Three men dying in about that many seconds…it would have been easy to freeze in fear when confronted with such devastation. Grimshaw’s hardcases had been in plenty of fights before, though, even if none of them had ever been like this one. They kept firing, even as the tree toppled on its own, and suddenly the Terror was gone, vanished into the shadows under the redwoods as if it had never been there.
Radburn shouted, “It went that way!” but Grimshaw figured that was just a guess. The Terror had been moving too fast for any of them to see where it had gone.
“Let it go!” he shouted. “Find Morgan! We still have to kill him!”
Grimshaw figured that Frank had slipped out of the trap as soon as all hell broke loose. Holding his Colt at the ready, he ran along the tree trunk to check. Sure enough, when he reached the little hollow at the edge of the cliff where Morgan had taken shelter, it was empty.
The Drifter was gone.
“Mount up!” Grimshaw yelled as he swung around. “We’ve got to find Morgan!”
Hooley asked, “What about the men that…that thing killed?”
“Leave ’em there,” Grimshaw replied with a snarl. “We ain’t got time to do anything else. Anyway, you left Nichols for the Terror, Hooley, when he was still alive, so don’t go gettin’ tenderhearted on me now.”
For a second, Grimshaw thought Hooley was going to take a shot at him. He would have almost welcomed it. He wanted really badly to kill something right now, and Hooley would do just fine.
But he’d already lost four men today, so he supposed it was better that Hooley got control of his temper and turned away. When you set out after Frank Morgan, you needed the odds on your side to be as high as possible.
The pursuit was delayed even more because some of the horses, badly spooked by the Terror’s scent, had broken free and run off. The men whose mounts were still where they had been left had to round up those other horses. By the time they started searching along the cliff, Grimshaw was certain that Frank was long gone.
That was the way it turned out. One of the men thought he had caught a glimpse of Morgan running south along the cliff during the battle with the Terror, but they couldn’t be sure about that. And it was next to impossible to follow tracks in the trees.
All they could do was spread out and comb through the forest as best they could. Grimshaw put his men a couple of hundred yards apart and told them to keep their eyes open.
“I don’t like it,” Hooley said. “What if we run into that monster again? One man alone wouldn’t stand a chance against that shaggy bastard.”
“Yeah, well, this way he can only kill one of us at a time,” Grimshaw pointed out, “instead of wipin’ out the whole bunch.”
That didn’t seem to make Hooley feel a lot better.
The searchers started through the woods, heading south along the coast since that was the only lead they had, and any lead was better than none. As soon as Grimshaw was out of sight of the others, the wet afternoon seemed lonelier than ever. With the trees closing in all around him, he might as well have been the only human being in some strange, primeval world.
“Damn you, Frank,” he muttered. “Why couldn’t you have just kept riding? Why’d you have to get mixed up in all this?”
Grimshaw wasn’t expecting answers, and he didn’t get any. Only the whisper of the wind in the trees and the faint dripping of moisture as the drizzle grew harder.
Frank continued working his way inland. He knew there were some hills in that direction that might offer him shelter. Also, he didn’t want to get caught with his back to the sea again, with no place to go in case of trouble.
His stomach growled, prompting him to dig a strip of jerky out of his saddlebags and gnaw on it as he rode. He was still feverish, and his left arm now hurt from wrist to shoulder. He shivered in the saddle as chills ran through him again.
Maybe he ought to try to make it back to Eureka, he thought. Dr. Connelly could patch up his arm. Connelly would probably stick him in bed and make him stay there for three or four days, though, and if that happened, Frank wouldn’t have any more chances to find the Terror before Rutherford Chamberlain’s twenty-thousand-dollar bounty went into effect.
No, he wasn’t going back to Eureka, Frank decided. Not until he had finished the job he set out to do.
Gradually, he became aware that the terrain wasn’t flat anymore. It had a slope to it. Stormy climbed steadily, still weaving around the massive tree trunks. Dog padded out ahead, while Goldy followed along behind. Because of the late hour and the overcast that was lowering even more, the shadows under the trees were thick enough so that Frank couldn’t see more than a few yards in any direction. Tendrils of fog floated among the trees, cutting down on Frank’s vision as well.
Suddenly, something huge and black loomed up right in front of them. This wasn’t the Terror, Frank sensed immediately. It was too big even for that. After a moment, he realized that it was a low bluff, about thirty feet tall.
And set in it, unless he was mistaken, was the round black mouth of a cave.
He closed his eyes for a second, took a deep breath. Fate had been kind to him and led him to exactly what he needed: a place to get out of the rain, rest, and spend the night. He urged Stormy forward.
The opening in the bluff was about ten feet tall. Judging by that, the cave might be big enough not only for Frank and Dog, but for Stormy and Goldy as well. Frank hoped that he could find some wood that wasn’t too wet to burn. He really wanted to build a fire and dry out.
They were approaching the cave mouth when Dog suddenly planted his feet and started to growl. The two horses stopped short as well and tossed their heads as if reluctant to go any closer.
“Come on,” Frank urged. He felt light-headed now, and the fog that crept through the trees seemed to have seeped into his brain as well. His thoughts were sluggish. All he wanted was a place to rest, to be warm again, and his friends who were usually so helpful weren’t cooperating this time.
Stormy wouldn’t budge, so Frank dismounted, slipping a little and grabbing the saddle horn to keep from falling. He took hold of the reins and tried to lead the rangy gray stallion into the cave. Stormy’s hooves were planted firmly on the ground, though. He wasn’t budging. Neither was Dog or Goldy.
“All right,” Frank muttered. “Stay out here and get wet then.”
Instantly, he felt bad for saying such a thing. He had never had a better friend than Dog, and Stormy and Goldy were almost at the same level as the big cur. Maybe once they saw him go into the cave, they would follow, he thought. He trudged toward the opening.
The smell that came from it made him wrinkle his nose. Something had crawled up in there and died. Maybe more than one something.
But he wasn’t going to let a little stink keep him from getting out of the rain. He stepped up to the cave mouth, something nagging at the back of his brain as he did so, and reached into his pocket to fish around for the little waterproof container in which he always kept several matches.
He found it as he moved a couple of steps into the cave. The drizzle wasn’t hitting him now. His fingers fumbled to open the container and shake out a match. When he had one, he snapped it to life with his thumbnail.
The match flared up and cast a yellow glow over the interior of the cave. It was rounded, ten or twelve feet high at its tallest, maybe fifteen across and an equal distance deep. Plenty of room for him, Dog, and the two horses, Frank thought. He turned slowly, holding the match higher in his left hand so that the light from it spread all the way to the back of the cave.
That was where he saw what he took at first for a sleeping bear. He stepped back sharply and dropped his right hand to the butt of his gun before he realized what he saw wasn’t a bear, wasn’t even alive. It was just a pile of animal pelts, dozens of them, from the looks of it. They looked like they had been arranged against the wall to form a bed of sorts. He saw a lot of little bones, too, tossed here and there.