The Last Gunfighter

Yet, how could he try to capture a thing that could do…this?

Nothing moved in the woods. After several minutes had gone by, Frank was convinced that whatever had carried out this mass murder was gone. Even so, he kept the rifle in one hand as he dismounted.

He stepped over a man’s arm that had been sheared off cleanly at the shoulder and flung across the camp. A few feet away lay a man who still had both arms, but no head, only a stump of a neck like the tree stumps that dotted the clearing. Frank moved on past several more bodies, all of them awash in gore from the deep wounds that covered their bodies. He had never seen anything like it in his life.

And as he looked closer, he realized that was true. He hadn’t seen anything exactly like this before, not even the previous day when he had stumbled across those victims of the Terror. With a puzzled frown on his face, he turned and went back to the first body he had looked at, the one without a head. After studying it for a moment, he forced himself to ignore the revulsion he felt and picked up the severed arm nearby so that he could take a closer look at it.

“Well, what do you know about that?” he said softly.

Carefully, he bent over and placed the arm back on the ground where he had found it. The authorities would need to take a look at this scene of death and destruction, and it might be a good idea to leave it as much like he’d found it as possible.

There was nothing he could do for these men except try to find whoever was responsible for their grisly deaths. He mounted up again, called Dog, and then rode into the woods. Dog whined in complaint. He wanted to pick up the trail he had been following earlier. But Frank had something else in mind. He started making a circle around the clearing where the logging camp was located, trying to stay about fifty yards out from it. If he hadn’t found what he was looking for by the time he rode all the way around the camp, he would move out a little farther and try again.

It took him about half an hour of careful searching before he found a spot where a number of horses had stood not long before. He couldn’t see their hoofprints on the thick carpet of fallen needles, but to his experienced eye, the fresh droppings told the story as plainly as if it had been written out with pen and ink or printed in a book.

A number of riders had made their way through the forest to this point, then stopped their horses and left the mounts standing here for a while. Probably one member of the party had been given the chore of holding the reins. The others had crept forward, using the trees for cover, until they reached the edge of the camp where the loggers were working.

Then they had opened fire with rifles, taking the woodsmen by surprise and probably killing several of them with the first volley. The loggers who hadn’t been killed outright had put up a fight—Frank had heard the evidence of that with his own ears—but they hadn’t been able to mount enough of a defense to keep the bushwhackers from cutting them down one by one. Finally, all of Chamberlain’s men were dead.

Then, the riflemen had come out of hiding to take care of the second part of their job. With axes that they had either brought with them or found in the camp, they had walked among their victims, swinging the keen-edged weapons again and again as they chopped their victims to pieces.

Frank had noticed that something was different about the severed arm he’d found, but it had taken him a few minutes to realize what it was. The day before, he had seen what the Terror of the Redwoods left behind after an attack. The wounds were ragged, not clean. Flesh that had been torn and shredded looked different from flesh that had been cut.

Men had committed murder here, not a monster.

But would anyone else have noticed that? Frank wondered. Or would they have seen just more evidence of the Terror’s bloodthirsty rage? Would they have been blinded by blood and revulsion and failed to see the truth?

Frank thought there was a pretty good chance that was exactly what would have happened.

“Come on, Dog,” he said. “Let’s see what else we can find.”

Chapter 12

The men kept a sharp eye out as they rode through the giant redwoods. Even though none of them had ever actually seen the Terror, they had heard plenty about it. Everybody had, in this neck of the woods. The Terror was the talk of every saloon and whorehouse and logging camp.

After what had happened today, that would be even more true. The news of the Terror’s latest massacre would spread like wildfire.

That was exactly what their boss wanted.

One of the men, named Radburn, spoke up. “Hey, Grimshaw, when do we get our money?”

Jack Grimshaw, who was ramrodding this gang of killers, leaned over in the saddle and spat. “You anxious to get paid, Radburn?”

“Damn right I am. You know doin’ this didn’t sit well with me.”

One of the men, a lunger everybody called Hooley, gave a mean-sounding laugh. “Why, I thought you’d killed men before, Radburn,” he said. “I didn’t realize you was a blushin’ little flower.”

Radburn was a chunky man with a squarish red face that got even redder when he was angry, like now. “I’ve killed my share, and you know it,” he snapped. “That don’t trouble me. I’m talkin’ about what happened afterward.”

“Without that, folks wouldn’t think the Terror was to blame,” Grimshaw explained patiently. He was a gaunt- faced, middle-aged hombre with iron-gray hair under a black Stetson. “You know as well as I do why it was necessary.”

Hooley cackled, then coughed. “Because the boss paid us to do it that way,” he said in a voice wet with sickness.

“That’s right,” Grimshaw nodded. “If that bothers you too much, Radburn, I don’t reckon you have to take his money.”