“I’ll be riding out again, right after I get something to eat,” Frank said.
Price grunted and inclined his head toward the wagon, which was still rolling down the street toward the undertaker’s. “You’ve got an appetite after seeing that?”
Frank smiled thinly. “A man’s got to keep his strength up if he’s going to be hunting monsters.”
After leaving a grim-looking Marshal Price in the street, Frank headed for Peter Lee’s hash house. The proprietor, his pretty wife, and their two children were busy at this time of day, but Frank found an empty stool at the counter and ordered the lunch special—steak, potatoes, greens, and apple pie. When Lee put the plate in front of Frank, he nodded toward the window and said, “Lots of excitement out there in the street a little while ago. I figured it would be better if I kept my wife and the little ones in here while it was going on.”
“You were right about that,” Frank told him.
Lee lowered his voice. “They say more men were killed by the Terror.”
“That’s what it looked like, all right.”
Frank didn’t add that that was what it was supposed to look like. He knew better, though. He suspected that by this time, so did Dr. Patrick Connelly. He couldn’t imagine the doctor overlooking the slight discrepancies between the wounds these latest victims had suffered and the earlier ones actually inflicted by the Terror.
The question was, would Connelly say anything about it to Marshal Price?
“A little while ago, I saw those men who came in here and caused all that trouble last night,” Lee went on. “They went by the window. I think they were headed into the Bull o’ the Woods.”
“Any of them appear to be hurt?” Frank asked as a theory came to his mind.
“One of them had a bloody rag tied around his arm, and another was walking really funny, like there was something wrong with his, well, his rear end.”
Frank tried not to grin. That was enough to tell him his hunch was probably right. The fella with the bandaged arm was the one he’d nicked, and the other one had probably made the acquaintance of Dog’s sharp fangs, up close and personal.
So the three would-be monster hunters, as well as the three loggers who had thrown in with them, had followed him into the woods and bushwhacked him. That didn’t come as any real surprise to Frank. They were filled with greed and anger, and they figured that killing him would not only settle the score for the damage he’d dealt out in that fracas, but also open the door for Chamberlain to reinstate the bounty on the Terror. A bounty that, in their confidence bordering on arrogance, they intended to collect.
So this morning there had been two separate gangs of gunmen in the forest—Erickson and his cronies, and the men who had wiped out the loggers at that camp and mutilated the bodies. Frank knew Erickson’s bunch hadn’t done that. There weren’t enough of them.
Plus the Terror had been in the vicinity, too. Frank’s earlier thought about the woods being crowded today was looking more and more right.
“If Erickson and the rest of those men bother you, Peter, you let me know,” Frank said. “I don’t think they will, though. Their grudge is against me, not you.”
“Don’t worry.” Lee leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I have a shotgun here under the counter in case of trouble. Those varmints come in here and try to start anything, they’ll wish they hadn’t when they get a faceful of buckshot.”
Frank had to grin. If there were more people like Peter Lee around who were willing to do what was necessary in order to protect themselves and their families, the world would be a better place.
Frank enjoyed his lunch. He could see why the hash house did such good business. The food was delicious. There wasn’t much ambience, as highfalutin folks in cities like San Francisco and Boston liked to talk about, but a man couldn’t fill his belly with ambience, now could he?
He was cleaning up the last of his apple pie when Lee paused in front of him, nodded toward the front window, and said, “Look there, Mr. Morgan.”
Frank turned his head and looked out the window as a large black carriage rolled past, pulled by a pair of big black horses in fancy silver rigging. The carriage had a lot of silver trim on it, too.
“Looks almost like a hearse,” Frank commented.
Lee shook his head. “No, that’s no hearse. That’s Mr. Rutherford Chamberlain’s carriage.”
Frank wondered for a second what Chamberlain was doing in town. According to what he had been told, the timber baron seldom, if ever, left that huge redwood mansion in the forest these days.
Then he realized that word must have reached Chamberlain about the slaughter at his logging camp. That would have been enough to budge the man from his sanctum.
Frank set his fork on the empty saucer where the pie had been and stood up. He slid a coin onto the counter to pay for his meal, and when Lee said, “I’ll get your change,” he waved it off.
“See you later, Peter,” he said as he settled his hat on his head.
“Be careful, Mr. Morgan. I have a feeling that there are a lot of people around here who harbor ill wishes for you.”
Frank chuckled, but there wasn’t much actual humor in the sound. “That’s been true just about every place I’ve gone in my life.”
He stepped out of the hash house and looked up the street. The carriage had come to a stop in front of the hotel. Frank’s powerful stride carried him in that direction.
He was passing the vehicle when he heard a woman’s voice say, “Mr. Morgan?”
Frank paused and looked over at the carriage. It had fine silk curtains over the windows to keep out the dust, but those curtains had been pushed back at one window and Nancy Chamberlain peered out at Frank with a worried expression on her pretty face.
“Mr. Morgan,” she said in a half whisper, “have you found out anything about…about…”
Frank moved closer to the window and glanced at the driver’s seat on the front of the carriage. It was empty at the moment, and he wondered if the driver was in one of the saloons wetting his whistle. That didn’t really matter. What was important was that he had a moment here to speak privately with Nancy.
“Miss Chamberlain,” he said with a polite nod. “What brings you and your father to town? I assume he came along, too?”
“He’s in the hotel,” she said. “He’s looking for you. He’s furious, Mr. Morgan. One of his workers came to the house and told him that eleven more men had been killed at one of our camps this morning. Killed by…by the Terror.” Her pale fingers clutched the edge of the window. “I can’t believe that. Do…do you know if it really happened, or is it just some terrible rumor?”
Frank wished he could have spared her what she was bound to be thinking, but he couldn’t. “Those men were killed, all right,” he said with a grim nod. “I saw their bodies when they were brought in.”
Nancy closed her eyes and flinched as if she’d been struck a physical blow. “Oh, dear Lord,” she murmured.
For a moment, Frank thought about telling her he was convinced that the Terror—whatever it was, whether Nancy’s brother or not—hadn’t been responsible for these latest killings. But then he remembered his decision to play that card close to his chest, and so he kept silent.
Nancy opened her eyes and looked imploringly at him. “Have you found out anything yet? Found any sign of…of…”
“I found that cabin you told me about,” Frank said. “It looked like nobody had been there for months.”
“Yes, he started shunning it for some reason. Almost like something happened there that upset him.”
Something that left a human bone in the cabin, Frank thought. Was that where Ben Chamberlain had carried out his first killing? Was that where he had begun his descent into madness, his transformation into a monster?