The Angel Butcher of Rio Bravo: An RDR2 Story

xiii. "What you can't take"

Arthur.

Since Blackwater, the gang had been running as often as they sat still. It made Arthur appreciate, all the more, the quiet moments he'd been afforded working with John and Tine; sitting across from them in the saloon, or by their small cookfire. Their time together reminded him of how the gang used to be, before it ballooned in size and, despite their best efforts, couldn't dream of escaping the law's notice.

Only in his thirties, Arthur realized he'd become an old gun. He watched with a smirk as John and Tine would playfully swat at one another, cock their hips and make bravado-laced pronouncements that they could shoot a bullet through a hat tossed in midair; an apple; a pea. To your tents, he'd order, once he'd had enough, and they'd listen. He'd lay alone in his, wondering what other orders Tine would obey, an urgent twinge in his stomach that he'd repeatedly dismiss.

Just as soon as he'd settled into a comfortable rhythm of running with the two, he was hauled away. Things had been ramping up with the two wealthy, warring families that controlled the gang's adoptive home of Rhodes. Dutch and Bill - of all people - had been deputized by the Sheriff, Leigh Gray, who belonged to the tobacco-growing Grays. Hosea had been taking a selection of gang members to play cribbage and drink sweet tea with Catherine Braithwaite, the matriarch of the moonshining Braithwaites.

All that Arthur had heard about the families only served to remind him of why he hated places like Lemoyne - they clung to the defeated Confederacy as much as they did to the grudges they held against each other - but, sidling up to Dutch by the lakeside one morning, he could see the tiredness in the leader's eyes, his hesitancy to ask what he was about to.

"They've got tons of gold, Arthur, that much is clear," Dutch said, out to the water. "It's just our efforts have been a little-" he paused, sighed "-clumsy so far. We could really use you on this."

So he was playing both sides, burning the Gray tobacco fields, stealing Braithwaite moonshine only to serve it for free at the Gray-owned saloon, taking the young Braithwaite girl to a suffragette rally on the young Gray's command. It was dizzying work - the families so identically awful that he barely registered who he was working for, and who against - and there was no way it could amount to anything other than naught. And it was the kind of work Arthur hated, regardless. For as deeply as he loved Hosea, he'd never seen the value in the long con: hours and days spent nudging a mark to give away what he could easily take within minutes. Arthur would watch with yearning as John and Tine saddled up and left the camp together, off on another job, wishing he could be with them.

Which is why, when Bill and Karen approached him to help them rob a bank in Valentine, he abandoned his usual skepticism and leapt at the chance. The opportunity for quick violence was far too appealing.

"Hoping you could be our vault man on this," Bill continued, after Karen explained the plan: the livestock auctions had just concluded and the bank vaults flooded with cash; she'd lead off a distraction and case the bank before Bill, Lenny, and Arthur ran in.

Arthur stopped mid-nod, looked across the camp to where Tine was polishing her boot, her hair taking on the pink cast of the early-morning sunrise. "How about two? I want Tine's hands on this."

Bill's laugh yelped out of him and Karen cackled, "Probably ain't the only place!"

He scowled, feeling his cheeks heat up. "Forget it."

"Good to know you still can't take a joke, Arthur, c'mon," Karen prodded him in the shoulder. "You know you love my classic drunken harlot bit."

The smile coaxed out of him. "OK, fine," he relented, and made off to tell Tine.