In consideration of the sum of $15,000 paid by the Northern Pacific Railroad Company to Samuel Danner, the undersigned agrees to clear all homestead claims along the Black Tooth Valley by January 1, 1878. Claims not relinquished voluntarily shall be declared forfeit under the Territorial Vagrancy & Banditry Act.
Underneath the railroad agreement were three signatures:
Samuel Danner.
Silas Danner.
And Thomas Vale Sr.
Eleanor’s hand froze over the page.
"Thomas?" she whispered, looking up at Elias. "Your brother signed this?"
Elias sat on the hearth bench, his head bowed between his massive shoulders. When he looked up, the yellow lamplight caught the deep tracks of tears through the grime on his cheeks.
"Thomas didn't sign it to rob you, Eleanor," Elias said, his voice barely audible above the hiss of the rain. "Thomas signed it because Danner held a pistol to his wife Clara's head in a cellar in Cheyenne. Danner told Thomas that if he didn't certify the land transfers as federal deputy marshal, Clara and their boy would disappear into the river."
"And then?"
"Thomas signed. And then he spent three nights copying every transaction into that ledger. He stole the book from the district vault, loaded Clara onto the night coach to Colorado, and took the Black Hills stage himself to deliver the original evidence to the federal circuit judge in Laramie."
Elias closed his eyes.
"Daniel was driving that stage," he said softly. "Daniel wasn't a passenger. Daniel was Thomas's oldest friend. He knew what was in the iron box beneath the driver's boot."
Eleanor felt the room recede, the small cabin suddenly feeling like a tomb where the dead were speaking through the cracks in the logs.
"The ambush at Bitter Creek..." she said, her throat tightening until she could barely breathe.
"It wasn't a bandit attack," Elias said. "It was Silas Danner and six hired regulators from the cattle company. They shot the horses from fifty yards out. They shot Thomas three times through the back while he was trying to drag the strongbox into the rocks. Daniel took a ball through the shoulder, but he managed to cut the wheel horse loose and carry the ledger into the hills."
Elias looked down at his own scarred, ruined hands.
"I arrived three hours later with four men from the mining camp. The stage was burning. My brother was lying face down in the brush with his deputy's star ripped from his vest. And Danner was standing over him with a smoking Winchester."
"You killed them," Eleanor whispered.
"I killed two of the regulators before they could reload," Elias said, his voice flat, dead, devoid of any pride. "Danner escaped into the dark. And when the territorial marshal arrived from Cheyenne three days later, Danner had already sworn out the warrants. He said I had led a gang of outlaws to intercept the payroll. He said my own brother died trying to stop me."
"And Daniel?"
"Daniel ran," Elias said. "He was nineteen years old. He had a hole through his shoulder and a book that proved every prominent man in the territory was a thief and a murderer. He came to Missouri, changed his name, and tried to bury it all under eighty acres of dry dirt."
Elias pointed with a trembling finger toward the bottom of page forty-four.
"Look at the last line, Eleanor."
Eleanor looked down.
Beneath the signatures of the Danners and Thomas Vale, written in the dark, frantic scrawl of Daniel Hayes’s own hand just before he left the territory, was a single, terrible line:
The children of Thomas Vale and the children of Daniel Hayes share the blood of the deed. If the land is taken, look to the churchyard at Pine Hollow. The true grant was never filed in Cheyenne.
Before Eleanor could ask another question, the sharp, frantic barking of the hound echoed from the high timber above the north field.
Not three barks.
A continuous, savage baying that signaled only one thing:
Men on foot, carrying fire, moving down from the ridge.
The baying of the hound did not echo through the spruce woods like an ordinary alarm; it was a choked, ragged sound that ended abruptly with the dull thud of a rifle shot.
Eleanor Hayes stood frozen beside the kitchen table, her hand resting flat over the open page of the territorial ledger. The single shot rolling down from the timber was not followed by a second. It had been close—less than three hundred yards up the creek draw where Daniel had set the northern boundary fence.
"They brought riders on the flank," Elias whispered. He was already on his feet, though his left boot dragged as he leaned his massive frame against the door casing. The color had abandoned his face entirely, leaving the skin around his hollowed eyes the gray tint of river slate. "That wasn't Ross and the boy. Danner keeps four men on retainer from the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. Cattle regulators. They don't hail a cabin before they shoot the dogs."