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

"Read the names of the children on the land patent," Elias said.

Eleanor held the page close to her face, angling it to catch the pale, milky light filtering through the fog.

Beneath the official seal of the Sweetwater County Clerk, in the section reserved for the legal transfer of family property in the event of the homesteader's death, were two lines written in the clear, elegant copperplate script of Thomas Vale Sr.:

To the heirs of the bloodline of Vale and Hayes: The parcel designated as the Black Tooth North Section, containing sixty-four rods of river bottom and forty feet of anthracite coal, is hereby deeded jointly to the surviving infants:

1. Thomas Vale Jr.

2. The children of Clara Vale, born in the third month of the year 1876.

Eleanor stopped.

Her breath caught in her throat. Her heart felt as though it had ceased beating altogether.

"The third month of 1876," she whispered aloud. "That was... that was when Emma and Noah were born."

She looked from the page to Elias, her eyes wide with a terror that far exceeded the fear of Danner’s rifles.

"Daniel told me... he told me the twins were his," Eleanor said, her voice dropping into a desperate, pleading whisper. "We were married in the chapel at St. Joe. He took me in when my father died of the cholera on the riverfront. He said he wanted a family. He said—"

"Daniel loved you, Eleanor," Elias interrupted, his voice cracking with emotion. "He loved you more than any man ever loved a woman in this godforsaken territory. But Daniel was sterile. The coupling-pin in Laramie didn't just break his fingers; they kicked him in the groin until he bled from his bladder for three weeks."

The forest was completely silent around them, save for the steady, mournful drip of water from the rotted flume.

"Then whose children are they?" Eleanor cried, the words tearing from her throat like a scream she had swallowed for years.

"They are Clara Vale's children," Elias whispered. "My brother's widow. When Danner’s men attacked the coach at Bitter Creek, Clara was seven months pregnant with twins. Daniel dragged her out of the brush and hid her in the basement of the old Presbyterian mission in Laramie. She delivered the babies three weeks after Thomas was murdered."

He looked toward the hollow in the limestone where the two infants lay wrapped in the wolf robe.

"Clara died of the childbed fever four days later," Elias said. "Before she passed, she made Daniel swear on the Bible that he would take the babies out of the territory, give them his name, and never let Silas Danner know that Thomas Vale left an heir. Because if Danner knew there was a surviving child from the Vale bloodline, the railroad charter would be contested in the Supreme Court."

Eleanor sank to her knees beside the cradled infants.

She reached out with a trembling hand, touching Noah's soft cheek, then Emma's fine, pale hair. For eleven months, she had believed she was nursing the fruit of her quiet, broken husband's love. She had stayed awake through the fever nights, hauled the water, chopped the birch scrub, and stood against the county bank because she believed she was preserving Daniel’s legacy.

And now, in a cold cave beneath a rotted logging ditch, she discovered she was holding the orphans of a dead federal marshal and a woman whose face she had never seen.

"And young Tom?" she asked, her voice hollow and dead. "The deputy who shot you?"

"Tom is Thomas's firstborn by his first wife, who died when he was three," Elias said. "He’s their half-brother, Eleanor. And Danner has spent ten years poisoning his mind to turn him into the executioner of his own blood."

By mid-morning, the fog did not lift; it turned into a freezing, gray drizzle that wrapped the town of Pine Hollow in a shroud of wet slate and coal smoke.

In the center of the town square, outside the two-story limestone courthouse that doubled as the Sweetwater County Jail, a crowd of fifty men and women had gathered under the wooden overhangs. They were sodden, silent, and uneasy. Word had spread before breakfast that the Hayes homestead had burned to the ground during the night, and that Daniel Hayes’s widow was on the run with a wanted murderer.

Sheriff Silas Danner stood on the top step of the courthouse, flanked by Deputy Ross and four heavily armed regulators wearing long yellow oilskin dusters.

At his left hand stood young Thomas Vale Jr.

The boy was pale, his eyes rimmed with red circles from lack of sleep. His silver badge was pinned crookedly to his vest, and his fingers continuously tapped against the cylinder of his Colt revolver.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Pause.

Tap. Tap.