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

She turned her gaze toward the small wooden church with its white belfry standing at the north end of the square, its graveyard enclosed by a low wall of dry river-stone.

"Where are you going?" Mae asked.

"Daniel left a note in the ledger," Eleanor replied, her voice steady as iron. "He said the true grant was never filed in Cheyenne. He said if the land was taken, to look to the churchyard at Pine Hollow."

"The churchyard?" Mae frowned. "Ain't nothing in that yard except dead miners and Daniel’s fresh sod."

"Then that's where we dig," Eleanor said.

The church of Pine Hollow had been built twenty years earlier by a congregation of Welsh coal miners who had drifted south from the Montana territory after the seams ran out. It was a dark, narrow building made of hand-hewn tamarack logs, with leaded glass windows imported from St. Louis that rattled whenever the mountain winds swept down from the ridge.

Behind the chapel lay two acres of unkempt earth, choked with wild mustard, dry thistle, and rows of sunken mounds marked by rotted pine headboards.

The rain was falling in thick, greasy sheets when Eleanor and Mae Jensen slipped through the rear gate of the cemetery wall.

Eleanor had left the mules tethered in the thicket of chokecherries half a mile below the creek road. The infants were nested in a dry wooden flour crate lined with clean sheepskin, hidden beneath the pulpit inside the empty church. The chapel was dead and cold, smelling of mice, paraffin wax, and old hymnals, but it was dry. Old Mae stood inside the door with Daniel’s heavy ten-gauge shotgun across her lap, her thumb resting on the twin hammers.

"You have twenty minutes, girl," Mae had warned her. "Danner's riders change the patrol at noon. When they pass the church road, they'll see the mud turned up."

Eleanor carried a short-handled spade she had taken from the livery shed.

She walked through the wet weeds until she reached the corner of the cemetery nearest the eastern limestone bluff.

There, marked by a simple cross of cedar timber held together with square iron nails, lay the mound where Daniel Hayes had been buried six months ago.

The sod had not yet fully taken root; the earth was dark, rocky, and sunken in the middle where the pine coffin lid had settled under the weight of the clay.

Eleanor knelt in the mud, the cold soaking through her canvas trousers. She laid the spade against the cross.

Daniel Arthur Hayes.

1848 – 1876.

A Just Man in a Hard Land.

"You weren't a saint, Daniel," Eleanor whispered into the wind, her fingers tracing the rough letters he had cut into the cedar himself before he took to his deathbed. "You lied to me every day of our life. You gave me another woman’s babies. You made me love a phantom."

She wiped the freezing rain from her eyes, her teeth chattering so hard her jaw ached.

"But you kept them alive. And I will finish what you broke your hands trying to do."

She did not dig into the center of the grave. She knew Daniel; he was a surveyor, a man who measured every corner by rods, chains, and compass points. If he had hidden something in this earth, he would not have buried it six feet deep where it would rot under the drainage of the limestone cliff.

She went to the foot of the grave, three feet east of the cedar cross, right where the surveyor's corner stake—an iron surveyor's pin with a brass cap—was driven into the hardpan.

She drove the spade into the clay.

The ground was like iron. For ten minutes, her arms burned with agony as she chipped through the frozen crust, lifting out shovelfuls of wet gravel and river stone. Her breath came in ragged, white plumes. Blisters formed on the palms of her hands, tearing open against the rough ash handle of the spade until the wood was slick with her own blood.

Two feet down, the blade of the spade struck something that did not sound like stone.

It gave a dull, metallic clang.

Eleanor dropped the shovel, dropped to her knees in the mud, and began clawing at the rocky clay with her bare fingers.

Her nails tore against the gravel as she cleared the dirt from a rectangular object. It was a heavy, military-issue dispatch box made of vulcanized iron, painted army green, with the letters U.S. DEPT. OF JUSTICE stamped into the lid.

The lock had been broken off with a cold chisel years ago and replaced with an iron wire twisted tight around the hasp.

Eleanor untwisted the wire with a flat piece of shale and hauled the heavy box up onto the wet grass of the mound.

She threw back the iron lid.

Inside, protected by three layers of greased canvas and sealed with pine rosin, lay a thick stack of papers.