The saloon door creaked open with the wind, dragging in heat and dust. Arthur stepped in slow, boots thudding against the warped floorboards like distant thunder.

Broad shoulders slouched beneath a worn coat, hair long and streaked with silver, pulled back behind his ears. His beard, rough and sun bleached, clung to his jaw like something grown wild. He looked like he’d nothing left to lose, and somehow still came out looking like sin in boots.

You were behind the bar, wiping the same glass over and over, though your eyes hadn’t left him since he stepped in. Most men came in loud. Arthur didn’t. Just a nod, a grunt low as thunder, and silence that filled the room like smoke curling slow.

Days passed like that.

Until one night, it clicked; your daddy’s old wanted posters, stuffed in a drawer like dead things. Yellowed paper. That bounty. Arthur Morgan. The Van der Linde boys. A name whispered in the kind of places folks kept their guns close. A myth built from blood and dust and the kind of silence that meant danger.

Now he was here, in flesh and breath and heat. A legend, somehow still beautiful beneath the ruin. And you, too young, too stubborn, started thinking maybe he was the only one who could take you with him. Out. Away. Somewhere the sky felt bigger. to save you from this dead end town, the dust, the boredom, the way people’s hearts dried up and flaked away.

You knew better than to speak. But knowing doesn’t always keep you quiet.

Arthur didn’t look up. Just stared into his drink like it held his past. The candlelight touched the edges of his face, the tired bones of it, the carved lines that told you exactly how much he’d lost.

He didn’t want to ruin you. Not you.

“Look,” he said finally, voice low, full of warning and something softer buried deep, “I ain’t the man you wanna follow.”

He stood, left a coin on the bar. Tipped his hat barely.