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

She turned to Mae, who had climbed down from the belfry with the heavy Sharps rifle cradled in her arms. The old woman's face was gray with fatigue, her hands trembling as she set down a leather pouch of linen cartridges.

"You stay here with Elias, Mae," Eleanor commanded. "Keep the door barred. If they bring the powder wagon, don't wait for them to set the fuse—shoot the mules."

"Don't worry about me, girl," Mae said, her voice dry as a pine shaving. "I was shooting road-agents in California before Silas Danner had hair on his lip. You take care of them babies."

Eleanor did not take the twins with her into the coal hole. It was too narrow, the air choked with black damp and cold mud. She looked at Tom, who had picked up his father’s Spencer carbine and checked the follower spring in the butt-stock.

"You stay with your brother and sister, Tom," she said.

The boy shook his head. "No. Danner knows my horse. If he sees someone near the water tank, he'll expect a deputy before he expects a woman. I'm going with you, Eleanor. And if we run into Ross... I'll settle my own debt."

Eleanor looked into his eyes—the same gray, steady eyes she had seen in the woodcut portrait of his father—and nodded once.

They pulled back the rag rug behind the communion table.

Beneath it lay a square hatch of two-inch tamarack, held by an iron ring. Tom hauled it upward with a sharp grunt. A smell of stagnant sulfur water, rotting shoring-timbers, and cold, dead coal dust billowed into the church.

Eleanor tucked the dispatch box into an empty grain sack, slinging the hemp strap across her shoulder. In her right hand she carried Daniel’s double-barrel ten-gauge, loaded with the brass shells from her apron.

"Go," she whispered.

They lowered themselves into the black throat of the tunnel.

The passage was barely four feet high and three feet wide, shored with rough cedar posts that groaned under the weight of the church foundation above. Cold water, black with coal slurry, reached Eleanor's shins. The air was thick, heavy with the taste of rusted iron and decomposing slate.

They moved on their hands and knees where the timbers had sagged, the sharp edges of anthracite cutting through Eleanor's canvas trousers and tearing her palms. Behind her, Tom pushed the grain sack ahead of him, his breath coming in short, choked gasps in the confined space.

Twenty yards in, the tunnel made a sharp turn to the left, following the line of the creek bed.

Here, the roof had caved. A mountain of wet shale and rotted cedar ties blocked the passage, leaving a gap near the ceiling no wider than fourteen inches.

"We can't get the box through," Tom whispered from the dark behind her.

"The box stays," Eleanor said through clenched teeth. "We take the baptismal certificate, the land grant, and Daniel's ledger. Everything else is ballast."

She reached into the grain sack, pulled out the oilcloth bundle containing the three essential documents, and shoved it down the front of her woolen coat, pinning it against her ribs with her leather belt.

"Follow me," she whispered.

She threw herself onto her stomach, worming her body into the narrow gap between the fallen shale and the sagging ceiling timbers. The sharp rock tore at her shoulders; cold mud squeezed into her ears and mouth. For three terrifying seconds, her hips wedged tight between two river boulders, the weight of the entire hillside pressing down against her spine.

"Eleanor!" Tom’s voice came muffled from behind.

She didn't answer. She dug her fingers into the soft slate ahead, kicked her heels with a wild, desperate fury, and tore herself free, sliding face-first into the freezing puddle on the other side.

Tom followed, his broad shoulders scraping against the rock with a sickening sound of tearing cloth, but he broke through, gasping for air.

Ten yards ahead, a sliver of pale gray daylight filtered through a screen of wild rose briars and willow scrub.

They emerged into the freezing drizzle at the bottom of the railroad ditch.

Directly above them, thirty paces up the embankment, stood the monstrous wooden cedar cylinder of the Union Pacific water tank. Suspended beneath its massive timber platform was the small, square shanty where the line-tenders kept their oil cans and repair wire.

And leaning against the platform ladder, holding a smoking pipe in his teeth and a double-barreled shotgun across his knees, was Deputy Ross.

Ross had his left arm bound tightly to his ribs with a blood-soaked sling where Mae’s bullet had plowed through the muscle of his shoulder, but his right hand was steady on the walnut stock of his weapon. He sat on an upturned kerosene drum beneath the drip of the water spout, watching the road that led from the sawmill toward the church.

"He's watching the ditch," Tom whispered, his lips an inch from Eleanor's ear in the shelter of the willow scrub. "If we show so much as a hat brim, he'll fire into the brush."