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

She had spent three hours after returning from the settlement scrubbing the laundry and tending the kitchen stove, but every time her hands were occupied, her mind returned to the square of paper pinned to the mercantile porch.

Elias Ward.

Why would a man with a price on his head that could tempt an entire county of half-starved homesteaders linger within four miles of the town? Why risk his neck to carry dried fruit and sulfur salve to two fatherless babies?

She turned the toy over in her fingers. The wood was ponderosa pine, aged and dry, but carved with astonishing, delicate patience. The tiny nostrils flared; the arch of the neck was muscular and clean; individual strands of the mane had been etched with the tip of a fine knife. No hurried woodsman or desperate outlaw fleeing the federal marshal’s hounds had fashioned this between gulps of cold ditch water. It had taken days. Perhaps weeks.

Her thumb smoothed over the curve of the belly, right where the rear legs joined the flank. Her nail caught on a small, deliberate indentation that she had previously mistaken for a knot in the grain.

Eleanor rose from the rocking chair, her movements soundless on the puncheon floor, and held the carving directly under the yellow glow of the lamp chimney.

There, cut so faintly into the dry grain that only the shadow of the lamplight revealed it, were three letters enclosed within an open triangle:

D. A. H.

Daniel Arthur Hayes.

The room seemed to tilt beneath Eleanor's feet. Her hand shook so violently that the toy clattered onto the oilcloth table runner.

Daniel had owned a leather-punch and an iron wood-chisel that he used to mark his branding irons and saddle trees. He had always stamped his leather with that exact mark: his initials set inside the surveyor's triangle he had carried since his days laying boundary lines for the territorial land grant in Nebraska.

"No," Eleanor whispered aloud into the quiet room. "No, that's impossible."

Daniel had carved toys for children before they married in Missouri, but he had lost three fingers of his left hand to an iron shackle during the war—or so he had told her. He had claimed his hands were too stiff and clumsy to handle small whittling blades ever again. For four years of marriage, Daniel had never carved so much as a whistle for the local boys.

And Daniel had been buried six feet under the frozen clover of the north field for six months.

If Daniel had not carved this toy, how had his private mark ended up under the belly of a wooden horse left on her porch by a wanted murderer?

A sudden, sharp thud rattled the outside door.

Eleanor’s blood turned to slush. She snatched the ten-gauge from the table, thumbing both external hammers back until they locked with a heavy, double-notched clack. She brought the stock to her shoulder, stepping between the table and the cradles.

"Who’s out there?" she called out, her voice hard, ringing with the desperate ferocity of a mother cornered in her own den.

Silence answered. The wind tore around the corner of the cabin, groaning in the sod chimney.

Then came three slow, deliberate knocks against the lower beam of the door. Not the knuckles of a lawman, but the blunt, heavy strike of an iron butt-plate.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Then a pause, long enough for her heart to beat four ragged strokes.

Tap. Tap.

Eleanor gasped. It was Daniel’s old signal—the one he used when he returned from late drives across the badlands, so she would know it was him and not cattle rustlers or stray wanderers from the Oregon Trail.

"Open the latch, Nell," a voice came through the cedar wood.

It was not Daniel’s voice. It was too deep, like rocks tumbling down a dry arroyo, worn raw by tobacco, cold weather, and long stretches of silence. But it used the name that only one man on earth had ever called her.

"Step away from the door or I’ll blow two barrels through the center plank!" Eleanor shouted, her finger resting on the front trigger.

"If you shoot, fire high," the voice answered, without anger, without fear. "The babies are behind you. Buckshot will ricochet off the stone hearth."

Eleanor felt the strength drain from her knees, replaced by an electric, terrifying clarity. She edged toward the heavy crossbar, keeping the shotgun leveled at waist height. She pulled the bar with her left hand, letting it swing free, and kicked the door open four inches.

The freezing gale lashed her face with sleet.

Standing on the split-log porch, framed against the black void of the yard, was the giant from the poster.

He was even larger than he had appeared in the lantern-lit rain five nights earlier. He stood nearly six feet six inches, his broad frame wrapped in a stained buffalo-hide coat that had lost half its hair. Water ran in dirty ribbons through his matted beard and dripped from the brim of a slouch hat pulled down over his brows.