After a while, Frank found the camp where he had first encountered the creature’s bloody handiwork. After loading up the bodies to take them to Eureka, Karl Wilcox and the other loggers hadn’t returned, so the place looked almost like it had when Frank left it. The campfire in its ring of stones had burned down and gone out, but not before boiling the coffee dry and scorching the bottom of the pot.
The frying pan was the big difference, though. The bacon and biscuits that had been in it earlier were gone. Somebody had come along and helped himself—or itself—to the food.
Frank dismounted and hunkered next to the ashes. He called Dog over and said, “Take a whiff, boy. See what you smell around here.”
Dog circled the dead fire with his nose to the ground, pausing halfway around the ring of stones to lift his head and gaze off to the west. Frank knew that the Pacific Ocean lay only a few miles in that direction, the endless waves washing in over jagged rocks that lay at the bottom of steep cliffs. Between here and the sea, though, lay thousands of acres of thickly timbered woodland where the Terror could be hiding.
Frank stood up and grasped Stormy’s reins again. “All right, big fella,” he told Dog. “Trail!”
Dog set off through the trees while Frank mounted up. He followed the big cur, leading Goldy. Dog didn’t range too far ahead, but even so, there were times when Frank couldn’t see him. He followed the crackling sounds of Dog’s passage through the undergrowth.
As the brush thickened, the going became even slower and more difficult. Frank would have thought that the lack of direct sunlight under the towering redwoods would have kept other vegetation from growing so well, but obviously, these hardy plants had adapted.
After half an hour or so, Frank and Dog and the horses emerged from the woods, coming out into an open, parklike area about fifty yards wide. Beyond it, a rocky ridge jutted up about a hundred feet. Part of it formed a sheer cliff. Redwoods lined the top of the cliff, growing right to the edge. At the base of it lay a tumbled mass of broken trunks and branches.
It took Frank a moment to figure out what had happened. Over the centuries, erosion had eaten away at the cliff face, so that some of the trees on top of it had lost their anchorage and fallen. Lightning strikes or windstorms might have toppled some of the other redwoods. The debris formed by those natural occurrences had scattered along the base of the cliff to form a maze of sorts, as if giant fingers had flung down a handful of matches and let them fall where they might. In places the trees had stacked like makeshift walls.
Dog turned and started northward, still following the scent that had brought them this far, and Frank was about to follow him when something about the jumbled tree trunks along the cliff caught his attention.
“Wait a minute, Dog,” he said. “I want to take a look over there.”
Dog looked in the direction he’d been going and whined, then turned and came back, as if he were humoring Frank. That brought a grin to The Drifter’s face. Dog was a stubborn old cuss, sort of like Frank himself. Maybe that was one reason they got along so well.
When Frank reached the edge of the tumbled-down tree trunks, he reined in and dismounted. Leaving Stormy’s reins dangling because he knew the rangy gray stallion wouldn’t wander off, he started into the tangle of logs on foot.
He hadn’t gone very far before he realized what had caught his attention over here. Somebody had stacked up broken branches, some of which were as big around as the trunk of a regular tree, as well as the upper sections of the redwoods, which were much narrower than the bases, and made walls out of them. Those walls formed a crude cabin built up against the cliff face. From a distance, it looked natural and blended in with the rest of the jumbled logs.
Densely intertwined branches formed the roof. Whoever had built this dwelling had left an open space for the door. An old blanket hung over it.
Frank slid his Colt from its holster. Nancy Chamberlain had mentioned that her brother Ben had built a cabin for himself when he left home and moved to the woods. Was this it?
And more importantly, was this the lair of the Terror?
Frank moved closer, the heavy revolver gripped tightly in his hand. When he was about ten feet from the blanket-covered doorway, he called, “Hello, the cabin! Anybody home?”
There was no response from inside. Frank said, “Ben! Ben Chamberlain!”
Still nothing.
Dog had come up behind him. The big cur pressed against Frank’s leg. Frank felt Dog’s muscles trembling, and knew it wasn’t from fear, but rather from the desire to explore inside that cave-like structure.
“All right, Dog,” Frank said quietly. “Check it out.”
Dog bounded forward and pushed past the blanket to disappear into the cabin. Frank stalked closer, ready to go in with his gun blazing if he heard any commotion.
Instead, a few moments later Dog reappeared. A few cobwebs clung to his wolflike face, as if he had pushed his nose into some dusty, empty hole.
“Nothing, huh?”
Frank pushed the blanket aside with his left hand, thrust the gun in front of him with his right. Although the afternoon was well advanced now and the sun would soon be dipping toward the horizon, enough light still spilled through the doorway for Frank to be able to see as he looked around the inside of the cabin.
There was only one room. Whoever had built the place had dug a fire pit in the ground in the center and left some openings above it in the thatched roof for the smoke to drift out. On one side of the room was a crude bed, little more than some blankets piled up on some branches. Had to be uncomfortable as hell, Frank thought as he looked at it.
On the other side of the room was the only real sign that a civilized person had ever lived here. An old wooden trunk with a curved lid sat there. Leather straps ran around it, but the leather was rotting now. It had brass corners and a brass latch, all of which were tarnished and dull. Frank went over to it and lifted the lid. He had no idea what he would find inside.
A frown creased his forehead as he saw that the trunk was empty except for a few books. The scent of mildew drifted up to his nose. The books had gotten wet at some point in the past, and they were moldering away now. He holstered his gun and knelt in front of the trunk, reached inside to pick up one of the leather-bound volumes.
The smell was even stronger as he opened the book. He saw words written on the flyleaf. Moisture had caused the ink to run, but the writing was still legible.
Property of Benjamin Andrew Chamberlain.
That pretty well answered his question about whether or not this was Ben’s cabin, thought Frank. Out of curiosity, he turned the pages to the title page. Five Weeks in a Balloon, by Jules Verne. Frank smiled. He had read this one, too, and he was willing to bet that this particular copy had come from the library in Rutherford Chamberlain’s mansion. Maybe that edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea had belonged to Ben, too.
Frank put the book back and stood up, carefully closing the trunk’s lid. Maybe the trunk and the books inside it were rotting away, but they belonged to Ben Chamberlain and Frank made it a habit to respect other folks’ property. He could come back for them, though, and take them to the Chamberlain mansion once he had returned Ben himself to that redwood edifice.
He took a quick look around the rest of the cabin. His boot prints and Dog’s tracks were the only marks that disturbed the hard-packed dirt floor. No one had been here recently. That agreed with what Nancy had told him about her brother avoiding the cabin that had once been his home in the woods.
Ben had hacked several cubbyholes into the cliff face, probably using a hammer and chisel and enlarging openings that were already there. Frank could see the marks of the tools on the rock. The young man must have used them for storage of some sort, but they were empty now except for cobwebs. That explained how Dog had gotten the silky strands stuck on his muzzle. He might have smelled the last vestiges of food scent in some of them and stuck his nose in to see what was there.