Beneath the Burning Timber: The Wanted Outlaw Who Died to Save His Blood

Elias did not look back. He raised the Spencer to his shoulder, turned into the darkness of the trees, and pulled the trigger. The heavy .56-caliber rimfire round boomed like an iron cannon between the rocky walls of the gulch. A scream cut through the smoke behind them—not of death, but of a horse rearing back into its bit, pitching its rider into the burning briars.

"Keep the mare in the water!" Elias shouted, running alongside the horse's neck, his huge boots churning the black gravel of the creek bed. "Don't let her touch the gravel bar! The water hides the stink of the blood!"

Eleanor clamped her teeth shut, her fingers woven into the mare's coarse mane, her arms locked like iron bands around Noah and Emma. She didn't pray. She didn't weep. She watched the black wall of the mountain forest swallow them whole as the only home she had ever known burned to ash behind her.

They reached the abandoned logging flume two hours before the gray light of dawn broke over the Sweetwater basin.

The storm had settled into a dense, freezing ground fog that hovered five feet above the shale. The flume itself was a monstrous skeleton of rotted trestle-timbers and moss-covered cedar troughs, winding along the sheer limestone cliffs where loggers had once slid ponderosa pines down to the river sawmills. Half the trestles had rotted into kindling, but beneath the overhang of the canyon wall, where the water had carved a deep natural terrace out of the rock, the ground was dry and hidden from the ridgeline.

Elias collapsed against the cold face of the stone.

His breath came in short, shallow gasps that rattled through his teeth like gravel in a tin bucket. When Eleanor slid down from the mare's back, her boots nearly went out from under her; her knees were stiff with dried mud and freezing river water.

She laid the twins down in a hollowed-out bed of dry cedar needles beneath a shelf of overhanging granite. Neither child made a sound. Noah's skin was warm, his breathing steady despite the cold, while Emma lay wide awake, her dark eyes reflecting the faint, silvery mist that filtered through the pine branches.

Eleanor knelt beside Elias.

She pulled aside the sodden folds of his buffalo coat. What she saw in the dim light made her stomach lurch. The bullet wound in his lower side had stopped weeping red blood; it was now oozing a thick, yellowish fluid that smelled faintly of scorched iron and stagnant water. The skin around the hole was swollen, purple, and hot to the touch.

"The lead didn't just graze the meat," she said, looking into his half-closed eyes. "It carried a piece of your wool shirt into the cavity. It's festering."

Elias gave a dry, rattling cough that shook his entire frame. "I know it."

"You need Dr. Mercer."

"Mercer would put a two-grain powder of strychnine into my tea before I could spit," Elias whispered. He reached into his coat pocket with fingers that were stiff and blue from the frost, pulling out a small iron tin of black grease. "Axle tallow and wood ash. Smear it over the hole. Keeps the air out."

"It will poison you."

"The air will poison me faster." He grabbed her wrist with surprising strength, his grip like an iron shackle despite the fever burning through his veins. "Listen to me, Eleanor. The boy... Thomas. He’s out there. He won't quit until he sees my boots swinging from a limb."

"Why did Daniel leave his initials on that wooden horse, Elias?" Eleanor demanded, her voice shaking with an intensity that cut through his delirium. "Tell me the truth! Not the story about Laramie. Not the story about the stagecoach. Why did my husband put his surveyor's mark on the toy you brought to my children?"

Elias stared up at the granite ceiling above them. A drop of condensation fell from the rock, striking his scarred forehead and running down through his graying beard like a tear.

"Because Daniel didn't carve it," Elias said softly.

Eleanor stepped back, the cold stone pressing against her spine. "What?"

"Daniel couldn't hold a whittling knife after the Laramie stockade," Elias whispered. "The guards broke the bones of his left hand with an iron coupling-pin because he refused to sign the waiver on his claim. He couldn't hold a pen without his fingers cramping into a fist."

"Then who made it?"

"My brother Thomas," Elias said. "Thomas carved three of them while we were locked in the territorial jail. One for his boy, young Tom. One for Daniel's unborn child. And one he kept in his kit bag."

Elias turned his head, his eyes burning into hers with a feverish brilliance.

"Look at the ledger, Eleanor. Look at the deed."

Eleanor took the heavy, leather-bound volume from beneath her shawl. Her hands were numb, but she forced her fingers to turn the stiff, crackling pages until she reached the forty-fourth leaf—the page pasted over with surveyor's notes and the faded railway easement.