The Last Gunfighter

Grimshaw had never moved faster in his life. He ducked away from the rush, stumbled, fell, rolled, came up with his Colt in his hand spitting fire and lead. Involuntary shouts tore loose from his throat.

The rest of the men had abandoned the tree cutting and swiftly joined the battle, opening fire on the Terror in their midst. Grimshaw knew that Emmett Bosworth wanted the thing to survive, so that it could continue spreading fear and, more importantly, be blamed for any attacks on Chamberlain’s operation that Bosworth had Grimshaw and his men carry out.

But knowing that was one thing, and finding yourself under attack by a crazed monster was another. Grimshaw and the others didn’t think twice about defending themselves. They just blazed away at the creature.

Problem was, the damn thing was so fast, it seemed to dodge the bullets as it rampaged among them, slashing right and left with hands that dealt out as much damage as talons. One man went down with his throat torn open and gushing blood. Another screamed and staggered as his eyeballs were gouged from their sockets and popped from his head like grapes. A third man stumbled backward, his skull crushed and misshapen by the sledgehammer blow that had landed on top of it.

Three men dying in about that many seconds…it would have been easy to freeze in fear when confronted with such devastation. Grimshaw’s hardcases had been in plenty of fights before, though, even if none of them had ever been like this one. They kept firing, even as the tree toppled on its own, and suddenly the Terror was gone, vanished into the shadows under the redwoods as if it had never been there.

Radburn shouted, “It went that way!” but Grimshaw figured that was just a guess. The Terror had been moving too fast for any of them to see where it had gone.

“Let it go!” he shouted. “Find Morgan! We still have to kill him!”

Grimshaw figured that Frank had slipped out of the trap as soon as all hell broke loose. Holding his Colt at the ready, he ran along the tree trunk to check. Sure enough, when he reached the little hollow at the edge of the cliff where Morgan had taken shelter, it was empty.

The Drifter was gone.

“Mount up!” Grimshaw yelled as he swung around. “We’ve got to find Morgan!”

Hooley asked, “What about the men that…that thing killed?”

“Leave ’em there,” Grimshaw replied with a snarl. “We ain’t got time to do anything else. Anyway, you left Nichols for the Terror, Hooley, when he was still alive, so don’t go gettin’ tenderhearted on me now.”

For a second, Grimshaw thought Hooley was going to take a shot at him. He would have almost welcomed it. He wanted really badly to kill something right now, and Hooley would do just fine.

But he’d already lost four men today, so he supposed it was better that Hooley got control of his temper and turned away. When you set out after Frank Morgan, you needed the odds on your side to be as high as possible.

The pursuit was delayed even more because some of the horses, badly spooked by the Terror’s scent, had broken free and run off. The men whose mounts were still where they had been left had to round up those other horses. By the time they started searching along the cliff, Grimshaw was certain that Frank was long gone.

That was the way it turned out. One of the men thought he had caught a glimpse of Morgan running south along the cliff during the battle with the Terror, but they couldn’t be sure about that. And it was next to impossible to follow tracks in the trees.

All they could do was spread out and comb through the forest as best they could. Grimshaw put his men a couple of hundred yards apart and told them to keep their eyes open.

“I don’t like it,” Hooley said. “What if we run into that monster again? One man alone wouldn’t stand a chance against that shaggy bastard.”

“Yeah, well, this way he can only kill one of us at a time,” Grimshaw pointed out, “instead of wipin’ out the whole bunch.”

That didn’t seem to make Hooley feel a lot better.

The searchers started through the woods, heading south along the coast since that was the only lead they had, and any lead was better than none. As soon as Grimshaw was out of sight of the others, the wet afternoon seemed lonelier than ever. With the trees closing in all around him, he might as well have been the only human being in some strange, primeval world.

“Damn you, Frank,” he muttered. “Why couldn’t you have just kept riding? Why’d you have to get mixed up in all this?”

Grimshaw wasn’t expecting answers, and he didn’t get any. Only the whisper of the wind in the trees and the faint dripping of moisture as the drizzle grew harder.

Frank continued working his way inland. He knew there were some hills in that direction that might offer him shelter. Also, he didn’t want to get caught with his back to the sea again, with no place to go in case of trouble.

His stomach growled, prompting him to dig a strip of jerky out of his saddlebags and gnaw on it as he rode. He was still feverish, and his left arm now hurt from wrist to shoulder. He shivered in the saddle as chills ran through him again.

Maybe he ought to try to make it back to Eureka, he thought. Dr. Connelly could patch up his arm. Connelly would probably stick him in bed and make him stay there for three or four days, though, and if that happened, Frank wouldn’t have any more chances to find the Terror before Rutherford Chamberlain’s twenty-thousand-dollar bounty went into effect.

No, he wasn’t going back to Eureka, Frank decided. Not until he had finished the job he set out to do.

Gradually, he became aware that the terrain wasn’t flat anymore. It had a slope to it. Stormy climbed steadily, still weaving around the massive tree trunks. Dog padded out ahead, while Goldy followed along behind. Because of the late hour and the overcast that was lowering even more, the shadows under the trees were thick enough so that Frank couldn’t see more than a few yards in any direction. Tendrils of fog floated among the trees, cutting down on Frank’s vision as well.