“Well, I appreciate it anyway. You say he only kept his horse here for a few nights?”
“Right. I reckon he found some place permanent to stay and was able to keep his horse there. That’s just a guess, but it’s all I’ve got, Mr. Morgan.”
“I’m obliged,” Frank said with a nod. He mounted up and lifted a hand in farewell, then turned the horses toward the end of the street. Dog trotted alongside as Frank rode out of Eureka.
He headed southwest, toward the thick band of timber that ran for miles along the Pacific coast, south of Humboldt Bay. Thick clouds were forming over the ocean, Frank saw. They didn’t look particularly threatening, but they would block some of the sunlight and make the twilight world under the redwoods more shadowy than ever. No telling what might be lurking in that gloom…
The Terror wasn’t the only thing he had to worry about, he reminded himself. He’d been shot at several times during the twenty-four hours he had been in this part of the country, including the previous afternoon when he first visited Ben Chamberlain’s cabin. That incident had been lurking in the back of his mind. Something about it didn’t quite jibe, and as he rode along the logging road now, penetrating deeper into the woods, he thought about what had happened at the cabin. That was before the ruckus with Erickson and his friends, before it was even widely known that Rutherford Chamberlain had given him the job of finding the Terror.
So who had taken those potshots at him when he stepped out of the cabin?
Frank had no answer for that, but it was one more mystery to solve once he had taken care of his more pressing problem.
“Stay alert, Dog,” he said unnecessarily to the big cur as they entered the towering trees. Dog’s senses always operated at peak efficiency.
Frank had recognized a landmark, a particular tree with a long blaze down its side from a lightning strike. The tree had survived, but it would be marked for all eternity by what had happened to it.
One more way trees and men were alike, Frank reflected as he rode past the redwood.
“Twenty grand,” Treadwell said. “A big share of that bounty would go a long way toward making things all right again.”
“Yeah, your balls wouldn’t ache as much if you had a pocket full of
“Let’s leave my balls outta this. And Sutherland’s ass and Roylston’s nose, too. Let’s face it, all of us have plenty of reasons for wantin’ that bastard Morgan dead, even without the bounty.”
Dawson said, “But twenty grand always helps.”
None of the six men could argue with that.
They had ridden out of Eureka about half an hour after Frank Morgan left town. Roylston, Jenkins, and Sutherland had all worked for Rutherford Chamberlain before the danger from the Terror had spooked them into quitting, so they knew the woods quite well. Erickson intended to put that knowledge to good use.
In fact, he had gotten Jenkins, the smartest of the trio, to draw a map of the timberland southwest of the settlement. There was a low range of hills to the east, the Pacific to the west, and the Eel River running into the ocean about twenty miles south of Eureka. Within those boundaries were some of the biggest trees in the world, and those were also the stomping grounds of the Terror. The three loggers knew every place the monster had struck. Chances are Morgan would be scouting around those same locations. And Erickson and his companions would be scouting for Morgan.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” Erickson mused as they rode along. “Once we’ve taken care of Morgan, we’ll go ahead and start looking for the Terror. If we find it, we can kill it and hide the body somewhere. Then we’ll go back to town to wait until Old Man Chamberlain has given up on Morgan and posted that twenty-thousand-dollar bounty.
“It sounds like you ain’t hurtin’ for confidence,” Treadwell said with a dour look. “Hell, it ain’t the middle of the afternoon yet. Plenty of time to hunt down and kill Morgan
Erickson frowned. “I’m just sayin’, if it works out that way, that’s how we’ll do it.”
“Sounds good to me,” Dawson said. “I’d just as soon get this over with as quick as we can.” He looked at the trees that had started to close in around them. “I don’t much like it out here.”
Neither did Erickson, but he wasn’t going to let the others see that. He kept the confident look on his face as he rode forward.
The wind picked up a short time later. They really couldn’t feel it much where they were, but they could hear it sighing through the branches far overhead, and see the trees swaying a little, too, if they looked up. Dawson asked, “Is it gonna storm?”
“No, those weren’t storm clouds comin’ in from the ocean,” Roylston said. “It might drizzle a little, that’s all. You’d hardly feel it under here.”
“I wouldn’t want to get caught in these trees during a thunderstorm. Too much lightnin’.”
“Hell, you’d be safe.” Roylston waved a hand at the redwoods. “Everything around here is a whole heap taller’n a man. What you have to worry about with lightning is it starting a fire, and we’ve had enough rain lately so that’s not a real threat right now.”
Erickson took the map Jenkins had drawn out of his shirt pocket and unfolded it to study it. He motioned Jenkins up alongside him, conferred with the former logger for a moment, then said, “How about we all shut up for a while? We’re gettin’ to an area where the Terror’s been spotted several times. In fact, the damn thing killed a man not far from here. We don’t want it sneakin’ up on us while we’re busy runnin’ our mouths, do we?”
The men shook their heads as Erickson looked at them one by one. He had just gotten that response from Sutherland when something came flashing out from behind a tree and jerked the man right out of the saddle.
Chapter 19
