mistakes a man could make.
From behind one of the other trees, Hooley called, “You reckon he fell off the cliff?”
“Well, I don’t rightly know,” Grimshaw said. “Why don’t you mosey out there, Hooley, and see if you can tell?”
Hooley moved slightly, as if he were about to follow Grimshaw’s suggestion, but then he stopped short and glared over at the older man.
“You’re tryin’ to get me killed!”
“Thinnin’ the herd,” Radburn muttered. Grimshaw could hear him, but Hooley couldn’t. Grimshaw chuckled.
“Chances are, Morgan found some cover, even though from here it doesn’t look like there is any,” Grimshaw added. “He’s the best I’ve ever seen at using whatever luck gives him. The best I’ve ever seen at anything, period. But he’s still human. He can’t sprout wings and fly off that cliff, and there’s nowhere else for him to go.”
“But if we leave these trees, he’ll have a clear shot at us,” Radburn pointed out. “I don’t want to try crossin’ fifty yards of open ground while I’m in The Drifter’s gunsights. Seems like a good way of committin’ suicide.”
“None surer,” Grimshaw agreed.
“Then how are we gonna get him outta there?” one of the other gunmen asked.
Grimshaw rubbed his jaw and frowned in thought. They had a Mexican standoff here, and he couldn’t see any way to resolve it short of charging Morgan’s position. If they did that, Grimshaw was confident that Frank would die in the end—but not before quite a few of them got ventilated as well. The rest of the men would be like Radburn; none of them would want to be the one leading the charge.
An idea glimmered to life in Grimshaw’s brain. He looked up at the trees towering above them. The redwoods were all at least a hundred and fifty feet tall, and many of them were taller than that.
“Any of you boys know anything about cuttin’ down trees?” he asked.
No one spoke up.
“None of you ever worked as a logger before?”
“I always had better things to do with my hands than swing an ax,” Hooley said with a sneer in his voice.
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” one of the other men said, “con-siderin’ how the ladies feel about you.”
Hooley turned angrily toward that hombre, but before a squabble could break out, Grimshaw snapped, “Settle down, damn it. We got a real problem here. If we don’t deal with Morgan before it gets dark, he’ll have a lot better chance of giving us the slip. I want some of you boys to head for that logging camp we hit this morning and bring back all the axes and saws you can carry.”
“What if the law’s there, or some guards or somebody from Chamberlain’s company?” one of the men asked.
“Then wait until they’re gone, or find another camp, or figure something out, damn it!” Grimshaw took a deep breath to calm himself. “Just get axes and saws and, oh, yeah, some of those steel wedges loggers drive into the trees when they’re cuttin’ ’em down. Mallets to drive them, too.” He remembered more than he would have thought from the few times he had seen logging crews at work.
“What the hell you got in mind, Jack?” Radburn asked.
Grimshaw nodded toward the trees. “We’re gonna use the weapons that the Good Lord was so thoughtful in providin’ for us.”
Radburn grinned as understanding dawned on him. He said, “How hard can it be to cut down a tree?”
They would soon find out, Grimshaw thought.
An hour went by. Frank’s clothes were soaked by now. The fine mist in the air might not amount to much in the way of actual rainfall, but it would get a man wet if he were out in it long enough.
A while earlier, he had heard hoofbeats in the forest, fading into the distance, but he knew better than to think all the bushwhackers were gone. Maybe they were trying to lure him out by making him think they had left, but he doubted that. If they were professional enough to be hired by Emmett Bosworth to commit mass murder, they probably weren’t fools, and they wouldn’t think he was one either.
Still, the idea that some of them were pulling out was puzzling…and a mite worrisome.
Later, the riders came back. Frank heard the horses, although the hoofbeats were muffled by the carpet of needles under the redwoods and the damp, heavy air.
A few minutes after that, he heard the ring of axes biting into wood.
What in blazes were they doing? Cutting down a tree? That was the only explanation for the sounds. The steady
As soon as his eyes came over the level of the ground, muzzle fire lanced from several places under the trees as shots cracked out. He ducked and felt the dirt kicked up by the bullets spray over him.
Even that quick glance he had gotten had been enough to tell him that several of the men were working with axes on one of the trees at the very edge of the forest.
Frank studied the tree, tilting his head back enough so that he could run his gaze all the way up the thick trunk to the top. It was close to two hundred feet tall, he estimated, which meant that when it fell, if it toppled in the direction of the cliff, it would reach the spot where he had taken cover…
The bastards were going to drop a tree on him!
A grim smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. He’d had folks try to kill him in a heap of different ways, but as far as he could recall, this was the first time anybody had attempted to flatten him with a giant redwood.
