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A beggar told him, once, something that he completely ignored. Wasn’t personal, really - it was mostly because John couldn’t remember him apart from the last one. Or the one before that. Or maybe they were all the same beggar, with the same milky eyes and the same single coin rattling in his tin cup until John dropped another dollar inside. Giving him some piece of advice he didn’t much care to think about or drift off to sleep to.
That was how it usually went.
Until one night, when he’s sitting up under Benedict Pass as it sloughs rainwater and he sloughs blood from a knife stuck in his leg, courtesy of a mugging that went a hell of a lot worse for the other guy. He’s dizzy and pissed off and that’s when that beggar’s words come back to him. All at once, for some god damned reason.
That weird, blind bastard had smiled, with maybe two teeth, and said: “Some gold and bones are better left buried.”
He doesn’t know why it comes to him now, other than maybe his head is loose and cottoned and he recalls Arthur telling him once about a corpse he found strung up under a pass like this one. All red and guts and blood and bones. John doesn’t want to be like that: bones under a bridge.
He grips the knife and yanks it out with one clean motion, which hurts just as much as when it went in. He studies it dourly. It’s a pretty but tiny thing, with cherry varnish and golden snakes engraved into the metal, which makes John think that whoever his mugger was cared more about style than the actual part where he was supposed to stab someone with it for not giving him money.
John’s got no interest in keeping it at all. So he flips it around and buries it right there in the mud. Pushes it down blade-first with the heel of his palm on the butt of the hilt and lets the loamy soil gulp it down all the way. He doesn’t know what possesses him to do it, other than that the gold flashes against his lantern and it hurts his eyes and there’s no bones nearby. And when the glint of color disappears into the earth, his vision goes dark, too.
He wakes up mostly fine, in the morning, with dirt and blood in his fingernails. No bones, and no guts.
And no knife; and no gold.
There were lines of sweat down his neck when Arthur came up on John by the riverside, chewing a cigarette butt over the sounds of crickets and chittering water. He looked down at John the way he usually did: like he was trying to figure out the best way to keep a puppy from pissing on his leg in excitement.
“You’re with me,” he said, and walked away.
John was thirteen, then, and sometimes he wasn’t sure if he completely liked Arthur, but somehow he always wanted to impress him anyway. So he’d shot up like a whip, tossing the cattail in his hand into the water, and took up a light jog after the older man.
“Where we goin'?”
“Out.”
“We already out.”
“Outta camp, you mouthy louse.” Arthur spat his stub onto the grass, ground his heel into the glowing ember. Hosea was always saying to do that in the dry season and was always on Dutch for leaving his cigars around. John wasn’t allowed to smoke yet, or he’d probably forget, too.
Swinging up onto his horse - a big, black shire with speckles of creamy white down her flank named Eris - Arthur turned back to John and offered his arm down. John huffed.
“I’m big enough to ride by myself.”
“You ain’t big enough to see the top of a horse’s ass,” Arthur said. He waved his fingers. “Now up, before I change my mind an’ leave you here.”
Indignantly, John slapped at his hand, but grabbed onto his forearm and let Arthur swing him up. The saddle was getting too small for both of them, which was more because of Arthur’s big butt than John’s skinny one, and the arch dug into his tailbone uncomfortably. But he didn’t complain.
Arthur grunted, clicked his tongue to start them moving at a trot down the hillside.
“Dutch and Hosea know we’re goin’?” John asked.
“We ain’t five. They won’t miss us a couple hours.”
“Huh. Okay then.”
It was a little weird, and it wasn’t. Seemed like Arthur was always taking off on his own for days at a time, ever since John knew him. Dutch didn’t seem to mind so long as he brought something worthwhile back when all was said and done. Hosea tended to get just a bit antsier, checking the newspapers every morning and lightly scolding Arthur for being out too long. But neither of them ever stopped him.
It was different for John. He wasn’t allowed to go anywhere on his own. He thought maybe that he was just too young, or maybe Dutch and Hosea still thought he had somewhere else to go and didn’t trust him not to sneak off. It’s not like he was a prisoner, though; one of them just always had to be with him whenever he went into town. Them or Arthur. But Arthur didn’t seem all that interested in him, most of the time.
Except times he was being a little weird. Like now.
“Anyway,” Arthur continued, “We’ll shoot a deer or somethin’ on the way back. Saw a clearing west of the river while I was out ridin’ last week. Big herd grazin’ there.”
Sometimes he wondered what that was like. To just go and have a whole world there, and to still know it in your bones when to go back. He hadn’t been with them long, but John liked Dutch and Hosea and usually even Arthur. He wasn’t used to having a place he didn’t hate. A part of him was afraid that when he was old enough to go out into the world, that he would just forget how much he liked them all, and he’d keep going and going and he wouldn’t ever think to come back.
Maybe they were right not to trust him.
“You’re awful quiet back there,” Arthur rumbled suspiciously. His voice was deep and it vibrated like music through his back, and John tightened his arms around Arthur’s middle.
“Where we goin’?” he asked again.
Arthur rode, ducking a branch and steering Eris down into the trees.
“Goin’ for gold,” he said.
Pronghorn Ranch is the second time in his life that John thinks he could die from loneliness.
It’s a stupid thing because it’s all his fault. And it’s so gut-bustingly ironic that he can imagine even Arthur laughing at him, once he’d finished throttling John into next year. Be a goddamn man, he’d said with hooks in his voice, and then he’d shoved John out into the world, knowing he’d never see him again.
But Pronghorn Ranch is when Abigail takes Jack and leaves him in a dusty cabin surrounded by trees and rivers and horse shit. It’s when there’s silence at night and only one shadow cutting shapes into the wall at morning light; coffee and biscuits he can’t finish and too many of his thoughts that don’t make any sense without someone else to think, too.
For the second time, there’s nothing in the world except him. And same as the first, it nearly does him in.
Halfway through the week he’s sure he’s going crazy, so he digs out Arthur’s hat and starts wearing it. It’s too big, and it slips down, and the frayed ropes flop into his vision while he’s working often enough to annoy him. But he can almost feel a big, surly presence glaring daggers at the back of his head all day. It helps. It’s better than nothing; better than the first time he was alone.
The first time was his fault, too. The first time he’d been scared and stupid and angry. He’d cut himself out of everything and gone out into the world at a run and tried not to look back; but Arthur and Dutch and Hosea were all there, Abigail and Jack were there, and it took him a year to admit that nobody else really mattered.
Hilltops with stunning stars and saloons and whores, waterfalls breaking over salt-white rocks and cliffs cut into leaping walls, the west and the world and gold and freedom. Everything out there, if he’d just kept running. But he was alone, and he looked back.
John wonders now what he’d see. Because he’s not going forward anymore - that’s where Abigail is, stronger than him by a mile and moving still. Waiting for him to catch up. And he will, he swears to god he will, but he’s run farther than he ever ran before and he wonders what he’d see behind him if he did look back.
Arthur’s hat slips down his forehead. It’s like a warning. He takes it off and sets it next to the cold tin of coffee on his nightstand, and he lies back on his bed and shuts his eyes. Digs out that hollow feeling around his heart a little deeper. Lets himself rot in the sterility of silence, without Abigail’s nightdress rustling or Jack’s crinkling book pages or snores like thundering hooves in the tents still set up around his dreams.
It doesn’t matter, he resolves; because he doesn’t know what he’d see back there, but he knows what he wouldn’t see.
Abigail. Jack. Hosea. Arthur.
Dutch.
Not this time. The sour bastard is still right, all these years later.
Ain’t nothing back there for him, anymore.
They dismounted a few miles downriver, where the water turned murky and ugly from its long trip through the valley. Arthur wasted no time in wading out shin-deep, kicking up clouds of silt that swirled like desert dust. John still had no clue what they were supposed to be doing, but the way Arthur was stomping around sure did rule out fishing.
John was allowed to dismount on his own, which he did mostly without difficulty. Or maybe Arthur just forgot to help him.
“What gold are we gonna find here?" John asked dubiously.
Arthur pushed up the rim of his hat with his thumb, gazing thoughtfully out into the water. Then he flipped his satchel open and began rummaging inside.
“Gonna teach you somethin’ I learned from my Pa when I was your age.”
John wrinkled his nose faintly. He didn’t know much about Arthur’s father, but he knew that Dutch and Hosea spoke about the man like he was made out of horse flies and pig faces when Arthur wasn’t around, and didn't speak about him at all when he was. And Arthur never seemed offended by it either way.
He knew sometimes Arthur still flinched, the same way John did, when Dutch got a bit too drunk at camp and moved a bit too fast in their direction. Not too often. Usually just when Arthur was a little drunk himself. But the same way, all the same.
“Don’t know if I wanna learn from your Pa,” John grumbled.
Arthur looked at him in surprise. Then his expression smoothed into something a little bit softer, maybe approving. He huffed out a breath of laughter and pulled some sort of metal bowl out of his satchel.
“He weren’t completely useless,” he said, but John could hear the burrs in it. He supposed that was probably as much as Arthur was going to say about that.
Instead of pressing, John awkwardly waded out into the water.
“What’s that thing?” he asked, pointing to the bowl. It was shallow, with ridges carved into the rim, and it looked like Arthur had gone and poked all through the bottom with a needle. It didn’t look much useful for holding the thickest soup he could think of, let alone water.
“It’s a gold pan.”
“It’s got holes.”
“So’s your head.” Arthur shoved the pan into John’s hands and shuffled back to land, turning around and crouching right at the waterline. John mimicked him, bouncing his weight on his ankles impatiently as Arthur drew out another pan from his satchel. “Now you watch close, I ain’t doin’ this more than once.”
He ended up doing it a few times, actually, but it was more the nature of the activity than John’s failure to pick it up quickly. Panning for gold is what Arthur called it, and though John had vaguely heard of it as one of the countless secrets to riches before, it seemed mighty boring in practice: scoop up some silt, swirl it around until all the water and gunk was gone, and see if there was any gold left behind.
Some people really did this, apparently. Went looking for their wealth in some filthy river instead of spending their lives doing something useful. It didn’t surprise John much that Arthur’s daddy was one of those idiots, even though according to Arthur, he’d really only started turning to it in his final, desperate year.
John thought it was real stupid, to be frank. He especially thought so when he’d gone five times without finding so much as a shiny rock, and then ten times, and then twenty.
And he was getting annoyed.
That was how Arthur left him; tossed his own pan onto the dirt like it was an afterthought, stood up and cracked his spine with a twist of his hips back and forth. He adjusted his hat and stepped back; watched John stubbornly attack the silt in his pan, swirling it viciously around so that half of it splashed right back out over his hands and into the water.
“Well, guess I’ll go see about that deer,” Arthur said.
John ignored him, snarled, and upended the contents of his pan back into the river.
He finally understands those words, the day he returns to Beaver Hollow.
It’s an accident; it really is. For once it’s not the law on his tail, but the undeniably worse Murfree Brood. And he’s not too happy about it, to be honest - he doesn’t understand how they didn’t go extinct back when he and Arthur and Charles murdered what felt like hundreds of them a few years back.
Seems like the smelly bastards went and inbred a hundred more of themselves between now and then, because they’ve all been chasing him through the hills for the better part of the day.
Well. It still ain’t the law, so at least Abigail will be happy about that. Maybe.
She won’t be happy if he gets his guts eaten in a godforsaken forest, though, and that’s the only goddamn reason he lets himself tear into the clearing without taking a look at it. He doesn’t pay enough attention to Buell, either - that’s his second mistake, writing off Buell’s wide, darting gaze as he dismounts, the way he paws at the dead mulch on the ground. Buell’s always been a bit easily spooked, but that’s only because he has good sense. Most horses do, when it comes to evil places.
John gives him a good smack on the flank and lets him gallop off into the trees. Then he turns and runs for the first cover he sees, which is the cave tunneling crookedly into the hillside, which --
-- damn fool he is, and blinded by adrenaline besides, he really didn’t think through.
He’s deep down the throat of the tunnel before he realizes where he is. By now he’s got his lantern pulled out, the strange electric one that melts into a furious red whenever he turns it north, and John feels himself pale as he hefts it up and blood-colored light spills all around him, into the corners and bends, into the skulls and ribs, the spines and the fingers and teeth.
Beaver Hollow, a boneyard. For evil men and everyone else.
Nausea spikes in his gut like foul meat, and his legs carry him forward. Forward, not back - deeper into the cave where there’s bones rattling in stacks under his boots, and not back into the clearing where there’s bones in his head, Molly’s and Miss Grimshaw’s and Arthur’s. Somewhere above him, higher in the sky, somewhere he’ll never go and he’ll never reach: Arthur Morgan.
Feels like that’s always how it’s gonna be.
It eases the tremble in his grip, when John finds the ladder they both scrambled up years ago. When he mounts it and climbs, climbs another, until he’s standing tilted against the hillside, the red blink of his lantern swallowed by murky daylight. There’s peace inside him as he sinks to his knees, palm pressed into his eyes, and if a Murfree bullet sunk between them right now at least he would die with this feeling.
That hollow feeling, dug around his insides. It’s not gone and it never will be. But whatever was in that space before died like everything else; whatever was carved out of him is nothing but dust and blood and guts at the bottom of a tunnel.
What’s there now, he really doesn’t know. But he remembers one time, when he was young, and Arthur showed him how to sit by a river alone, how to scoop up silt from the scum and shake it all away and have nothing inside you but hope.
And maybe - if you knew it was there in that river somewhere, if you had any chance and any luck - there would be gold inside.
Arthur found him sitting despondently at the riverside, red-faced and repeatedly stabbing a stick into the mud.
“Golden Boy,” he greeted loudly, which just had to be on purpose. John turned to him with a sullen look, watching Arthur dismount and steady the pronghorn carcass tied down to his horse. “Must be the richest brat in the state by now.”
“No,” John said hotly. “And your stupid pan broke.”
Arthur crouched, eying John with a thoughtful hum. His gaze cut to the gold pan he’d used to demonstrate, still abandoned in the grass, and then out into the tumbling river.
“You mean you tossed it.”
His face turning even redder, John twisted the end of his stick into the mud. “Got angry,” he mumbled. “An’ you know I can’t swim.”
Arthur sighed and stood up.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. John stopped twisting his stick.
Arthur didn’t sound mad at all. In fact, he almost sounded satisfied, like he knew things were going to end up this way. It only took a heartbeat and a flash of indignation later for John to realize that was exactly the case.
He shot up angrily, punching Arthur as hard as he could in the stomach. Arthur, laughing, didn’t seem to feel it too much.
“You set me up!” John shouted.
“Reckon I did,” Arthur agreed calmly. John threw another fist at him, which he caught and pulled aside as if it only mildly interested him.
“There ain’t no gold here!” Still furious, John yanked his hand out of Arthur’s grip, who let him go easily enough. He snarled and stomped over to the remaining gold pan, pulling his foot back and kicking it violently out into the river to join the first. It splashed into the water with a plop that was all too satisfying to hear.
That, however, seemed to press the limit of what Arthur found amusing, and almost instantly there was a big hand tugging at his shoulder, pulling him away from the water. John would have shoved him off, but maybe part of him was afraid of slipping and drowning.
So he moped instead. Dropped his eyes to the water and sniffed.
“You said there might be gold. You just wanted me to make a fool outta myself.”
“Boy, you can do that all on your own.” His tone wasn’t unkind, but John was sick of the words all the same. He did shove Arthur off, this time, whirling on him and spitting.
“Shut up! I oughta pop you again! Why d’you hate me so bad, huh?”
Then he looked again, and he realized looking had been a mistake.
Arthur was staring down at him. Quietly, seriously, his face all lines and silence and thoughtfulness, and John hated it when he got like that. It was one thing when he just acted like he thought John was stupid all the time, but sometimes Arthur actually looked at him like he really expected something out of him.
John never knew what to do with that, other than feel that gnaw in his belly - the one that told him he didn’t want to disappoint these strange new men, when he used to accept that disappointment was all he was good for.
“Well now, John,” Arthur said; “I sure don’t hate you.”
And he tried to hold onto his anger at having wasted hours for nothing, he did, but now he was mostly confused. It must have shown in his face; Arthur got an amused look again, but he only whistled Eris over and mounted, offering his arm down.
John firmly ignored him and grabbed Arthur’s pant leg instead, swinging himself up. As he settled in, scootching forward to keep his back from resting against the dead dear, he heard Arthur sigh and saw him tilt his head the way he usually did when he was rolling his eyes.
Well, if he didn’t like it then maybe he shouldn’t have acted like such a jerk. Reluctantly, John looped his arms around Arthur’s middle, and then Arthur clicked his tongue and they turned away from the river and the silt and the pans, trotting off towards the dusky skyline.
Arthur didn’t seem too bothered to start any sort of conversation. Which was all well and good, John thought; he didn’t want to talk to him anyway. But seconds passed, and those turned into minutes, and eventually his fury and embarrassment simmered down into reluctant curiosity. He leaned away from Arthur a little bit and looked up at the yellowing sky.
“You don’t hate me?” he asked, again.
Arthur’s reply was immediate. “Naw. Don’t blame you if you hate me, though.”
John mulled the offer over, even if it didn’t sound very serious, and decided that it wasn’t very satisfying if Arthur felt like he deserved it. Still.
“I might,” he murmured churlishly.
Arthur huffed and shook his head, the ropes on his hat flapping about, and started leading them up the hill. Instinctively, John reached one of his hands back to keep the deer carcass steady, the other one fisting into Arthur’s shirt.
“I don’t get it,” he said after a minute. “What was the point of all that?”
He didn’t get an answer right away; just crickets and horse hooves. He was more used to that, honestly; sometimes Arthur never even answered him at all. But finally, this time, he did.
“Told you. Wanted to teach you a lesson.”
It took John a moment to realize what he meant. “Wait, you serious?” He waited a beat, and when he didn’t get a response, he scoffed. “If that’s what your Pa taught you, he didn’t teach you a damn thing, Arthur!”
“Use your ears, Marston, I know you have ‘em. I never said he taught me nothin’.”
John blinked. “Huh?”
“I said,” Arthur grit out, and John felt the muscles in his arm coil as he gripped the reins, his voice going all tight and low and awful -- “That I learned it from him. Did it myself. Lyle Morgan didn’t have nothin’ to do with what he taught me, an’ you know why?”
A sick feeling dropped low into John’s stomach. He felt like he didn’t want to know why, but knew that he already did.
“‘Cause you really did hate him,” he said softly.
Arthur’s breath hitched under his knuckles, and that’s how John knew he said the wrong thing. Or maybe the right thing. Either way, it stunned Arthur into silence, but the kind of silence where John knew he was right and he wasn’t afraid of whatever came next.
Eventually, Arthur bit out a laugh that seemed edged and tired. Didn’t sound twenty-three, then. He stared straight ahead.
“Jesus, John. Yeah - guess maybe I did. Or he hated me. But that’s not what I’m gettin’ at.” He turned his head slightly, the corner of his eye flashing silver against the sky. “Why’d you believe me when I acted like there was gold in that river?”
John mulled that over. “Guess I didn’t think not to.”
“And how was I supposed to know that, huh?” Arthur drawled thickly. “Some nameless river out in god knows where, just ripe with gold? We ain’t been camped here for a week, and there ain’t a town for miles. Guess an angel herself must’ve whispered it to me as I slept.”
“What’re you tryin’ to say?” John asked, annoyed.
Arthur looked forward again. Suddenly, John thought there was something lonely-looking about him; his back to John, his outline against the sky, just a dark silhouette that John couldn’t see too well against the setting sun.
“You get older, an’ people get meaner, Marston. Meaner and desperate. Everyone’s gonna start lookin’ for gold in places where it just ain’t. You’re lucky and they just forget about you, search themselves into their grave or into a noose. You find a real selfish, cowardly bastard, though - he’s gonna make you think it’s all there.” Arthur swallowed. “It ain’t. So you forget that fool, whoever he is, John. You think for yourself.”
And he didn’t really know what to say to that. He knew Arthur had been just a year or two older than John was now when Dutch and Hosea picked him up, and part of him wondered what that all meant; just what the hell kind of venom Lyle Morgan left in his son’s veins. If it was even his or if it was Arthur’s own.
The ground evened out under Eris’s hooves, and John let the deer go to wind both arms around Arthur’s middle. Pressed the side of his face into Arthur’s back and held a bit tighter. He didn’t think he was smart enough to understand what Arthur was trying to tell him, yet, but he’d try to remember it and maybe he’d understand it better someday.
Arthur seemed to think he would.
Instead, he murmured into Arthur’s back: “Sorry ‘bout your pans.”
Arthur laughed again. It did sound twenty-three this time, buzzing gently against John’s cheekbone, and John wondered if people’s laughs just sounded different right up inside of them.
“I ain’t. Never used ‘em a day in my life after my Pa died.”
“Your Pa was real stupid if that’s all he did for the last year of his life.”
“Well, he’s just bones now. But he sure was.”
Then, John reared back and punched Arthur again. This time it was right in his spine, of course, and Arthur yelped a little, which was probably more out of surprise than actual pain, but it felt good to hear anyway.
“The hell was that for?”
“You left me at the river for hours,” John said indignantly. “I coulda drowned.”
“For Chrissake, it was two feet deep all the way across! You think I didn’t check?”
“Don’t matter. You left me alone. Dutch’n Hosea’d skin you alive if they knew.”
“Dutch and Hosea are gonna see this deer that their little Golden Boy helped me track and shoot, an’ they’ll be none the wiser ‘bout anythin’ else.” Arthur hunched forward and grunted. “Shoulda drowned you, y’little raccoon.”
John hummed. “Deal.”
And it actually was a good deal, one that made John think that Arthur might have learned more about bullshitting bullshitters from Hosea than he let on. He didn’t say that, though. His lips pressed together and he replaced his arms around Arthur’s middle.
“Anyway, all that stuff you’re sayin’. I hear you, but…” he glanced sideways. “... you ain’t talkin’ ‘bout them. They ain’t ever gonna do that to us. We’ll be fine, won’t we?”
“Sure. ‘Course we will.” And the conviction was there, such an easy sleeve of loyalty that it was hard for John not to slip it over himself, too. Then Arthur tilted his head again and added, quietly: “If you’re plannin’ to stay.”
John blinked. He looked out to the sky, and to the river, and to Arthur’s dark outline, toneless and solid and warm.
“Wasn’t plannin’ not to,” he said.
And Arthur didn’t do anything, didn’t move or breathe a word, but that was fine anyway; John watched the rope tassels at the end of his hat sway back and forth, and watched the gold in the sunset, all around them.
Goes to show who he got his talent for plans from, really.
But, John thinks, it ain’t all bad. He still wonders sometimes if any of it had sunk back with Arthur, in those last awful weeks; he doubts it did, doubts the man had any time to reminisce, when he was always setting the example for John. When the example this time meant running, and not looking behind him, and it was just business as usual that it left John looking at his back.
Until it wasn’t. Until Arthur turned to him and put a hat on his head and then John is the one who left him behind.
His bones are in these hills, and maybe one day, they’ll sound the same as the rest in his dreams. But he doesn’t think they will, and he doesn’t want them to. Sometimes he thinks that’s the easiest way to keep that space inside him from feeling too wide. To remember that he’s just bones, too, and his will look the same as all the evil and good men.
It’s comforting, he supposes. To be forgotten one day.
Down by Donner Falls, where the water splits and tumbles down and then comes together again John picks his way down to the shoreline. He’s got the satchel with him that he’s touched maybe twice since it was pressed into his hands that morning on a mountainside. Tossed the feathers and the jewelry and the trinkets, though he left some things. The letters from Mary. The drawings. The journal. Looked again and found, just a few days ago, the one thing he didn't need anymore.
At the river, John opens it up now. Dips his hand into it, and pulls out a gold nugget, maybe the size of a sparrow’s egg. He turns it over in his palm and sees sunset, sees a fire; sees blood-and-honey light flashing through tunnels of bones.
John crouches to the river bank, sets the nugget against his thumb, and pushes it gently into the mud. Lets the earth swallow it up, where all things seem to go or belong, in the end.
He stands up and brushes dirt from his knee. Turns east, towards a cropping of hill with a mound of rocks mounted near the edge, inconspicuous and forgettable and lonely. Everything Arthur would have preferred.
John smiles, tips his hat at the hill, and laughs to himself.
“Found your stupid gold after all, Arthur,” he says. “So you can tell that angel to stick it.”
He feels the warmth of the setting sun at his back.