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

In the faint light from the stove, Eleanor saw the red sheen spreading across his left thigh and the hem of his coat. He was leaning heavily against the door jamb, his right hand gripping an old Spencer carbine by the balance, while his left pressed a rag of greasy saddle-fleece into his ribs.

"You're bleeding," she said, her voice dropping into a harsh whisper.

"Lead passed through," he rasped, his breath misting white in the doorway. "Left a furrow in the meat. It isn't the lead that'll kill me tonight. It's the four men Danner sent into the draw behind me."

"Why did you come here?" she hissed, the muzzle of the shotgun still steady between his collarbones. "They're offering two thousand dollars for you in town. They say you killed three men in cold blood."

Elias looked down at the twin black bores of the ten-gauge, then lifted his dark, deep-set eyes to hers. There was no defiance in them. There was only a crushing, bottomless sorrow.

"I didn't murder Thomas Vale," he said softly. "Thomas Vale was my older brother. And your husband, Daniel, was the man who put the rope around his neck."

Eleanor did not lower the gun, but her arms began to tremble from the sheer weight of the weapon and the terrible gravity of his words.

"You're lying," she said through gritted teeth. "Daniel was a teamster. He was an honest man. He took a bullet at Shiloh and spent three years working stock in Illinois before we met in St. Joe."

"Daniel never set foot in Illinois," Elias murmured, his legs giving way slightly as his weight shifted against the heavy cedar casing. "He was twenty-one years old when he sat in the territorial stockade at Fort Laramie with me and Thomas. We were branded as horse thieves because we refused to turn over the herd we brought from Texas to Silas Danner’s syndicate. We spent two winters eating weevil-flour out of iron troughs while Danner filed patents on the water rights we had blazed."

Elias swayed. A dark, thick drop of blood fell from his coat, hitting the threshold with a dull splat.

"If you're going to use those triggers, Eleanor, pull them now," he whispered, his eyes fluttering under the heavy brow. "Because if you don't, I'm going to fall on your clean floor, and Danner's trackers will see my trail from fifty yards off the creek road."

Something in her—some ancient instinct that valued survival over legalities, or perhaps the memory of the delicate pine horse now resting on her table—broke the paralysis in her chest.

"Step inside," she commanded. "Move!"

Elias hauled his immense bulk through the threshold. The small cabin seemed to shrink instantly, the ceiling rafters suddenly low and fragile above his shoulders. He sank onto the bench near the hearth, his breath wheezing through clenched teeth, his face the color of wet river clay.

Eleanor slammed the door, dropped the oak crossbar back into its iron brackets, and bolted the iron slide.

"Listen to me," she said, hurrying to the woodbox. "The sheriff was in town this morning. He looked me in the eye. He knows I live closest to the ridge."

"Danner knows more than that," Elias said, his voice straining as he pulled away the bloody fleece from his side. A clean, round hole had punctured the heavy wool shirt just beneath his ribs, weeping dark venous blood down his trousers. "He didn't put that poster up to catch me. He put it up to see if you would flinch."

"Why would he care about me?"

"Because Daniel didn't die of consumption, Eleanor."

Eleanor stopped. She held a clean linen flour sack in her hands, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. "What did you say?"

"A man doesn't cough up his lungs in three weeks from autumn damp," Elias said, his gaze fixed on the flames behind the stove gate. "Danner’s company physician, Dr. Mercer, treated him, didn't he? Gave him dark syrups in amber bottles to ease the rattle?"

"Yes... Mercer was the only doctor within thirty miles."

"Mercer is Danner's second cousin. The syrup wasn't horehound and cherry bark. It was sweet vitriol and white arsenic. Daniel knew it on the tenth day. That was when he got word out to the timber."

"You're mad," Eleanor breathed, stepping back until her spine pressed against the edge of the kitchen table. "Daniel died in my arms! He was shaking, he couldn't take breath—"

"Because his throat was burning out!" Elias’s voice cracked with a sudden, violent intensity that caused baby Emma to stir in her cradle. Instantly, the giant clamped his mouth shut, his huge chest heaving, his eyes darting toward the cradles with an expression of agonized remorse.