hope of hitting them, but at least he could hurry them on their way. No shots came back toward him, so he was convinced that whoever the ambushers were, they had given up on killing him.
At least for the moment.
“Dog!” Frank called.
A minute later, the big cur came bounding out of the brush. The flecks of blood on his muzzle testified that he had sunk his teeth into at least one of the gunmen. Frank roughed up the fur on his head and said, “Good boy!”
He whistled for Goldy, who promptly answered the summons just as Dog had. Frank took down his bedroll, removed one of the blankets from it, and used the blanket and those broken branches he had decided on earlier to make a travois. Once he had the corpse loaded onto it, he replaced the rest of the bedroll, taking care that the bone he had found in the primitive cabin was still wrapped up securely.
The morning’s developments meant that he needed to return to Eureka now, instead of continuing his search for the Terror. For one thing, it was clear now that more danger lurked in the woods than just the supposed monster. Frank wanted to get a lead on the man whose body he had found, if possible.
He planned to keep his theories about Emmett Bosworth to himself for the time being, though. He would just tell the marshal that he had found the dead man in the woods, and wouldn’t say anything about the massacre at the logging camp. Somebody else would come across that soon enough, Frank figured. More of Chamberlain’s men were bound to show up there and make the grisly discovery.
Dragging the travois with its gruesome burden behind his horse, Frank rode toward Eureka. He kept the Winchester across the saddle in front of him, just in case he ran into any more trouble—human…or otherwise.
Treadwell’s face was gray with pain as he hunched forward in his saddle. “Bad enough that bastard Morgan kicked me in the balls last night,” he grated. “Now he had to go and shoot me, too.”
“You’ll live,” Erickson told him. “Morgan’s bullet just knocked a chunk of meat out of your arm.” The big, red- bearded man laughed curtly. “At least you can sit your saddle without hurtin’ too bad. That wolf-dog of Morgan’s practically tore poor Sutherland’s ass off.”
“It ain’t funny,” Sutherland said as he leaned far forward in the saddle, trying to ease the injured area. “That critter was vicious.”
Dawson urged his horse up alongside Erickson’s. “Who do you think that other hombre was, the one Morgan found?”
“I don’t know,” Erickson said with a shake of his head. “I didn’t get a good look at him. All I know is that he was dead. Nobody could lose that much blood and still be alive.”
Jenkins said, “The Terror got him. That must be what happened.”
“We’ll get the Terror,” Erickson said. “But we need to get Morgan first.”
“Don’t you reckon Old Man Chamberlain would pay us the bounty anyway if we showed up at his house with the thing’s head?”
Erickson frowned in thought. “I don’t know. He might not. He might say it didn’t count anymore. You fellas who worked for him know him better than I do. Is he a tight-fisted old son of a bitch?”
“He pays fair wages,” Jenkins said. “He don’t go out of his way to give anybody anything extra, though.”
Erickson nodded. “There you go. Chances are, he’d use any excuse not to have to pay the bounty. So it’ll be better if we kill Morgan first,
“Easier said than done,” Treadwell complained. He nodded toward the bloody rag tied around his arm. “We didn’t do a very good job of it today.”
“This was just our first try,” Erickson said. “We’ll stick like burrs to Morgan, and the next time…we’ll fill his hide with lead.”
Hooley caught up with the rest of Bosworth’s hired gunmen before they reached Eureka. When Jack Grimshaw heard the horse coming up fast behind them, he reined in and motioned for the others to do likewise. Hooley galloped up and joined them, bringing his mount to a sliding stop on the logging road they were following now.
Grimshaw saw the wild look in Hooley’s pale, watery eyes and guessed that something had happened. “Where’s Nichols?” he asked.
Hooley shook his head. “I don’t know. I had to leave him back there.”
“You were supposed to stay with him,” Grimshaw said.
“Yeah, well, that was before somethin’ spooked his horse and made it run away. Damn horse ran right into whatever it was that scared it, though. I never heard an animal scream like that in my life.”
“So you ran off and left Nichols there on foot with that thing in the woods?”
“It already had him,” Hooley snapped. “What was I supposed to do, stay there and get torn up, too?”
One of the other men asked, “Did you see the thing?”
Hooley shook his head. “Not really. Just caught a glimpse of it through the trees. It was mighty big and fast. Shaggy, too, like a critter. But it’s a critter the likes of which ain’t never been seen around here before. Or anywhere else either.”
“Maybe so,” Grimshaw said, “but I don’t like the fact that you just left him there. We’re supposed to all be working together.”
“Easy for you to say. You weren’t there.”
Hooley’s tense, angry attitude as he spoke and the way he moved his hand just slightly toward the butt of his gun made Grimshaw stiffen in the saddle. He was ready to slap leather, too, if Hooley wanted to push the matter.
Radburn moved his horse up and said, “Damn it, we already lost one man today. We don’t need the two of you
