Work Text:
It’s been so long…
There’s a small campsite set against the rolling green grass. A fire, gray smoke lifting into the air. It’s dusk, the red and oranges of the setting sun against the backdrop of pink clouds and purple skies. There’s a buckskin mare close by, grazing; a leather bound journal, opened on his knees with an elegantly written letter exposed. His own words, written with a dark charcoal are easy enough to see. Writing and drawing had always been a small secret passion for him, one that he kept away from the others. Gunslingers aren’t supposed to have good penmanship or use fancy words.
Dear Arthur,
I’ve written this letter a hundred times or more and I cannot get it right.It’s me. You know it’s me from the bad handwriting. I know I said when we last spoke and I was going off to get married, that we would never speak again. I know I said a lot of things and I meant them, I suppose, at the time, but I am not so proud as to not speak to people who care for me, or cared for me. I’ve been in Valentine a couple of months. I had some bad luck and well, it’s a long story, and not an interesting one, but I am here now. I say a couple of the girls, or whatever the polite term is for them that ran with you and your associates in town and I heard tell of a man who sounded like you. I would love to see you again, if you could spare me a little bit of your time. I’m renting a room at Chadwick’s farm, just north of Valentine.
Yours,
Mary Linton
The letter is taken in callus-worn hands, but folded delicately in half. A sigh, the thunk of the back of his head against the fallen tree he’s using for a brace. Eyes glued to the now black vastness of the sky and the stars that twinkle from millions of miles away. He didn’t know it at the time, but the milk shines with its orange and red swirls. A harvest moon, slowly beginning to rise above it all and light the dark.
Scratches against the page that his journal is turned too. Arthur draws most of the pictures from memory and honestly, thinking back on it all, it was something that he had to get from his Mother. Even though she wasn’t with him long, she taught him so many valuable lessons. Lessons that not even Dutch or Hosea could instill in him.
I’m old.
Not as old as some but I’m not a youngster no more. These new aches in my bones when the weather gets cold or I ride too long reminds me of that every day. I look back on my life and I know that I’ve lived it honest and to the fullest that I possibly could. Struss sent me to that Downes feller again but something was off, he was sick and coughed some blood on me. I reckon’ I might have used too much force but that’s what I am good at. Sometimes, I can’t help but be disappointed in the way that my life has turned out. Sometimes, I wonder if I’d been born into a different family or a different time, would it have been better. Would I have been better?
Greenish blue eyes glance over to the page with the bust drawing of Mary. She used to be his once upon a time, not being able to handle the life that an outlaw led, she moved onto bigger and brighter things. Another sigh, his horse nickers in the background and it currently pulls him from his thoughts. Sometimes, out here in the vast wilderness, it’s easy to forget that you are a man on the run with a bounty on your head.
I regret a lot of things in my life. Regret what I’ve ultimately become and what will happen to me down the road. I am both excited and terrified to be meeting up with Mary once again. She always has a way of leading me around like a pup and I follow blindly. I regret that I didn’t marry that gal when I had the chance, when I was still young and might have been able to leave all this behind. Leave behind being a cowboy, not being ruled by the gun and the lure of the open freedom that comes with it. Sometimes, I do feel sick robbing and killing people. Dutch… Dutch ain’t what he used to be, when we was robbing from the rich to give to people like us, back when it seemed to matter.
Tomorrow, I will go and see Mary. See what she needs help with this time around and end up feeling like a goddamn jackass for doing it. Tomorrow, I’ll let myself get all worked up that maybe she’ll just want to see me for seeing me. Tomorrow, I will once again be disappointed.