Red Dead Reborn

i) Practice Makes Perfect

"Uncle Dutch?"

Inside his tent, Dutch Van der Linde was seated on a wooden stool, brooding ominously as he stared blankly at the cot he slept on; the cot that he once shared with his lover, Annabelle. It destroyed Dutch psychologically to have seen his lover dead with nothing but hatred for what Colm O'Driscoll had done to him.

"Uncle Dutch... I'm sorry about Annabelle." Danny began, his voice quivered as he spoke out of fear of his uncle lashing out at him with strong verbal abuse.

The first interaction exchanged between the two was followed up by Dutch craning his head in Danny's direction. His cold, dead, stare shook Danny to his core.

"How did she die?" Dutch asked with the voice of a broken man. A single fat tear ran down his pale cheek.

To ask a young boy to share such gruesome details of the death of someone close to him was a painful experience. So Danny did the one thing he could do for Dutch.

"Peaceful." Danny lied.

Dutch put his hands on his knees and rose up. Slowly, he walked over to Danny and placed his hand on his shoulder, giving it a squeeze.

"Thank you, son."

Dutch's attention was stolen by his oldest friend and advisor, Hosea Matthews, who was drastically approaching the two like a man on a mission.

"Dutch... Son, could you leave us for a moment? I need to discuss something important with your uncle, Dutch." Hosea interceded.

It was a very common thing for Danny to be forcibly excluded from conversations that weren't appropriate for a young children to be involved in, therefore the only reason that seemed justifiable by the older members of the gang, which consisted of mostly men with two young women barely any older than Danny, who was merely just an early teenager.

Given how somewhat large the camp was, Danny felt no bother in walking from one side of the camp across to the other to his sleeping area, which was by two caravans still linked together with a retractable cover. Prior to his latest birthday just a few months ago, Danny had been given the opportunity to upgrade from sleeping beside his father underneath a simple tent, to with people in his age group.

Danny sat down on a slightly worn out garnet red blanket in a spot that was unofficially Danny's dedicated sleeping spot - the furthest to the left between the two spaces which made up where the two young women slept.

Fetching a book before he sat down, Danny opened the book that his father had been teaching him to study to help him learn how to read and write. He flipped through pages until he found one where he left off last and began to read out loud, but not without difficulty in pronouncing every word he scanned through.

" 'And looked a-ac... across... the ar-ar, the arr... ar-ro-ya... arroya... and sat her horse and... lean, leaned, over and spit in the dry dirt running with c-c-c-cr... ugh! Cr... cr...' " Danny struggled.

Suddenly, a soft, heavenly voice took over from where Danny was reading off of the top of her head.

A girl with long brown hair tied up in a braided tail hang just over her shoulder stood in front of Danny's feet. She wore a green buttoned shirt tucked into a velvet dress secured by a brown belt around her thin waist.

" 'With cracks from a hundred days of beating sun.'

'I don't know too many women take after chewing tobacco like that,' the man said.

'I don't know too many one-eyed Injuns,' Black Belle replied. 'Fact I'm not used to travellin' with company. Slows me down.'

'She motioned her horse over the scree and blinked into the sun and spat again...' "