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 hummed to himself as he helped Tori with the dishes. Her arms were elbow deep in warm, soapy water, and his job was to dry each dish for her and put it away once it was done washing. This was often the way they did chores back home in their own time as well. Arthur found unpleasant work more palatable when he had Tori helping him.
"What do you think our kids would be doin' right now if they were here with us?" he asked her, grinning sideways.
"Hiram would either be sleeping or playing quietly with his toy horses," Tori laughed, flipping some of her hair out of her eyes with a quick shake of her head. "And Lord knows what Sadie would be doing. Tracking mud on the carpet or harassing my brother's dog with those toy guns of hers or screaming at the top of her lungs because she wants you to take her horseback riding."
"She does like horses," he agreed. "Almost more than I do, I think."
"And guns," said Tori with a sigh, handing him a plate. "I know you've been letting her shoot that pellet rifle with iron sights you bought a couple of years ago. I wish you wouldn't encourage her like that."
"She's gonna have to learn to shoot eventually," he replied. "If she wants to hunt someday or learn to carry a pistol to defend herself, she needs to start young. Years of practice is how you become a good shot, and I never let her handle real guns of any kind unless I'm there with her to make sure she's bein' safe."
"She's five, Arthur," Tori sighed. "She hasn't even started Kindergarten yet, and you're already teaching her to handle a weapon."
"It's just a pellet rifle," he argued. "It uses air instead of gunpowder, and it ain't loud at all. The most it could kill is a sparrow, sweetheart. And besides, I was already shootin' full sized revolvers at that age. I turned out fine, didn't I?"
"If you call running with a gang of outlaws for most of your life fine, then sure," she said sarcastically, handing him another plate to dry. "It only took a near-death experience for you to get your head screwed on straight, after all."
He knew she was joking him, but her words still bothered him slightly. "It ain't the same, and you know it," he whispered, putting the plate on a nearby shelf once it was dry. "I was even younger than Sadie when I I saw my father murder my mother, and it was gruesome, Tori. Flat-out gruesome. Blood and brains everywhere, and my mother dead in a pool of even more blood with a big hole blown in her forehead. I was real little, and I can still see it clear as day."
"I know, but-."
"Sadie will never have to see anything even remotely close to that, Tori. I'm nothing like the bastard I share blood with. I turned out the way I am because of my father. If it weren't for him, I'd never have met Dutch and turned into a killer myself, and I might even have been a good man. Our children will be good people their whole lives because of the love you and I have for one another, and the love we have for them, too. They'll never know violence or that kind of pain, and they'll be the good people I never got the chance to be."
