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 the 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.
Those thoughts went through his head for a second when he saw the steam engine mounted on its low, wheeled platform and lashed in place with thick ropes between several stumps. The other things he saw around the clearing drove everything else out of his mind.
Bile rose in Frank’s throat at the sight of the bloody heaps that had been men. It looked like the Terror had gone on another killing spree. Frank counted the corpses, feeling sicker with each one. There were eleven dead men in this camp.
Dog stood stiff-legged a short distance from the carnage, still growling. The coppery reek of fresh blood probably bothered him as it mixed with the sharp tang of powder smoke lingering from the shooting. The smell bothered Frank, that was for sure.
Sitting still in the saddle, Frank gazed around the clearing. The Winchester was in his hands. He was ready to snap the rifle to his shoulder and open fire instantly if he caught sight of the thing that had done this.
Then he remembered his promise to Nancy Chamberlain. He had told her that he would do his best to bring her brother home safely. He couldn’t just gun down Ben Chamberlain.
