During the 1890s, Sarah Headley remained on Sulphur Spring Fork, although tax records and oral tradition do not indicate the exact location of her dwelling house. In that span of time, according to tax records, her property valuations increased significantly. In 1891, a 50-acre tract climbed from $100 to $125, a 45-acre tract went from $69 to $90 and a 26-acre tract jumped from $39 to $156.

In 1892, Margaret Headley, Sarah’s youngest daughter, married Zachary T. Neace, a well-to-do timberman on the creek. In subsequent years, they lived in Virginia, the place of Neace’s origin, or on Fourteen Mile Creek.

In 1893, Sarah Headley — perhaps taking advantage of a rising evaluation on her property — sold a 45-acre tract of land worth $90 to an unknown party, leaving her with only 76 acres of the 455 acres she had owned just after her husband’s death in 1882.

A few years later, Dave Headley, Sarah’s 23-year-old son, was accidentally shot and killed.

“Dave was aiming to sell this guy a gun and this guy was looking at it and it went off and shot Dave in the head,” said Ward Adkins, a step-great-grandson to Sarah Headley, in a 2003 interview. “When Will and Uncle Johnny first heard about it they aimed to kill that guy, then they found out it was an accident.”

In the late 1890s, Will Headley, who had left Sulphur around the time of the disastrous house fire and spent time with his uncle Burl Farley on Harts Creek, moved back to Fourteen after marrying Caroline Lucas, a daughter of William R. and Emily (Fry) Lucas. He and his wife settled near the mouth of Sulphur where he continued to assist his mother and family.

During that time, Sarah Headley was still somewhere on Sulphur. In 1897, she sold 42 acres — including 16 acres of the old homeplace — to Sarah A. (Nelson) Sias, whose husband Billy had bought 174 acres from Headley in 1884. Three years later, she was listed there in the Lincoln County Census as “Sarah A. Hedley,” age 51, with sons Ballard, age 20, and Moses, age 15.

Just after the turn of the century, Ballard Headley joined the army and left Sulphur Spring for a few years.

“Uncle Bal joined the army and they sent him West,” said Adkins. “I think he was in one or two Indian skirmishes and he deserted and joined a gang with Harry Tracy and Dave Merrill, two famous outlaws. I was reading a book about Harry Tracy. I asked him, ‘Did you ever hear of Harry Tracy when you was out West?’ He said, ‘Son, I rode with him.’ He said, ‘We was horse thieves. We’d steal horses from one state and take them into another state and sell them and then steal some there and take them somewhere else and sell them.’ He wasn’t afraid of nothing. He told me himself he held up a passenger train one time, too.”

Harry Tracy, the outlaw supposedly befriended by Headley, was born in Wisconsin in 1874. At a young age, he drifted west to Wyoming where he hooked up with a gang of cattle rustlers who worked with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In 1897 he was arrested in Salt Lake City but escaped and went to Colorado where he joined the Hole-In-The-Wall gang. He was arrested there and sent to jail in Aspen, Colorado, but escaped a short time later after nearly killing a guard with a lead pipe. He next went to Oregon, where he met gambler Dave Merrill in a saloon. The pair committed their first crime together in January of 1899. They were soon arrested and Tracy and sent to Oregon State Penitentiary. In December of 1899, he and Merrill were transported to Olympia, Washington to face charges, where they again escaped. They were both free for New Year’s in 1900, but were captured again in Portland a short time later. On the morning of June 9, 1902, Tracy and Merrill broke out of prison, leaving behind dead and wounded guards. On June 28, Tracy killed Merrill in a duel near Napavine, Washington. Thereafter, he hijacked a boat, which dropped him off near Seattle. He slipped through the city and crossed the Snoqualmie Pass, before he killed himself after a shoot out with a small posse in Creston, Washington.

“Uncle Bal was mean,” Adkins said. “He wasn’t out West long but when he came back here he told my grandpa Neace, who ran the post office, ‘If any mail comes here for George Golden, it will be for me. You hold it for me.’ Sure enough, there was. And by the time the government tracked him down for desertion he was blind as a bat. Some people said he put his eyes out to keep from going back in the army but he didn’t. He said he’d caught this disease and it got in his eyebrows and he put red persipity in there to kill it and got out and got to working and went to sweating and it got in his eyes and put his eyes out.”

“Now Bal was awful intelligent,” Adkins continued. “He’d come up and he’d have me to read the Bible to him. He belonged to the church. And he knew the Bible all ready, I don’t know why he’d want me to read it. But I’d try to skip on him. Maybe I’d just down here eight or ten verses. He’d say, ‘Hold on, back up there.’ Then he’d start quoting it off to me.”