror in his tone and swivelled on his stool, expecting to be met with a giant man, a fearsome gunslinger: the types who might earn such a name.

Though the young woman he found was dressed like a gunslinger, she was like a porcelain doll come to life: delicate features on a heart-shaped face, white-blonde hair in a ponytail slung down her back. John laughed in surprise. "You've got to be kidding," he muttered, shaking his head, turning his attention back to the dusty bottles on display behind the counter.

He was only half-aware of her coming to sit at the bar a few stools to his left; the full glass of whiskey before him much more interesting. The man at his right stepped down and made his way over, leaning against the hand-weathered wood, his hat jauntily perched on his head. 

"Can I interest you in a drink, little lady?" John's mind, independent of himself, anticipated a typical response; a woman's voice to sing out above the grumbling men scattered throughout the room. What came instead was a dull, wet thunk, then the man's agonized scream.

John turned to see blood, welling up around a wicked-looking knife stuck through the man's hand, embedded into the bartop; the unfortunate fellow simultaneously twisting away and gravitating back towards his injury.

"Oh, fool, me," the woman's voice finally came, and it was deceptively sweet, clear as a bell. "You mind giving me my knife back?"

"You crazy bitch," the man seethed through his teeth. That bravado too, soon vanished, a revolver procured from somewhere at her waist, pushed up against his temple.