Sudden Fury

Chapter 11

After the long, eventful day, Frank slept well that night. He had the veteran frontiersman’s natural ability to take advantage of any opportunity for some good sleep, and the bed in the hotel room was mighty comfortable. After breakfast the next morning in the hotel dining room—where the food was all right, but not as good as that served up by Peter Lee and his family—Frank headed for Patterson’s Livery and Wagon Yard.

The proprietor was working on a wagon’s broken axle as Frank came up. He gave Frank a friendly nod and said, “Mornin’, Mr. Morgan. I hear you got mixed up in a little excitement last night.”

“You could call it that,” Frank acknowledged with a grin. “I’m getting a mite old for so much excitement, though. I’m a little stiff and sore this morning.”

Dog must have heard Frank’s voice. He came bounding out of the livery barn, tail wagging.

Frank grabbed the big cur by his shaggy ruff as Dog stood up and put his front feet on Frank’s shoulders. He scratched Dog’s ears as he asked, “This old boy give you any trouble last night?”

“Nope,” Patterson said. “Not a bit. Tell you the truth, I slept a little better than usual, knowin’ that he was in the barn. Anybody who’d tried to sneak in and steal anything would’ve been in for a surprise.”

“That’s the truth,” Frank agreed. “I’ll be leaving Stormy here today—that’s the gray I was riding yesterday—and taking Goldy out instead.”

“Goin’ monster huntin’, are you?”

“Word does get around in a hurry, doesn’t it?”

“All over town,” the liveryman said with a nod. “A lot of people aren’t too happy about it either. They don’t like it that Mr. Chamberlain took back that bounty, and they think more than one man ought to be goin’ after the Terror.”

“What do you think?”

Patterson shrugged. “I’d say it depends on who that one man is.”

Frank saddled Goldy and then, with a wave of farewell to Patterson, rode out of Eureka with Dog loping along at his side. He headed southwest, where the thickly wooded land bulged out past Humboldt Bay. That took him in the direction of the crude cabin he had discovered the day before. He hadn’t forgotten that Dog had been following a trail of some sort when they came across the cabin. It hadn’t rained during the night, so Frank thought there was a good chance Dog could pick up the scent again.

As he rode, Frank pondered the events of the day before. They were all pretty straightforward…except for one. That ambush attempt while he was at the cabin puzzled him. He had just ridden into this part of the country. Why would anyone have a reason to bushwhack him?

Of course, he had plenty of old enemies. As many men as he had killed in gunfights, there were a lot of hombres—brothers, fathers, sons of men who had gone down with his lead in them—nursing grudges against him. One of them could have trailed him here and seized the opportunity to take a few potshots at him.

Frank wished he had gotten a look at the bushwhacker, even though he might not have recognized whoever it was.

Dog ran ahead as usual. It was a nice morning, with thick, white clouds filling about half the blue sky and a crisp breeze. Frank couldn’t feel the breeze any longer, though, as soon as he rode into the forest, and he saw the sky only in occasional patches. He was back in the green twilight world under the towering redwoods, surrounded by their trunks like the legs of giants.

It took all of Frank’s instinctive skill to guide him back to the spot where Dog had first picked up the trail the previous day. When they found the place where men had died at the hands—or whatever—of the Terror, Dog cast around until he caught the scent again. At Frank’s order, he took off through the trees, with Frank following on Goldy.

By mid-morning, they reached the open area and the cliff with the tumbled tree trunks piled at its base. Frank reined in at the edge of the trees and dismounted. He looked across the clearing at the cabin, which showed no signs of any other visitors since the day before. Letting Goldy’s reins dangle, Frank explored the edge of the trees on foot, looking for anything that might tell him who had hidden here and taken those shots at him.

The only thing he found was the stub of a quirly, which meant absolutely nothing because there were hundreds, if not thousands, of men in the area who rolled smokes just like this. Frank could tell that this one had been pinched out before the man who’d been smoking it threw it down. That told Frank the man knew at least a little something about how to act in the woods. Discarding a still-lit quirly could start a forest fire that might burn thousands of acres.

With no other clues to tell him who ambushed him, Frank turned his attention back to the cabin. He took hold of Goldy’s reins and led the horse across the clearing, then left him outside the jumble of fallen trees while he and Dog checked out the primitive dwelling that Ben Chamberlain had made for himself. Everything still looked the same inside. Frank lifted the lid of the trunk and saw the books and the long, slender bone he had put there. Giving in to an impulse, he took the bone from the trunk and carried it outside, where he rolled it up in the slicker that was tied on behind his saddle. He had in mind taking it back to Eureka with him later on, finding one of the local doctors, and asking the man to confirm his opinion that the bone was human.

With that done, Frank swung up into the saddle. “All right, Dog,” he said to the big cur. “If you can still follow that scent, let’s see where it leads. Trail!”

Dog still had the scent. He took off, heading north. Frank followed. Their course paralleled the ridge, which gradually tapered down until it was gone and the trees closed in around them again. Dog turned west then, toward the Pacific.

Frank knew they couldn’t go very far in that direction before they would come to the ocean. After a few minutes, he heard the ringing of axes. The sound told him that a logging crew was working somewhere nearby. The recent deaths had everybody worried, but work had to go on.

He came to a road that had been cut through the forest. Deep ruts told him that wagons traveled it regularly. He suddenly heard a chuffing noise, and after a moment recognized it as the sound of a donkey engine. Those steam engines had a number of uses in a logging operation, Frank knew, so the presence of one meant that he must be close to one of Chamberlain’s work camps.

Dog was still following the scent he’d first picked up the day before. It led toward the camp, Frank realized. A frown creased his forehead. Would the Terror, whatever it was, attack a whole camp full of loggers? It had done exactly that the day before, Frank reminded himself, although to be fair, that camp was only a small one. That crew hadn’t had a donkey engine with them. This camp would be a larger one, with more men on hand in case of trouble.

A sudden burst of gunfire punctuated the stuttering roar of the engine. Frank stiffened in the saddle for a second as he heard pistols popping and the sharper crack of rifles, even the dull boom of a shotgun. There was a battle going on up there.

The question was, was it a battle between men…or between men and a monster?

Dog heard the shots, too, and recognized them as the sound of trouble. He raced ahead. Frank urged Goldy to a faster pace along the rough road.

The flurry of gunfire began to die away. A few more shots blasted out; then an eerie silence fell over the forest, broken only by the donkey engine’s racket. There were no animal sounds. The rumble of the engine would have scared away most of the creatures who lived in these woods. The explosions of guns would have sent the rest fleeing. The carpet of needles on the ground even muffled Goldy’s hoofbeats.

Dog ran around a bend in the road and out of sight. A second later, Frank heard the big cur growling and snarling. He pulled his Winchester from the saddle sheath and had it ready in his hands as he used his knees to guide Goldy around the curve.

He came in sight of a large clearing, dotted with the stumps of the trees that used to be there. Tents were set up among the stumps. A couple of wagons were parked to one side of the clearing, and the mule teams that had brought them here were penned up in a pole corral nearby.

The donkey engine still chuffed and rumbled. Steam rose from the funnel-shaped stack on top of the large, cylindrical boiler, and the gears it drove still turned, winding a thick metal cable around a drum. That cable snaked off into the woods. Frank knew the other end would be wrapped around a log that was being dragged out of the forest. This was a collection point. A number of felled redwoods were lined up end to end in the clearing, ready to be hooked together and dragged along the road by a team of oxen or possibly by a larger donkey engine that could be brought out when the crew was ready to transport these logs to the sawmill.

Frank had worked for a time as a logger during his wandering years, when he was trying to put his reputation as a gunman behind him, so he knew a little about how such operations worked. But not much anymore, because things had changed quite a bit since then. They hadn’t used donkey engines in those days, only mules and oxen and the muscle and sweat of the loggers themselves.

Those thoughts went through his head for a second when he saw the steam engine mounted on its low, wheeled platform and lashed in place with thick ropes between several stumps. The other things he saw around the clearing drove everything else out of his mind.

Bile rose in Frank’s throat at the sight of the bloody heaps that had been men. It looked like the Terror had gone on another killing spree. Frank counted the corpses, feeling sicker with each one. There were eleven dead men in this camp.

Dog stood stiff-legged a short distance from the carnage, still growling. The coppery reek of fresh blood probably bothered him as it mixed with the sharp tang of powder smoke lingering from the shooting. The smell bothered Frank, that was for sure.

Sitting still in the saddle, Frank gazed around the clearing. The Winchester was in his hands. He was ready to snap the rifle to his shoulder and open fire instantly if he caught sight of the thing that had done this.

Then he remembered his promise to Nancy Chamberlain. He had told her that he would do his best to bring her brother home safely. He couldn’t just gun down Ben Chamberlain.

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.”