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.”
“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.
