"Mac, if you have time, could you go and talk to Mrs. Adler? After all, you and Arthur, Micah Bell, and Dutch were the ones who rescued her.
Tilly says her spirits haven't been very good lately."
Noticing Mike standing silently beside him with a faint look of loss lingering on his face Hosea let out a long sigh before speaking.
But perhaps it was just his imagination. Hosea kept getting the feeling that something indescribable had changed about the Mac standing before him.
"I'll go see her later," Mike nodded. "But first, Hosea, I want to talk to you."
"Of course," Hosea replied.
The two walked through the thick snow. A gust of cold wind swept across the mountainside, and Hosea tightened his coat against the chill.
Mike finally spoke.
"Hosea… you don't support Dutch robbing that train, do you?"
"That's right. I don't think Dutch should rob Cornwall's train," Hosea said with a firm nod.
"Cornwall isn't just anybody. He's rich and out here, wealth means power." Hosea's voice carried years of weary experience.
He had lived most of his life already, seen enough of the world to know exactly what a man like Cornwall represented.
Money and power always walked hand-in-hand. Without the power to protect wealth, no one could hold on to so much of it for long.
In Blackwater, they had robbed a bank Dutch even killed a man.
Now federal agents, hired Pinkertons, and bounty hunters hounded them like starving wolves. Forced to flee, they had climbed into the blizzards of the Hagen Mountains to shake their pursuers.
To offend yet another powerful tycoon now would be nothing short of madness.
Mike nodded slowly.
"Exactly. If we keep going like this, things will only get worse. The Blackwater job hurt us badly but if we lay low, those vultures won't chase us forever. There are far too many criminals in the West for them to fixate on us forever."
In a few decades, Mike thought, they will have no choice but to leave the country entirely.
But now?
This is the Old West.
Even though the frontier was closing and "civilization" was sweeping in from the East… the West's law was still thin as dust.
Even sheriffs in small towns had to hire bounty hunters to get anything done.
Mike's voice dropped lower.
"But Cornwall isn't like the others. He has money enough to spend a fortune hunting us down. Pinkertons, bounty hunters… they'll never let us go."
Hosea's face grew grave. He could almost picture it already and the terrifying part was that he knew it was entirely possible.
But what surprised him even more… was Mac's attitude.
"So Mac… you don't support Dutch's plan either? This… honestly, this doesn't sound like you."
In Hosea's impression, Mac Callander was not like Arthur blindly loyal to Dutch, willing to follow questionable plans even when he thought they were bad.
Mac usually didn't care enough to give his opinion: Dutch talked, Mac acted.
Mike shook his head.
"I figured some things out after seeing Davey's condition. Robbing Cornwall is just a bad plan."
Since waking up in Mac Callander's body escaping Blackwater and surviving the mountain storm Mike had been thinking constantly about how to secure his future.
If this were two or three decades earlier, just after the Civil War, he would stay with Dutch's gang without hesitation.
But this was 1899.
The railroads connected the West and the East.
Big ranchers no longer needed dozens of cowboys driving cattle for weeks; the railway did that work now.
Factories rose. Immigrants poured West.
Cowboys stepped off their horses and into assembly lines.
And outlaw gangs once kings of the frontier found themselves cornered by civilization.
The Van der Linde gang was a sinking ship.
No matter how much Mike liked its members when he played the game… he knew he could not keep them alive.
Arthur Morgan's devotion to Dutch bordered on blind loyalty. He had to learn he was dying before he saw Dutch's true face and even then, he followed Dutch to the bitter end.
Arthur, right now, was still healthy. Still a "bad man with principles."
Trying to convince him to abandon Dutch?
Maybe Arthur wouldn't draw a gun on him…
But a fistfight? Very likely.
As for Dutch? Mike had already ruled that out entirely.
From his memories of the game and from everything he had seen since arriving Mike was certain of one thing:
Dutch would never change.
He merely wore a convincing mask for the moment, shaken by Blackwater.
(And even in the game's prologue, the seeds of doubt were already there. Arthur questioned Dutch's motives in the Plowshare job.)
Eventually Dutch would abandon the gang's ideals.
They would become no different than the lawless butchers that plagued the West.
As for Micah Bell?
Yes, he was a snake. A petty, venomous man.
But he was only a catalyst.
Without Micah Bell, there would be a West-Ka, an East-Ka someone else would fill the same role.
Even without Micah, Dutch would walk the same path.
This world wasn't a scripted game.
It was real a living world.
Dutch's methods no longer belonged in the West of 1899.
If nothing changed, the Van der Linde gang would meet the same fate as in the game: running, hiding, shrinking… until there was nowhere left to go.
And Dutch would never change.
Mike refused to place his life in someone else's hands.
Leaving secretly? He had thought about it.
But Davey who would certainly side with Mike was still wounded. Mike couldn't abandon him.
Even if they ran, Pinkertons and bounty hunters might target them specifically.
And with the O'Driscolls still active especially in New Hanover fleeing with just himself and Davey would be suicide.
No… not yet.
If he were to escape, he needed people.
Before Blackwater, Dutch's charisma made it impossible for anyone to break away with followers.
But now?
Things were different.
He and Davey were well-liked, respected even.
Not on the level of Dutch, Arthur, or Hosea but enough.
Even Bill, who would definitely side with Dutch, respected the Callander brothers.
And during the Blackwater escape, Dutch had crossed a line kidnapping a girl and shooting her captor.
Bill and Micah didn't care, but Charles and others did.
Dutch's reputation had cracked.
Many in the gang had joined only recently.
To them, the Van der Linde gang was supposed to be different like a band of righteous outlaws, a Western Robin Hood.
Now that illusion was broken.
Mike saw the opening clearly.
He wasn't ready to leave.
But he was ready to dig.
If he couldn't escape the gang…
He would carve his own future out of it.