Traveler trilogy Book 2, updates every Friday!
Five years after killing Levi Cornwall, Arthur Morgan is happy. He has a wife who loves him, an honest job he enjoys, and two beautiful children named Sadie and Hiram. All of it is turned on its head, h...
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"Good mornin', kid," said Arthur sleepily to Jenny as he sat up next to her on his cot.
"Good morning," said Jenny, rolling over to look at him. "How are you feeling?"
He hadn't complained about his shoulder in a while, but she still caught him stretching it out and rubbing it as though it pained him for weeks now. The fact that he even still had an arm at all was a miracle to Jenny, as she knew even minor wounds could quickly turn sour, let alone massive craters punched by a shotgun slug. It hadn't soured, though, likely because Arthur had insisted she use moonshine instead of water to clean the wound with, and the fact that either he or someone else changed the dressing on it three times a day.
Regarding the moonshine, Jenny thought Arthur was an idiot for his request, at first. She knew firsthand that moonshine stung like a handful of angry fire ants when it got into open sores, but Arthur had insisted, saying he'd been using it to help wounds heal for years now, and it seemed to always work. But clearly it had worked on his gunshot wound, and Jenny was much less hesitant to call him an idiot these days.
Between her and Susan Grimshaw, Arthur never seemed to get a moment's peace as he healed. The two women fussed over him constantly, making sure that he couldn't have died even if he tried. These days, the wound was an ugly, scabbed scar, but at least Arthur's limb was usable again, and he'd regained most of his strength. Jenny thanked her lucky stars every day that he hadn't died of gangrene or fever.
Next to Mac, he was really the only person she cared about that was left in the world. Sure, there was Sadie, but Sadie couldn't protect her from Micah like Arthur could. She and Jenny shared one fatal flaw: they were women. Micah would never fear Sadie like he did Arthur for that very reason, and if Micah knew Sadie had an inkling of the way he treated Jenny, he might rape her, too. Jenny would never be able to live with herself if she was responsible for Micah doing that to Sadie. Better she keep Sadie at an arm's length to keep her safe.
She'd tended to Arthur so dutifully to keep him safe as well, though it occurred to her a few times that she'd been neglecting her own safety as of late, starting with her job as a hired gun to Catherine Braithwaite.
Jenny was never privy to any of Mrs. Braithwaite's private conversations or all of her business dealings, only the ones with dangerous folk like Angelo Bronte or the Lemoyne Raiders. Mrs. Braithwaite might have been fond of Jenny, but she didn't tell her everything. All Jenny knew for sure was that Mrs. Braithwaite knew Dutch and the others were in the area, and that she knew it was them who'd stolen the horses. The fact that she still trusted Jenny with her life on occasion, however, told Jenny that none of the Braithwaites suspected she rode with their enemies.
Still, Jenny allowed herself to be more and more reckless in her little side job, taking larger and larger risks at the cost of her own safety. For example, she'd been sent to tell some of the Lemoyne Raiders that Mrs. Braithwaite refused to buy their illegal moonshine unless they lowered the price. It was risky, given that they didn't take kindly to nonwhite folk or women and that their leadership tended to shoot the messenger, but Jenny hadn't cared, and had brought only her twin Schofields to the meeting. She'd shot her way out of the resulting altercation and managed to escape on Moondancer, but her hat had a nice, new bullet hole in it now, and she had a new scar from a bullet that had grazed her bicep. She could easily have been killed.
