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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Arthur hated Annesburg.
Not as much as Rhodes, but enough to despise every waking minute he had to spend in the town limits, which was a lot, unfortunately.
The past few weeks staying in a tiny, cramped mining cottage made him feel filthy and stir-crazy. He couldn't leave the house much during the daytime because at this point in 1899, the price on his head had risen to at least ten thousand dollars owing to the Saint Denis Bank and Leviticus Cornwall deciding to add an additional five thousand dollars to the five thousand it had been before. It was a staggering amount of money, and if anyone caught him, Arthur figured he'd never get to go home to the Double L again.
Charles, as a lesser-known member of the gang, didn't have the same problem. He and Mac came and went freely, hunting for meat and wild plants to feed them all.
Jackson, on the other hand, had taken it upon himself to earn money for the little group to pay rent on the cottage. Figuring he'd like to see firsthand what it was like to work in America's coal mines around the turn of the century, he'd applied for a job in the Annesburg mine and spent his days picking away at a coal seam for a sad, meager amount of money.
Francis spent most days in the post office, reading a newspaper and listening for any word at all about the return of Dutch and the others from Guarma. Arthur knew the gang was camped at Lakay for the time being, but they'd be at Beaver Hollow any day now, as soon as the men returned, and then things would go very, very fast indeed. They would need to know the moment word started getting around that Dutch had been seen in the area again, and so Francis took it upon himself to be the eyes and ears of the group, carefully gathering intel that would help them finally straighten this mess out once and for all.
Arthur, meanwhile, couldn't seem to get Jenny out of his mind. When he lay in bed at night, holding Tori in his arms, memories he didn't even remember making would play themselves across his mind like a moving picture show. One night it was the way she looked in full paint as she buried a tomahawk in a man's neck, and the next it was how her hands felt as they gently cradled his face when she could tell he wasn't feeling well or was having a bad day. She cared about him.
Arthur cared about her too, he supposed, but not in the romantic sense at all anymore. That was something he saved entirely for Tori. Nevertheless, he cared about Jenny the same way he did Abigail or Sadie Adler. Jenny felt like family to him, someone he loved so much he'd have taken a bullet for her, but someone he'd feel wrong to kiss just the same.
"What are you thinking about tonight?" Tori asked him, rousing him from his thoughts.
They lay in bed together, with Arthur holding her back to his chest so he could bury his face in her sweet-smelling hair. Her belly was too big anymore to comfortably hold her face to face, but they were used to switching to holding each other this way when Tori was too pregnant to do otherwise. She was as large as she'd been when eight months pregnant with Sadie and Hiram, even though she was nowhere near ready to give birth yet. The twins still had a few months of growing to do, but the size of her worried Arthur just the same.
