“Then wait until they’re gone, or find another camp, or figure something out, damn it!” Grimshaw took a deep breath to calm himself. “Just get axes and saws and, oh, yeah, some of those steel wedges loggers drive into the trees when they’re cuttin’ ’em down. Mallets to drive them, too.” He remembered more than he would have thought from the few times he had seen logging crews at work.
“What the hell you got in mind, Jack?” Radburn asked.
Grimshaw nodded toward the trees. “We’re gonna use the weapons that the Good Lord was so thoughtful in providin’ for us.”
Radburn grinned as understanding dawned on him. He said, “How hard can it be to cut down a tree?”
They would soon find out, Grimshaw thought.
An hour went by. Frank’s clothes were soaked by now. The fine mist in the air might not amount to much in the way of actual rainfall, but it would get a man wet if he were out in it long enough.
A while earlier, he had heard hoofbeats in the forest, fading into the distance, but he knew better than to think all the bushwhackers were gone. Maybe they were trying to lure him out by making him think they had left, but he doubted that. If they were professional enough to be hired by Emmett Bosworth to commit mass murder, they probably weren’t fools, and they wouldn’t think he was one either.
Still, the idea that some of them were pulling out was puzzling…and a mite worrisome.
Later, the riders came back. Frank heard the horses, although the hoofbeats were muffled by the carpet of needles under the redwoods and the damp, heavy air.
A few minutes after that, he heard the ring of axes biting into wood.
What in blazes were they doing? Cutting down a tree? That was the only explanation for the sounds. The steady chunk! chunk! continued until Frank had to risk raising his head just enough to take a look.
As soon as his eyes came over the level of the ground, muzzle fire lanced from several places under the trees as shots cracked out. He ducked and felt the dirt kicked up by the bullets spray over him.
Even that quick glance he had gotten had been enough to tell him that several of the men were working with axes on one of the trees at the very edge of the forest.
Frank studied the tree, tilting his head back enough so that he could run his gaze all the way up the thick trunk to the top. It was close to two hundred feet tall, he estimated, which meant that when it fell, if it toppled in the direction of the cliff, it would reach the spot where he had taken cover…
The bastards were going to drop a tree on him!
A grim smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. He’d had folks try to kill him in a heap of different ways, but as far as he could recall, this was the first time anybody had attempted to flatten him with a giant redwood.
That was exactly what would happen, too, if the tree landed on him. He’d be squashed flatter than a flapjack. And if he jumped up to run out of the way when the tree started to fall, the gunmen would be waiting for him, waiting to cut him down with rifle fire, instead of saws and axes.
He had to make them think twice about continuing with their plan. Moving fast, he raised himself enough to thrust the Winchester toward the trees and trigger a shot. That was the only round he got off, though, because the men who weren’t working on the tree opened fire as soon as they saw the first flicker of movement from him. He had to hunker down again as bullets slammed into the ground just above him. He had no idea if his shot had come anywhere close to the men cutting down the tree.
The axes continued to ring, and a few minutes later when they stopped at last, they were replaced within moments by the rasp of a long, crosscut saw.
Frank bit back a curse. They had him trapped good and proper, with no way out that he could see. He edged back a little, so that he could turn and peer over the edge of the cliff. Maybe he could climb down there somehow, work his way along the rocks at the base of the cliff, and find another way up.
He saw instantly that wasn’t going to be possible. The cliff was too sheer, too slick, with few if any handholds. And in this mist, it would be even slicker than usual. Trying to climb down was certain death.
But maybe staying here wouldn’t be, he saw after a moment. The area that sloped down where he had taken shelter dropped about a foot from front to back. If he stretched out right at the very brink, maybe the surrounding ground would stop the tree from descending all the way into that shallow depression…
No, Frank thought, he was grasping at straws. The tree would crush everything in its path when it fell, and that little bit of extra space wouldn’t stop it for a second. What he needed was a miracle.
Or some help.
“Keep drivin’ those wedges in!” Grimshaw called. “We don’t want the tree to start bindin’ on that saw. If it does, we’ll never get it out.”
Even though he’d never done anything like this before, cutting down a tree seemed like common sense to Grimshaw. You hewed and sawed through the trunk from both sides, a little lower on the side in the direction you wanted the tree to fall. It was hard, dangerous work, but not all that complicated.
They had started the cuts with axes, but were now using the long, two-man saws. A couple of other men worked driving wedges into the cuts on both sides with wooden mallets. Once the cuts were deeper, the saw on the cliff side would be taken out, and the wedges on that side would be removed as well. Then more wedges would be pounded into the cut on the back side to widen it and tip the tree toward the cliff. When it tipped enough, gravity would take over.
Having a tree dropped on him was a hell of a way for a man like Frank Morgan to die, Grimshaw thought. Ol’ Frank ought to go out with his hands full of blazing guns, dealing out death even as it came to him. A shame it couldn’t be that way today, but Grimshaw didn’t want to lose any more men. Bosworth would have plenty of work for them in the future, and he might wind up needing every gun.
“Keep an eye on Morgan’s hidey-hole,” Grimshaw reminded the men who had their rifles trained on the edge of the cliff. “You see a whisker move, you open up on it.”
He walked around the tree, studying the cuts. They were almost deep enough, he decided, not overlapping but close. “You’re doin’ fine,” he told the men working the crosscut saws. “Another couple of minutes, and we’ll be ready to topple the damned thing.”
Radburn had one end of a saw. Sweat covered his face. He panted, “I’m sure as hell glad…I don’t do this…for a livin’.”
“Yeah, no matter what a man does, there’s always something worse,” Grimshaw said.
“Give me…a gunfight…any day.”
Grimshaw felt the same way. He had done his share of honest labor when he was a young man. It hadn’t taken him long to figure out that he didn’t like it. Once he had realized that he could handle a gun pretty well—not anywhere near as good as Frank Morgan, of course, but better than most men—that was all he’d really needed to know.
Carrying his rifle, he walked around to the back of the tree again. He stood there, watching as the work continued. After a moment, he frowned a little as his nose wrinkled. A funny smell had drifted to him. It wasn’t pleasant at all, something like a cross between unwashed flesh and a rotting carcass. It was getting worse, too.
Realizing suddenly what that might mean, Grimshaw stiffened. He jerked his rifle up and whirled around.
And found himself face-to-face with a horror that had surely come crawling up out of the depths of Hell.
Chapter 21
Frank heard the yelling and shooting from the trees, and he knew right away the bushwhackers weren’t shooting at him. The fast, frantic sound of the gunfire told him the men were fighting for their lives, though.