The Angel Butcher of Rio Bravo: An RDR2 Story

xxxii. Between steel and ice

John.

"Pearson said he saw scat, just over there." Abigail looked panicked, pointing beyond a small cluster of pines, the mountains silhouetted beyond them in the bright moonlight. John followed her finger reluctantly, his hand over his mouth. She'd been worked into a fervour over supposed signs of a grizzly around camp, and John didn't want to play into her fears; another move deeply unwanted.

"Maybe it were his own and he's embarrassed he didn't make the latrine," John joked lamely, and Abigail cuffed him.

"Could you care about your own son's safety for a goddamned minute?" She seethed, punctuating her question with another hit to John's head. "Tilly found tracks by the river, and there was fur in the burdock. And it were bearshit, John."

John pinched the bridge of his nose, felt the scar there, hard between his fingertips. A million responses bubbled up in his mind but he severely doubted his ability to follow through with any of them, so he huffed a sigh instead, avoiding Abigail's furious eyes.

"Sorry, I know a bear 'round camp is real inconvenient for your outings with Tine," she said bitterly, turning from him. She had a point. Despite what he'd said to Tine on their way back from Saint Denis, they'd been out several times since, chasing the leads they'd found and, more often than not, returning to camp with fistfuls of cash and valuables, often the only additions to the gang's new contributions box.

He'd kept his word to himself, retreating to his own tent when they camped abroad. At times like these, when Abigail was breathing down his neck more than he liked, he gathered fistfuls of spent bottles and took them to the fringes of camp, shooting until the hot blood coursing through him subsided.

Not that his time out of camp with Tine was free of its own fraught conversations. Just the night before, they'd robbed that luxury stage successfully, descending upon it like wraiths, the glint of Tine's knife a sobering promise that led its passengers to readily fork over their belongings.

Once they'd put a good several miles between themselves and the ransacked stage and returned to the mostly-sleeping Van der Linde camp, John and Tine counted their spoils. They had a good number of fine jewels that Tine had frosted herself with, sparkling in the firelight, as well as a wad of cash that she counted with some difficulty; the bills held in her bad hand and flipped through with the other. John couldn't help but chuckle, the money so close to her lips and held carefully in both hands like a dear child to whom she crooned a lullaby.

The laugh broke her concentration and she looked to John, reminded of his presence. "Should we say the job was a bust?"

The question came out like a gunshot in the night, ringing in John's ears. "What?" He whispered, hoping he'd misheard.

"Should we say we didn't get anything and keep this for ourselves?" Tine said it slowly and clearly, leaving no room for misunderstanding. She rifled through the bills and held half out to John. "Sure this much'd even put a smile on Abigail's face."

"We can't do that." Tine frowned, looked at the money in her outstretched hand.

"So we give this-" she waved the bills "- to Dutch instead, for what? So he can go and lose it again?"

"If that's what comes to pass." It was such a simple idea - holding onto the cash from a job instead of spreading it among the gang - but John realized it had never once occurred to him. It was as if Tine had asked him to sacrifice a child; so foreign and barbaric it seemed.

"Fine, John," she shrugged, walking to the contributions box and tucking the money inside. She split what was left between them, pressing the significantly smaller stack of bills into John's palm. Her hand lingered there, and he felt the heat from it even with the money separating them. "But I've got your best interests at heart; it's time you do."