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

He waited until the baby settled back into sleep before he spoke again, his voice reduced to a dry, harsh rasp.

"Daniel wrote to me," Elias whispered. "He paid a Shoshone trapper three silver dollars to carry a piece of butcher paper up into the high gulch where he knew I was hiding. He told me Danner was closing the circle. He told me that if he didn't make the winter, Danner would take this valley section by section until he had the water rights for the whole Union Pacific spur."

Elias reached inside his torn coat with two bloody fingers. From an inner pocket, wrapped in oilskin to protect it from the mountain rain, he withdrew a flat, folded packet of paper and laid it on the edge of the table.

Eleanor looked down. The paper was yellowed and smeared with tallow, but the handwriting was unmistakable. It was Daniel’s angular, cramped script—the letters leaning forward as if running away from the left-hand margin, the loops of his y’s and g’s hooked like barbed wire.

She unfolded the paper with trembling fingers.

Elias, the note read.

The cough is black now. Mercer smiles when he pours the draught. I have maybe five days before the legs fail under me. Nell knows nothing of the Laramie days. She thinks I am a saint from Missouri. Let her keep that, if you have any mercy left in your big carcass.

Danner wants the patent under the east pasture. He doesn't know Thomas gave me the original land office ledger before the stage ambush. It isn't just cattle land. The coal vein runs forty feet thick through the creek bed. If they lay the rails through here, this valley is worth half a million dollars.

I hid the book where Nell keeps the winter squash. Under the third joist beneath the pantry. If Danner comes with paper, burn the homestead before you let him read the signatures.

Watch my boy. Watch my girl. And if you ever find Thomas’s boy, tell him his uncle didn't run.

Daniel.

Eleanor read the words three times until they blurred into gray smears of ink. Her knees finally buckled, and she sat down hard on the wooden bench.

"Thomas's boy?" she asked, her voice hollow.

"My brother Thomas had a son," Elias said softly. "The boy was six years old when Danner's riders ambushed the stage at Bitter Creek. Danner took the boy. Told the court he was adopting his fallen deputy’s orphan out of Christian charity. The boy’s name is Thomas Vale Jr."

Elias raised his eyes to hers.

"He wears a deputy's badge on Danner's payroll today. He’s the one who shot me three hours ago."

Before Eleanor could process the horror of his words, the distant, unmistakable sound of horses trotting across the frozen gravel of the north draw echoed through the night.

Elias stiffened, his fingers instantly clamping onto the receiver of his Spencer carbine.

"They're here," he said.

The riders did not come with lanterns blazing or bells jingling. They came like wolves on a winter trail, the thud of their mounts’ unshod hooves deadened by the soft mud and freezing sleet.

Eleanor stood frozen in the center of the kitchen. Her mind raced across every corner of the small homestead. There was no cellar; the ground in this basin was too rocky, packed with river boulders that Daniel had broken his back trying to clear with crowbars and black powder. The only place beneath the cabin was the shallow root crawl-space beneath the pantry, dug three feet into the dirt to keep potatoes and turnips from freezing when the blizzards swept down from Montana.

"Under the floor," Eleanor whispered, her voice snapping with sudden authority. "Now."

Elias looked at his boots, then at the blood seeping onto the floorboards. "If they bring hounds, Eleanor, they'll tear the place apart. A hound will smell this meat through two inches of pine."

"I don't have hounds, and Danner's men didn't bring theirs—if they had dogs, they would have been howling at the draw five minutes ago. Move!"

She grabbed Elias by the thick buffalo-hide sleeve, pulling him toward the rear of the cabin. The pantry was little more than a narrow alcove separated from the kitchen by a coarse burlap curtain. Shelves of pickled cabbage, dried venison, and crocks of lard lined the timber walls.

On the floor lay a rectangular hatch cut from rough spruce planks, with an iron ring countersunk into the wood.

Eleanor grabbed the ring and hauled it upward. A smell of damp earth, rotting potato skins, and cold lime rose from the dark pit.

"Down," she ordered.

Elias lowered his massive frame into the hole with a suppressed grunt of agony. His shoulders barely cleared the edges of the opening. He had to draw his knees to his chest and lie sideways among the squash sacks and salt tubs to fit beneath the floor joists.