Frank lay stretched out on his belly on the damp grass, which grew all the way to the cliff’s edge. He tried not to think about the fact that only a couple of feet behind him lay yawning, deadly emptiness with rocks and sea at the bottom.
As the mist continued to fall and make his clothes even wetter, he looked over at his left arm to see how badly he was hit. Blood stained the sleeve of his shirt about halfway between his shoulder and elbow. Frank moved the arm, and even though doing so hurt like blazes, the muscles still obeyed him and he didn’t feel anything grating together.
So the bullet had missed the bone, he thought—the humerus, he remembered Dr. Patrick Connelly calling it—and had just torn through flesh. And it had gone all the way through as well, Frank knew, because he could feel distinct entry and exit wounds as they throbbed.
The loss of blood could still be dangerous, but from the rate at which the crimson fluid leaked onto his shirt, he could tell that the slug hadn’t nicked any veins or arteries. With even rudimentary medical attention, the wounds ought to heal. His arm should be fine.
Of course, there was still a little matter of surviving this ambush.
The shots died away as the men in the trees realized that they couldn’t see him anymore. Now they would be debating what they ought to do next, whether to rush him or try to wait him out.
Frank cast a glance at the sky, which was completely gray and overcast by now. There were still a number of hours of daylight left, but if the bushwhackers waited too long and night fell, Frank might be able to slip away in the darkness. They had to be as aware of that as he was.
He wondered who they were. Erickson and his friends were the most likely suspects, but they had been going in a different direction the last time Frank heard their shouts in the distance.
And although it was difficult to tell because everything had happened so fast, he would have sworn that more than five men had been shooting at him, too. More like twice that many, maybe more.
It was possible that Erickson and the others had run into some other would-be monster hunters who wanted Frank dead and had thrown in with them. A lot of folks had been upset about Chamberlain lifting the ten-grand bounty, and today those same hombres were licking their chops over the prospect of a bounty twice that size, with only Frank Morgan standing in the way of it.
Another possibility was that the killers hired by Bosworth had ventured back into the woods today after all. But if that were the case, why would they be after him? Frank wondered.
There was one good reason, he realized as he thought about it, and it tied in with other things he suspected. Bosworth was staying at the Eureka House, according to Dr. Connelly, so it was entirely possible, even likely, that he had heard about Chamberlain giving Frank twenty-four hours to find the Terror. If the men who had wiped out the logging camp that morning worked for Bosworth, as Frank believed, then Bosworth was taking advantage of the fear everyone felt concerning the mysterious monster in the woods.
But if the monster was dead or caught…then whatever future atrocities Bosworth had in the works would be ruined, because they couldn’t be blamed on the Terror.
Yeah, now that he’d thought it through, it made sense, Frank decided. Bosworth had a different reason for wanting him dead than Erickson and the other would-be monster hunters, but it was no less valid.
Silence still hung over the woods. Frank knew better than to think the bushwhackers were gone, though. They were still there, hidden in the shadows, waiting to kill him if he showed even the slightest glimpse of himself.
“I never saw a man move that fast in my life, Jack,” Radburn said to Grimshaw. “With more than a dozen of us openin’ fire on him at the same time, how in the hell did he manage not to get hit? He should’ve been filled full of holes!”
“There’s some sort of guardian angel lookin’ out for Frank Morgan,” Grimshaw replied with a trace of bitterness in his voice. “Always has been, ever since we were kids. Why do you think I always tried to make sure him and me were on the same side every time we got mixed up in some ruckus?” He grunted. “Until now, that is.”
Grimshaw had been afraid things would turn out like this. He hadn’t wanted to come after Frank Morgan in the first place. Morgan was too slick, too quick-witted, too fast on his feet, to say nothing of his speed with a gun.
But the money Emmett Bosworth was offering was just too damned much to turn down, Grimshaw thought, so he and the other men had left Eureka a short time after Frank, and they had been on his trail ever since. They had been close enough to hear some sort of uproar going on earlier, and when they found a torn-up body at the base of a tree, it hadn’t taken much of a guess to know that the Terror was involved somehow. Frank was on the trail of the Terror, but he had danger coming up behind him, too. He just hadn’t known it at the time.
Now he did, and Grimshaw couldn’t help but regret the fact that they hadn’t killed Morgan with their first shots. That would have gotten an unpleasant task over with quickly, before Morgan even knew for sure what was going on.
Letting Frank Morgan know that you were gunning for him, and then failing to kill him, was one of the worst 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.