They’d never have to worry about that again. They were all dead, their bodies scattered around the clearing.
Frank’s jaw tightened as he reined Stormy to a halt. His mouth was a grim line. He looked around the gore- splattered clearing and tried to figure out how many men had died here. He put the number at six, although it was hard to be sure because they appeared to have been torn limb from limb.
Frank had seen plenty of violent death in his life, but he wasn’t sure he had ever come across anything like this before. He had heard stories about how grizzly bears could maul men until they barely looked human. As he gazed in horror around the clearing, his first thought was that a bear must have done this.
But it would take a grizzly to wreak such destruction, and he didn’t think they lived in this part of the country. There were black bears in California, but he doubted if one of those smaller bears could have killed six men. A black bear might have mauled one or two men, but those gunshots Frank had heard would have brought it down.
“Dog, come away from there,” he called as the big cur nosed around the torn-up bodies. Still holding the Winchester, he swung down from the saddle and studied Stormy and Goldy. The horses were a mite skittish, but that was probably from the coppery smell of freshly spilled blood that filled the air. They would be spooked even more if they were picking up bear scent, Frank thought. And Dog would be growling. Dog was curious about what had happened here, but the thick ruff of fur around his neck wasn’t standing up as it would have been if he’d smelled a bear or some other immediate danger.
Because of that, Frank knew that whatever had done this was gone. He walked over to take a closer look at the bodies.
The men were still clad in blood-soaked clothing. Frank studied the boots that had metal calks on their soles, the thick canvas trousers, and the woolen shirts, and he knew he was looking at loggers. The saws and axes and other gear scattered around the camp testified to that fact as well. He saw several pistols and a couple of rifles lying on the ground where the men had dropped them. The guns hadn’t saved them.
Dog lifted his head and growled. Somebody was coming. Frank swung around in time to see four men burst out of the woods, each of them carrying a long-handled, double-bitted ax.
They stopped short and stared in shock at the horrible scene laid out before them. They were dressed the same as the dead men, with the addition of caps or narrow-brimmed hats. A couple wore holstered guns strapped high on their waists. After a moment, all four men slowly came forward into the clearing, gazing around at the corpses as if they couldn’t believe what they were seeing.
Finally, one of them lifted stunned eyes to Frank and demanded, “Mister, did you do this?”
Frank shook his head. “Do you really think one man could do this?” he asked. “I heard the shots and the screams and rode up to see what was going on. I imagine the same thing brought you fellas here. Did you know these men?”
“Yeah, we knew ’em,” replied a broad-shouldered man with a bushy mustache that drooped over his mouth. “We were all part of the same crew.”
“Then I’m sorry you lost your friends. Do you have any idea what might have happened?”
“The Terror,” another man said.
“Yeah,” a third man croaked. “The Terror of the Redwoods.”
A frown creased Frank’s forehead. “What’s that?” he asked. “Some kind of animal?”
“It’s not an animal, mister,” the first man said with a shake of his head. In an awed voice, he went on. “It’s a monster.”
Frank’s frown deepened. Stories about various monsters that were supposed to live in the West, like the Sasquatch and the Wendigo, were common, but he had never really believed in them.
He was about to say as much when he heard hoofbeats approaching the clearing. Those gunshots had drawn a lot of attention. As Frank turned toward the sound of horses, three men rode into the clearing.
These newcomers were dressed very differently from the loggers. They wore range clothes and broad-brimmed Stetsons. They had gun belts strapped around their hips and thonged to their thighs, and they carried Winchesters as well. Frank recognized the sort of men they were: gun-throwers, hardcases…hombres much like himself.
Frank Morgan was middle-aged, a powerfully built man of medium height. The crisp dark hair under his high- crowned hat was shot through with silver threads. His face was too rugged to be called handsome, but it was the sort of face a lot of women looked at twice. He wore a butternut shirt, faded denim trousers, and boots aged to a comfortable fit. A Colt .45 Peacemaker rode in a plain brown holster on his right hip. A bowie knife with a staghorn handle rested in a fringed sheath on his left hip. The fringe was the only thing about Frank Morgan that could be considered even remotely gaudy. He was a simple man with relatively simple needs.
The most overwhelming of which was to stay alive, because there were plenty of people west of the Mississippi who wanted the man called The Drifter dead.
Born and raised in Texas, Frank had returned to the Lone Star State after the Civil War as a young cowboy, figuring he would spend the rest of his life working on a ranch, only to discover that he possessed a natural talent for drawing a gun and firing it accurately faster than most men could blink. Even though he’d never intended to become a gunfighter, once his boots were set on that path, there was no getting off it. Lord knows he had tried from time to time.
But there were simply too many men, young and old, who wanted to match their speed and prowess with a gun against his. He had been forced to defend himself, and with each would-be conqueror who fell before his gun, the legend of The Drifter grew. Folks spoke his name in the same breath as Smoke Jensen, John Wesley Hardin, Ben Thompson, Falcon MacCallister, Matt Bodine, and all the other famous shootists. He couldn’t shake the reputation that clung to him, and so he was forced to kill again and again.
The years had rolled by, turned into decades. He had married, tried to settle down. It hadn’t worked. Violence had always reared its ugly head, often with tragic results. Now, thirty years after that young cowboy had returned to Texas from the war, he was alone, and he had vowed to himself that he would stay that way. Never again would he put anyone else’s life at risk by becoming close to them. He had lost Vivian and Dixie, he had lost his friends in the town of Buckskin…From here on out, The Drifter would just…drift.
He faced the riders who had just entered the clearing. One of them gestured toward the bloody corpses and said, “By jingo! The Terror did this, didn’t it?”
