The Elbow Creek Problem

Posted on Tue Aug 4th, 2026 @ 9:26pm by Percival Hawthorne & Bonnie Campbell & Professor Hooker & Catalina Escareno & Silas "Shade" Nightingale & J.R. McEntyre

3,466 words; about a 17 minute read

Mission: Assembling the Troubleshooters
Location: Western Kansas, Disputed Lands
Timeline: Date 1877-11-22 at 14:00

The contraption took another step, and the whole car lurched to the left.

Shade braced his boot against the opposite bunk frame and waited for the right leg to come down. It did, with a shuddering clang that traveled up through the floorboards and into his teeth. Then the left again. Then the right. A rhythm you could almost get used to, if you were the kind of person who could get used to riding inside a walking building.

Two days of this. Two days of that relentless mechanical gait, the creak and groan of articulating joints somewhere beneath the floor, the hiss of pistons and the low grinding complaint of ghost rock under pressure. Every step jolted through the car like a mule kick, rattling tin cups on their hooks and making the lanterns swing in lazy, seasick arcs. The whole affair swayed side to side with each stride, a lurching motion that split the difference between a ship's roll and a drunk's stagger. Shade had been on stagecoaches that rode smoother. He'd been on horses that smelled better.

The Professor's conveyance was, by any honest accounting, two rail cars welded and bolted together into a single structure and set atop a chassis of articulating mechanical legs. The forward car housed Hooker's workshop and the ghost rock furnace that powered the thing, a tangle of pipes and pistons and devices that Shade couldn't name and didn't want explained. The rear car had been converted into living quarters. Bunks along one wall, a potbelly stove that hopped an inch to the left with every other step, crates of supplies lashed down with rope and, in some cases, what appeared to be leather straps salvaged from a horse harness. Everything that wasn't tied down had already fallen over at least once.

Most locals who saw the thing coming described it as an abomination. Hooker described it as proof of concept.

Shade had to admit the concept had its merits, if you could stomach the execution. The conveyance moved faster than a man could comfortably walk but slower than a horse wanted to travel, which meant anyone riding alongside had to keep their mount at an irritating, plodding pace that made the animals twitchy and their riders worse. The real advantage came after dark. Lanterns mounted on the forward car threw enough light to see the ground ahead, and the mechanical legs didn't need rest or grain, so the thing could keep walking through the night while the horses slept in a makeshift corral bolted to the rear platform. They'd covered more ground after sunset than before it, which was the only reason this trip was two days instead of four.

The nights, though. The nights were something else.

When they stopped, when Hooker throttled the furnace down and the legs locked into their resting position, the ghost rock screamed. Not a hiss, not a whistle. A scream, high and thin and wrong, like something alive being slowly crushed. It came from the cooling furnace as the pressure bled off, and it lasted ten, sometimes fifteen minutes. The first night, Shade had come off his bunk with both revolvers drawn before he'd been fully awake. The second night, he'd known what it was and still hadn't slept for an hour afterward. The sound burrowed into a place behind your eyes and made itself at home. Cratchit had sat bolt upright at the first scream and not spoken to anyone for the rest of the evening.

Now it was late afternoon on the second day, and Shade sat near the back of the rear car with his long legs stretched out, boots braced against the bunk frame to keep the swaying from sliding him off the bench. A dime novel lay open on his knee, unread for the past twenty minutes. His purple vest was buttoned against the November chill that crept through every seam and rivet, and his revolvers hung in their holsters from a peg above his bunk, swinging gently with each mechanical stride like pendulums counting off the steps.

He was watching the others. Old habit. Danite habit. The kind you didn't unlearn just because you'd left the church behind.

Six people he barely knew, crammed into a walking tin can, headed toward a mine where something had scared hardened men into walking away from good wages. Brennan's handpicked troubleshooters, and not one of them had worked together before. Shade had survived enough bad situations to know that untested alliances killed people faster than bullets.

J.R. McEntyre had claimed a spot near the front of the car, closest to the connecting door and the map of the Elbow Creek Mine district that he'd pinned to the wall with a knife point on the first morning. He was the one who'd picked this job from Brennan's list, and he carried the weight of that decision the way Shade imagined he carried most things.

"This mechanical contraption shakes like a sumbitch." J.R commented as he looked at the map. His instincts told him that this was the right job to lead them to their objectives but somewhere in the pit of his stomach he wasn't quite sure. "Let's just hope the job is worth the money they're offerin to get her done."

Bonnie Campbell had settled in across from the Ranger, near enough to the potbelly stove to claim whatever warmth it offered between its inch-long hops. She was the only one of them with roots in Dodge deep enough to make leaving it a genuine sacrifice, and Shade still wasn't sure what had convinced her to climb aboard this lurching coffin.

Anyone who had spent more than a single evening in Dodge City knew Bonnie by name. She was the acclaimed and coveted Diamond of Dodge City, the woman who ran the largest and most profitable saloon in town. Like her beloved Long Branch, Bonnie usually favored the luxury of silks, fine tailoring, and a polished elegance that always seemed a touch too grand for the dust and grit of the frontier.

But when the conveyance arrived and duty called, she shed that finery without hesitation. The satin and rouge gave way to practical breeches, sturdy cotton, and well-cut leather. The clothes were still immaculate because Bonnie would accept no less, but the choice of them spoke volumes. Whatever this venture was, she meant to meet it seriously, and with sense enough to dress for the work ahead.

Even so, the saloon girl in her never quite disappeared. Seated within the rumbling machine as it carried them toward their destination, Bonnie occupied herself with a piece of needlework. Pink roses and lilacs blooming delicately beneath her careful hands. She hummed softly as she stitched, unbothered by the motion or the company. And whenever someone’s gaze lingered a moment too long, she would glance up and offer a small smile before tipping her head and returning to her work.

Father Percival Hawthorne occupied the bunk opposite Shade's. An Anglican priest who'd come down through Canada, Brennan had said. Who'd run into the Weird up north and hadn't run from it. Shade had learned long ago to be cautious around men of God who didn't flinch.

Percival sat on the edge of his bunk, a small, leather-bound book, likely a Bible, resting between his hands. His eyes were closed, his grip steady, as though the familiar weight of it anchored him against everything else.

This contraption was no godly vessel, that much he felt with quiet certainty. It unsettled him in a way he struggled to name, stirring the same deep unease he’d known during the crossing from England. A sickness lingered in him now, not just of the body but something deeper, harder to reconcile.

Still, he remained where he was, composed in posture if not entirely in spirit, his lips barely moving as he held fast to something older, steadier than the world around him.

Cat, as Catalina Escareno preferred to be called, had taken a position near the connecting door between the two cars, where she could see both rooms and every person in them. Shade recognized the instinct because he shared it. She'd said little since Dodge. People like them, people trained to read rooms and survive by their wits, tended to recognize each other on sight. It made for either very good partnerships or very short ones.

She was a woman who had lived her entire life out on the dust of the dessert, making camp under mountain outcroppings, and living as an outlaw. This terrible machine was far different than the back of her horse, and while it allowed her to recline and rest, it set her teeth on edge. She had always hated ghost rock and anything that ran on it. The noise was bad enough, but the feeling it brought on in her was otherworldly. She glanced between both rooms like a hawk, unable to turn her mind from survival.

The Professor himself was up in the forward car, tending to his machine. The connecting door muffled nothing. Every clang of a wrench, every hiss of vented steam, every muttered conversation with the engine came through clear as church bells.

Professor Benjamin Titus Julian Hooker was engaged fully in the exploits of creation, as we his penchant. The contraptions and mechanical contrivances that absorbed his every waking urge and focus when not otherwise distracted by the needs of society around him were scattered all around the compartment that was the heart of his wandering behemoth of metal and fire. Weapons of dubious utility, wearable contraptions of questionable intent and protection, a veritable shrine to the depths that mankind was capable of sinking into on full display for any who ambled into it. Few were the number who actually did, and fewer in number were those that understood the insidious genius that was required to bring such fabrications to life in the mortal world. And standing in the midst of it all was an unassuming man who looked as if he belonged in a lecture hall, not within the belly of a walking hell spawned train on legs. The duality would have been disconcerting had it not been something no one ever really had the stomach to witness for themselves.

Then there were the three men Brennan had sent along as extra hands.

Ned Cratchit was the foreman from the Elbow Creek Mine, a sun-creased man in his fifties with leathery skin and a permanent squint that suggested he'd spent most of his life underground or staring into bright light. He was the one who'd reported the trouble, the last man out of the mine when his crew walked off, and he'd spent the past month drinking in Dodge and trying to convince himself he hadn't heard what he'd heard in those tunnels. He sat apart from the troubleshooters, turning a tin cup in his hands and flinching at every particularly loud step from the conveyance. The ghost rock screams had hit him worst of all. Shade suspected the sound reminded him of something he'd heard underground.

The other two were Tom Bickle and Earl Sutton, hired guns of the middling sort. Brennan's money had bought their presence, and their presence was about all they'd contributed. Bickle was thick-necked and slow-eyed, the kind of man who followed orders well enough if you kept them simple. He'd spent most of the trip sleeping, which Shade found almost impressive given the constant jarring. Sutton was leaner, quieter, with a nervous habit of checking his Winchester that had grown more frequent the farther they traveled from Dodge. Both men had the look of fellows who'd agreed to a job before hearing the details and were now too proud or too broke to back out.

Shade turned a page in his dime novel without reading it and let his gaze drift to the window.

Kansas in November was a bleak canvas. Pale grass bent flat under a grey sky, the horizon unbroken in every direction. The conveyance walked through it like something that had wandered out of a fever, its shadow stretching long and strange across the empty ground. Each step left a deep print in the cold earth. From outside, Shade imagined it looked like the tracks of an animal that had never existed.

Two days together, and they'd settled into the cautious choreography of strangers sharing close quarters. Polite distances. Measured conversations. Everyone sizing everyone else up while pretending not to. Shade recognized the dynamic because he'd lived it before, in Danite safehouses where trust was a luxury and information was currency.

The difference was that back then, everyone had shared a faith. Here, the only thing binding them was Colonel Brennan's money and whatever J.R. McEntyre had told each of them about the job.

The job. Shade closed his dime novel and thought about what Cratchit had told them back in Dodge, the night before they'd boarded. The Elbow Creek Mine, one of Brennan's most productive ghost rock operations, had shut down six weeks ago. Miners reported voices in the deeper tunnels. Not the groaning of earth settling or the echo of pickaxes. Voices. Conversations in the dark, spoken by no one visible. Equipment moved on its own. Lanterns guttered and relit in empty shafts. And the cold. Every man who'd gone down into the lower tunnels talked about the cold, a bone-deep chill that had nothing to do with depth or ventilation, that settled into your chest and made you feel like something was standing right behind you.

Three men had gone down to investigate after the first reports. Two came back up at a dead run, white-faced and unable to articulate what they'd seen. The third, a driller named Hagan, never came back up at all. Search parties found his tools, his lantern still burning, and his boots. Just his boots, standing upright in the tunnel floor as if the man wearing them had simply ceased to exist above the ankle.

After that, the miners walked. Every last one. Cratchit had been the last out, and the look on his face when he'd described sealing the mine entrance told Shade everything he needed to know about what the foreman had heard down there.

The conveyance took another lurching step. The lantern swung. Somewhere in the forward car, the Professor said something to his engine in a tone that could have been encouragement or apology.

Shade set the dime novel aside and looked around the car at the people who were supposed to become a team. A Ranger. A saloon owner. A priest. A con artist. A mad scientist. And him, a former Danite assassin in a purple vest, pretending to read penny dreadfuls while a walking machine carried them all toward a hole in the ground where a man had vanished out of his own boots.

Quite a congregation, he thought. Now all they needed was something to pray about.

He had a feeling the Elbow Creek Mine would provide.

“Mr. Cratchit,” Bonnie asked as they grew closer and closer to their destination. “I was wondering if you could tell me more about the voices that were heard down in the mines. Could you understand them? If so, what were they talking about?"

Percy stood, opening his eyes, and moving closer. The voices interested him as well.

Cratchit didn't answer right away. He kept turning the tin cup, around and around, until the motion seemed less like habit and more like something to hold onto.

"You don't understand 'em," he said at last. "That's the trouble of it. First couple days, the men figured it was wind in the old shafts. Air movin' through worked-out tunnels'll do that, make a sound like talkin'." He shook his head, slow. "But wind don't wait for you to stop walkin'. Wind don't go quiet when you hold your breath to listen."

He glanced up, and for a moment the squint was gone and what sat underneath it wasn't pleasant to look at.

"Down in the lower works it was words. I'd swear it on whatever you like. Not loud. Like a man talkin' low to another man, the way you would over a sickbed. Couldn't make out the most of it." The cup stopped turning. "But every so often you'd catch a piece. A name. Your name. Said real friendly, like whoever it was had known you a long while and was glad you'd finally come down to see 'em."

The conveyance took a hard lurching step and he flinched at it.

"I told my boys it was settle and echo. Told myself the same, all the way back to Dodge and most of a month after." He wet his lips. "What I didn't tell nobody was the cold. You'd be sweatin' from the climb, then you'd hit a stretch where your breath fogged up in front of you and the back of your neck went to ice, and you'd know, sure as scripture, that somethin' was stood right behind you. Close enough to touch. And it weren't in any hurry. That's the part I can't shake. Whatever it was, it had all the time in the world."

Shade had stopped pretending to read somewhere around the word name. He sat with one boot crossed over a knee, watching the foreman the way he'd once watched men confess things in the back rooms of Salt Lake, where the difference between truth and terror was mostly a matter of how still a man's hands were. Cratchit's weren't still at all.

"Patient," Shade repeated, quiet, tasting the word. "That's the part worth listening to. A hungry thing rushes. A patient thing already knows the meal isn't going anywhere." He let the silence hold a beat, theatrical by instinct even now, then tipped his head toward the older man. "Tell me this, Mr. Cratchit. Did it ever call a name that belonged to a man who hadn't gone down into those tunnels yet?"

Over on the bench, Tom Bickle had woken somewhere in the middle of it. He scratched at his thick neck and gave a snort he likely meant to sound dismissive. "Voices," he said. "Hell. Every mine's full of fellas hearin' things on account of bad air and too long in the dark. Ain't no ghost ever et a man's boots. Somethin' down there with teeth, more likely, and we'll find it and shoot it." He was trying to convince the room, and not quite managing himself.

Earl Sutton said nothing at all. He worked the lever on his Winchester a half inch, checked the brass, and eased it shut again. It was the fourth time Shade had watched him do it since the last water stop. The rifle wasn't going to load any fuller. Earl seemed to know that, and to do it anyway.

Cratchit didn't answer Shade right away. The tin cup had gone still in his hands, and stillness, Shade noted, did not suit the man at all.

"Once," the foreman said finally, barely over the sound of the legs. "Last week before we sealed her. We was up top, all of us, nobody below for two days by then." He looked at the cup like he'd forgotten what it was for. "It weren't in the tunnels that time. It come up the shaft with the draft, the way smoke does. And it said my name. Mine. And I hadn't been down past the second level in a month." The old man's jaw worked. "That's the night I wired the Colonel. Not because of what it said." He set the cup down on the crate beside him, careful, like it might spill something that wasn't coffee. "Because of how glad it sounded that I'd heard it."

J.R. hadn't moved from the map, but the Ranger had gone quiet in a way that had weight to it. He reached up and worked the knife loose from the wall, folded the map along its creases, and slid both inside his coat. "Man wires the Colonel over a voice," he said, slow, not quite mocking, not quite anything. "And the Colonel pays six of us to go say howdy to it." He settled his hat lower. "Hell of a thing I signed us up for."

Shade said nothing at all. He picked his dime novel back up, opened it to no page in particular, and did not read a single word the rest of the way.

Running a hand through his hair, Percival regarded each of his companions in turn. His gaze lingered on each face for a moment, thoughtful and searching. He couldn’t help but wonder which of them felt like J.R.

 

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