The Last Gunfighter Page 9

  “On what charge?” Frank asked.

  “Assault. Disturbing the peace.”

  Peter Lee surprised Frank a little by speaking up. “That’s not how it happened, Marshal,” he said. “Those men came in here looking for Mr. Morgan, intending to cause trouble. They attacked him. He was just defending himself.”

  Price glared at the hash house proprietor. “You sure about that?”

  Lee nodded toward the men at the tables. “Ask any of my customers. They were all here when it happened.”

  The lawman turned to look at the men, several of whom nodded in agreement with what Lee had said. The gestures seemed rather reluctant, as if they didn’t want to get involved in this possible trouble, but their honest natures forced them not to lie.

  “All right then,” Price finally said with ill-concealed disgust. “But I’ll be keeping my eye on you, Morgan. You break the law, and you’ll wind up behind bars before you know what happened.”

  That was an empty threat, and probably everyone in the place knew it. But Frank just nodded and said, “I always try to be a law-abiding man, Marshal.”

  Price snorted and turned to stalk out of the hash house. Frank watched him go, then said quietly to Lee, “You may have made yourself an enemy there, Peter.”

  Lee shook his head. “Marshal Price is a windbag. I’m not worried about him. I don’t think Erickson and his cronies will bother us either. You made it pretty clear what would happen if they did.”

  Remembering how he’d been bushwhacked at Ben Chamberlain’s old cabin that afternoon, Frank said, “I couldn’t do much about it if I was dead.”

  Peter Lee smiled. “Don’t get yourself killed then.”

  Frank laughed and reached for his coffee cup. “Words to live by,” he said.

  The logger with the broken nose was named Roylston. He sat at a big table in the back of the Bull o’ the Woods Saloon holding a bloody rag to his nose and cursing in a low, monotonous voice.

  The other men at the table ignored him. The one who’d been kicked in the groin sat gray-faced and hunched over. Every now and then he grimaced and took a nip from the bottle in front of him. His name was Treadwell, and at this moment, he wanted to kill Frank Morgan more than he had ever wanted anything else in his life.

  Big, red-bearded Erickson wanted to kill Morgan, too, but even more than that, he wanted to collect the ten-thousand-dollar bounty on the head of the Terror. With Morgan around, the chances of doing that were slim.

  But if Morgan was dead, Erickson thought…

  Across the table, Dawson said, “It don’t matter. Let Morgan go after that damn monster. It’ll tear him into little bloody pieces, the same way it’s done with everybody else unlucky enough to run into it.”

  Dawson’s voice was thick because his jaw was swollen where Morgan had hit him. Anger burned in his eyes, too, the same way it burned in the eyes of the other men.

  Erickson, Dawson, and Treadwell weren’t really friends. They hadn’t even known each other before they came to this area of northern California, drawn by reports of the Terror and the ten-grand bounty. Each of them fancied himself a gunman. They were tough and weren’t above skirting the law when it was advantageous—or profitable—to do so. They had met here in the Bull o’ the Woods, recognized each other as kindred spirits, and formed a rough partnership of sorts…although it wouldn’t have taken much to tempt each of them to double-cross the others. Still, they were as close to being friends as men like them could be.

  Erickson had a bottle of his own, like Treadwell, and the other men were sharing a third bottle. Erickson had worried that a couple of his ribs were busted, but the pain that shot through him every time he took a breath had eased a little, dulled by the whiskey he was pouring down his throat more than likely. The whiskey didn’t do anything to ease the anger inside him, though.

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” he said in reply to Dawson’s comment about the Terror getting rid of Frank Morgan. “Morgan’s not like most men. He wouldn’t have lived as long as he has, with the rep he’s got, if he wasn’t plenty tough.”

  “Those fellas who ran into the Terror were tough, too,” one of the loggers said. “Damn thing tore ’em apart like a wolf with a rabbit. That’s why there needs to be more than one man goin’ after it. It may take an army to get it.”

  Erickson shook his head. “Not an army. Just a handful of men…if they’re the right men. Like us.”

  Roylston had his head tipped back, trying to stop the trickle of blood that still came from his nose. Now he straightened his head and said, “I’m not goin’ back out there. Not to cut trees for Chamberlain. He’s not payin’ me enough to risk my life with nothin’ but an ax and maybe a six-gun to defend myself.”

  “Then come in with us,” Erickson said. He nodded toward the other two loggers. “You and Jenkins and Sutherland. The six of us, we’ll find the Terror and kill it.”

  “What’s the point in that?” Roylston asked. “The old man lifted the bounty. He won’t pay ten grand for the monster’s head anymore, not unless Morgan brings it in.”

  “He’d put the bounty on it again quick enough if Morgan was dead,” Erickson said, putting into words what he’d been thinking.

  The other five men stared at Erickson for a long moment without saying anything. Then Treadwell rasped, “Are you sayin’ what I think you’re sayin’?”

  “Once Morgan’s out of the way, there’ll be nobody stoppin’ us from going after the Terror. And Chamberlain’s bound to pay off once we get it.”

  The logger named Jenkins shook his head. “Forget it. They say Morgan’s as fast as Smoke Jensen or Matt Bodine. What you’re talking about is a good way to get us killed.”

  “Six against one,” Erickson said. “Those are mighty good odds.”

  “Yeah. You would have thought so.”

  Erickson’s face flushed angrily. “That was different. He had the edge because we couldn’t all rush him at once.”

  “And what you’re talking about now is murder.”

  Erickson leaned forward and glared at Jenkins. “What I’m talking about is ten thousand dollars, you damned fool. Even split six ways, that’s more money than you can make in three or four years.”

  Jenkins thought it over and finally shrugged. “Well…you’re right about that.”

  “Of course I’m right.”

  “But we’ll be risking our lives going up against Morgan.”

  “You’re not already risking your lives by going into the woods where that monster is?”

  Roylston took the bloody rag away from his swollen nose and looked at it. “You’re right about that. Count me in.”

  “Me, too,” Sutherland said.

  Erickson looked at Jenkins. “How about it?” he demanded.

  Jenkins sighed. “All right. I’ll throw in with you, too, Erickson. I don’t much like it, but…ten thousand is a hell of a lot of money.”

  “It sure is.” Erickson reached over to Roylston. “Let me give you a hand with that,” he said as he took hold of Roylston’s nose and gave it a quick, hard squeeze before Roylston realized what he was about to do.

  Roylston howled in pain, making the other men in the saloon look around. They went back to their drinking right away, though, when they saw there wasn’t going to be a fight. Roylston sat there with both hands cupped over his nose, shocked by what Erickson had just done.

  “What the hell did you do that for?”

  “You don’t want that nose to be all crooked when it heals up, do you?” Erickson asked. “I just straightened it back up. Now you’ll be handsome for the ladies, once you’ve got all that money in your pocket.”

  Dawson grunted. “A man with enough money in his pocket is already handsome to the ladies.”

  Still muttering curses, Roylston shoved his chair back and stood up. “We’ll have to go out to the camp and get our gear. Then we’ll come back into town. I don’t cotton to the idea of spending another night in those woods.”

&nb
sp; “And then tomorrow we’ll start trying to figure out a way to get rid of Morgan,” Erickson said. “Right?”

  Roylston nodded. “We’re with you.”

  The three loggers left the saloon. Dawson watched them go, then commented, “I liked a three-way split of that reward money better than divvying it up six ways.”

  Erickson took a slug from the whiskey bottle. “It’ll still be a three-way split,” he said with a leer. “Those dumb woodsmen will come in handy while we’re getting rid of Morgan and then when we go after the Terror…but once we’ve got the monster’s head, we won’t need them any more, now will we?”

  Dawson thought about it for a second, then began to smile. Even Treadwell didn’t look quite as pained as he had earlier.

  “Yeah, I think the Terror of the Redwoods is gonna claim at least three more victims,” Erickson said, “before we collect that ten-grand reward.”

  Chapter 11

  After the long, eventful day, Frank slept well that night. He had the veteran frontiersman’s natural ability to take advantage of any opportunity for some good sleep, and the bed in the hotel room was mighty comfortable. After breakfast the next morning in the hotel dining room—where the food was all right, but not as good as that served up by Peter Lee and his family—Frank headed for Patterson’s Livery and Wagon Yard.

  The proprietor was working on a wagon’s broken axle as Frank came up. He gave Frank a friendly nod and said, “Mornin’, Mr. Morgan. I hear you got mixed up in a little excitement last night.”

  “You could call it that,” Frank acknowledged with a grin. “I’m getting a mite old for so much excitement, though. I’m a little stiff and sore this morning.”

  Dog must have heard Frank’s voice. He came bounding out of the livery barn, tail wagging.

  Frank grabbed the big cur by his shaggy ruff as Dog stood up and put his front feet on Frank’s shoulders. He scratched Dog’s ears as he asked, “This old boy give you any trouble last night?”

  “Nope,” Patterson said. “Not a bit. Tell you the truth, I slept a little better than usual, knowin’ that he was in the barn. Anybody who’d tried to sneak in and steal anything would’ve been in for a surprise.”

  “That’s the truth,” Frank agreed. “I’ll be leaving Stormy here today—that’s the gray I was riding yesterday—and taking Goldy out instead.”

  “Goin’ monster huntin’, are you?”

  “Word does get around in a hurry, doesn’t it?”

  “All over town,” the liveryman said with a nod. “A lot of people aren’t too happy about it either. They don’t like it that Mr. Chamberlain took back that bounty, and they think more than one man ought to be goin’ after the Terror.”

  “What do you think?”

  Patterson shrugged. “I’d say it depends on who that one man is.”

  Frank saddled Goldy and then, with a wave of farewell to Patterson, rode out of Eureka with Dog loping along at his side. He headed southwest, where the thickly wooded land bulged out past Humboldt Bay. That took him in the direction of the crude cabin he had discovered the day before. He hadn’t forgotten that Dog had been following a trail of some sort when they came across the cabin. It hadn’t rained during the night, so Frank thought there was a good chance Dog could pick up the scent again.

  As he rode, Frank pondered the events of the day before. They were all pretty straightforward…except for one. That ambush attempt while he was at the cabin puzzled him. He had just ridden into this part of the country. Why would anyone have a reason to bushwhack him?

  Of course, he had plenty of old enemies. As many men as he had killed in gunfights, there were a lot of hombres—brothers, fathers, sons of men who had gone down with his lead in them—nursing grudges against him. One of them could have trailed him here and seized the opportunity to take a few potshots at him.

  Frank wished he had gotten a look at the bushwhacker, even though he might not have recognized whoever it was.

  Dog ran ahead as usual. It was a nice morning, with thick, white clouds filling about half the blue sky and a crisp breeze. Frank couldn’t feel the breeze any longer, though, as soon as he rode into the forest, and he saw the sky only in occasional patches. He was back in the green twilight world under the towering redwoods, surrounded by their trunks like the legs of giants.

  It took all of Frank’s instinctive skill to guide him back to the spot where Dog had first picked up the trail the previous day. When they found the place where men had died at the hands—or whatever—of the Terror, Dog cast around until he caught the scent again. At Frank’s order, he took off through the trees, with Frank following on Goldy.

  By mid-morning, they reached the open area and the cliff with the tumbled tree trunks piled at its base. Frank reined in at the edge of the trees and dismounted. He looked across the clearing at the cabin, which showed no signs of any other visitors since the day before. Letting Goldy’s reins dangle, Frank explored the edge of the trees on foot, looking for anything that might tell him who had hidden here and taken those shots at him.

  The only thing he found was the stub of a quirly, which meant absolutely nothing because there were hundreds, if not thousands, of men in the area who rolled smokes just like this. Frank could tell that this one had been pinched out before the man who’d been smoking it threw it down. That told Frank the man knew at least a little something about how to act in the woods. Discarding a still-lit quirly could start a forest fire that might burn thousands of acres.

  With no other clues to tell him who ambushed him, Frank turned his attention back to the cabin. He took hold of Goldy’s reins and led the horse across the clearing, then left him outside the jumble of fallen trees while he and Dog checked out the primitive dwelling that Ben Chamberlain had made for himself. Everything still looked the same inside. Frank lifted the lid of the trunk and saw the books and the long, slender bone he had put there. Giving in to an impulse, he took the bone from the trunk and carried it outside, where he rolled it up in the slicker that was tied on behind his saddle. He had in mind taking it back to Eureka with him later on, finding one of the local doctors, and asking the man to confirm his opinion that the bone was human.

  With that done, Frank swung up into the saddle. “All right, Dog,” he said to the big cur. “If you can still follow that scent, let’s see where it leads. Trail!”

  Dog still had the scent. He took off, heading north. Frank followed. Their course paralleled the ridge, which gradually tapered down until it was gone and the trees closed in around them again. Dog turned west then, toward the Pacific.

  Frank knew they couldn’t go very far in that direction before they would come to the ocean. After a few minutes, he heard the ringing of axes. The sound told him that a logging crew was working somewhere nearby. The recent deaths had everybody worried, but work had to go on.

  He came to a road that had been cut through the forest. Deep ruts told him that wagons traveled it regularly. He suddenly heard a chuffing noise, and after a moment recognized it as the sound of a donkey engine. Those steam engines had a number of uses in a logging operation, Frank knew, so the presence of one meant that he must be close to one of Chamberlain’s work camps.

  Dog was still following the scent he’d first picked up the day before. It led toward the camp, Frank realized. A frown creased his forehead. Would the Terror, whatever it was, attack a whole camp full of loggers? It had done exactly that the day before, Frank reminded himself, although to be fair, that camp was only a small one. That crew hadn’t had a donkey engine with them. This camp would be a larger one, with more men on hand in case of trouble.

  A sudden burst of gunfire punctuated the stuttering roar of the engine. Frank stiffened in the saddle for a second as he heard pistols popping and the sharper crack of rifles, even the dull boom of a shotgun. There was a battle going on up there.

  The question was, was it a battle between men…or between men and a monster?

  Dog heard the shots, too, and recognized them as th
e sound of trouble. He raced ahead. Frank urged Goldy to a faster pace along the rough road.

  The flurry of gunfire began to die away. A few more shots blasted out; then an eerie silence fell over the forest, broken only by the donkey engine’s racket. There were no animal sounds. The rumble of the engine would have scared away most of the creatures who lived in these woods. The explosions of guns would have sent the rest fleeing. The carpet of needles on the ground even muffled Goldy’s hoofbeats.

  Dog ran around a bend in the road and out of sight. A second later, Frank heard the big cur growling and snarling. He pulled his Winchester from the saddle sheath and had it ready in his hands as he used his knees to guide Goldy around the curve.

  He came in sight of a large clearing, dotted with the stumps of the trees that used to be there. Tents were set up among the stumps. A couple of wagons were parked to one side of the clearing, and the mule teams that had brought them here were penned up in a pole corral nearby.

  The donkey engine still chuffed and rumbled. Steam rose from the funnel-shaped stack on top of the large, cylindrical boiler, and the gears it drove still turned, winding a thick metal cable around a drum. That cable snaked off into the woods. Frank knew the other end would be wrapped around a log that was being dragged out of the forest. This was a collection point. A number of felled redwoods were lined up end to end in the clearing, ready to be hooked together and dragged along the road by a team of oxen or possibly by a larger donkey engine that could be brought out when the crew was ready to transport these logs to the sawmill.

  Frank had worked for a time as a logger during his wandering years, when he was trying to put his reputation as a gunman behind him, so he knew a little about how such operations worked. But not much anymore, because things had changed quite a bit since then. They hadn’t used donkey engines in those days, only mules and oxen and the muscle and sweat of the loggers themselves.