The Last Gunfighter

by William W. Johnstone

  For a long moment, Connelly didn’t reply. Then he said, “There have been reports of strange, unknown animals from around the world for years, Mr. Morgan, perhaps even for centuries. Did you know that in Africa, there are creatures called gorillas, who are supposed to be half-man, half-ape? I’d love to see one someday.”

  Connelly was straying from the subject at hand. “What about the Terror?” Frank prodded. “Could it really be some sort of monster, instead of, say, a man?”

  The doctor frowned. “I’ve seen some of the damage done by the Terror, Mr. Morgan.”

  “So have I.”

  “Do you think a man did that?”

  It was a fair question, but to be honest, Frank couldn’t be sure. He was about to say as much when someone pounded violently on the front door of the doctor’s house.

  “Doc! Doc! Come quick!” a man yelled. “There’s trouble!”

  Molly appeared in the doorway to the kitchen again. “Now what’s all this disturbance?” she asked hotly. “At this rate, you’ll never finish your dinner, Patrick!”

  “Occupational hazard, my dear, occupational hazard.” Connelly strode over to the front door and pulled it open. A red-faced townie stood there, breathing hard. “What’s all the excitement about, Bert?”

  “You got to come downtown, Doc,” the man said. “A couple of Chamberlain’s loggers just brought in a wagon, and it’s plumb full of men who are all tore up!”

  Chapter 16

  Frank wasn’t surprised by that breathless announcement. If anything, he had sort of expected some of Chamberlain’s men to discover the massacre at the logging camp and bring the grisly news to town before now.

  Evidently, they had brought more than the news. They had brought the gruesome evidence of the killings as well.

  “Settle down, Bert,” Connelly said. “These men are all dead?”

  “Yeah. They’re all tore up!”

  “Yes, you said that. It seems that they’d be more in need of the undertaker’s attention than mine.”

  “All I know, Doc, is that Marshal Price told me to fetch you.”

  “Very well.” Connelly still held the bone in his hand. As he turned toward Frank, he lifted it and asked, “Do you mind if I hang on to this for the time being, Mr. Morgan? I might be able to determine a little more about it if I have time to study it.”

  Frank nodded. “That’s fine, Doctor. Just keep it somewhere safe.”

  Connelly laid the bone on a small table where he had placed the copy of Gray’s Anatomy. He reached for his coat and hat, which hung on hooks next to the door, and as he put them on, he said to his wife, “I’ll be back as soon as I can, Molly. I doubt if there’s any reason to keep my dinner warm, though. I expect I’ll be downtown for a while.”

  She sighed and gave him a resigned nod.

  Frank followed Connelly out of the house. Bert, the townie who had brought the news, was too excited to move at a normal pace. He broke into a run, obviously anxious to return to the main street.

  “Man’s morbid curiosity,” Connelly said as he and Frank strode along side by side. “I see it all the time. There’s nothing more intriguing than death, probably because of its universality and inevitability.”

  “Yeah, I expect there’ll be quite a crowd gathered around that wagon.”

  Frank’s prediction proved to be accurate. So many people were in the street that it was difficult to see the wagon itself. He spotted the man sitting on the seat holding the reins, though, and recognized Karl Wilcox, the logger he had met the day before. Wilcox looked pale and shaken, which wasn’t surprising considering his cargo.

  Marshal Gene Price was on hand, too. When he saw Frank and Dr. Connelly approaching, he raised his voice and ordered, “All right, everybody get back! Get back, there! Let the doctor through!”

  On the wagon seat, Wilcox rubbed a shaky hand over his face and said, “It’s too late for a sawbones, Marshal. Way too late.”

  Frank knew that was true, and Price must have as well. Still, the marshal took hold of Connelly’s arm and steered the physician to the wagon. “Take a look, Doc, and see what you think.”

  Connelly had to know what to expect, but he blanched anyway as he studied the grisly remains in the back of the wagon. “I think this gentleman is right,” he said with a nod toward Wilcox. “The time when my services might have come in handy has long since passed.”

  “You’ve seen some of the other bodies that have been brought into town from the woods,” Price said. “Are these killings the work of the same creature?”

  Frank was particularly interested in hearing Connelly’s answer. He had determined to his own satisfaction that men were responsible for this outrage, not some monster. However, his discovery of the other body indicated that the Terror had been in the vicinity of the logging camp when the massacre took place.

  Connelly said, “I couldn’t tell you that, Marshal, without a closer examination of the bodies. What I can say is that you should get them off the street. There’s no need for this grotesque display. Take them down to the undertaking parlor, and I’ll have a better look at them there.”

  Price nodded and made a curt gesture to Wilcox. “You heard the doc,” he said. The lawman stepped away from the wagon and waved his arms. “Let’s have some room here, damn it!”

  Reluctantly, the crowd moved back far enough so that Wilcox could flap the reins and get the team of mules moving again. Connelly followed the vehicle toward the undertaking parlor.

  Price hung back and frowned at Frank. “I saw you come up with the doctor, Morgan,” he said. “You sick or something?”

  “No, but I was discussing some medical matters with him.”

  Price looked like he was waiting for Frank to go on, but Frank didn’t elaborate. After a moment, the marshal said, “If you’re going to hunt down that creature, Morgan, I hope you do it soon. Even though these killings aren’t happening in my jurisdiction, I don’t like seeing all these bodies brought into my town.”

  “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?

  Frank didn’t know yet, but he was determined to have those answers. He had given his word to Nancy, and he was starting to feel like he owed it to all the men who had died to uncover the truth, too.

  “Father flew into a rage when he heard about the latest deaths,” Nancy went on. “He even ordered the servants to get the carriage ready and said we were coming to town. He’s looking for you, Mr. Morgan. He wants the Terror killed now, and if you can’t do it, he’s going to reinstate the bounty.”

  A frown creased Frank’s forehead. “That’s not a good idea. He needs to give me more time—”

  “Morgan!”

  The angry roar came from the front porch of the hotel. Despite Rutherford Chamberlain’s gaunt, wasted frame, he still possessed the deep, rumbling voice of a much more powerful man. Frank turned to see Chamberlain standing there, a look of impatient rage on his face.

  From the carriage window, Nancy said softly, “I think your time has run out, Mr. Morgan.”

  Chapter 17

  Frank thought Nancy was probably right about that. Rutherford Chamberlain looked mad enough to chew nails or bite somebody’s head off.

  Chamberlain stomped down from the porch and came toward the carriage. He wore a white suit today, with a flat-crowned white hat, and looked more like a Southern plantation owner than a timber baron. He came to a stop in front of Frank, glared at him, and demanded, “What the devil are you doing talking to my daughter?”

  “Just saying hello to the young lady,” Frank responded. “She told me you were looking for me. I was about to go into the hotel and find you.”

  Chamberlain snorted. “Somehow I doubt that. You’d have to explain yourself, sir.”

  “Explain what?”

  “Why you haven’t killed that unholy creature yet!”

  Frank took a deep breath and kept a tight rein on his temper. “It’s been less than twenty-four hours since we came to our agreement, Mr. Chamberlain. I don’t reckon that’s really giving me a fair chance to do the job, now is it?”

  “You haven’t had time to find the Terror and kill it, but the monster has had time to slaughter a dozen more of my men! Is that fair?”

  “I wa
s in the woods this morning,” Frank explained. “I found one of the victims and brought him in. You didn’t know about that, did you?”

  Chamberlain continued glowering at him and snapped, “It doesn’t matter. That creature has to be found and killed—now! Several of my foremen came to the house just before Nancy and I left and told me that the loggers don’t want to leave their barracks anymore. They’re afraid to do their work. I can’t allow that, Morgan. My business will collapse if the men won’t go into the woods.”

  And that was probably the exact reaction Emmett Bosworth had been hoping for when he hired that crew of gun-wolves, Frank thought. Once again, the image of Jack Grimshaw flashed through his mind. He still hated to think that Grimshaw might be involved in that, but he was coming to the realization that he was going to have to talk to his old friend and try to get the truth out of him.

  “Just give me some more time,” Frank told Chamberlain.

  “How much time? Until every man jack who works for me has been ripped to shreds?”

  “Give me another twenty-four hours,” Frank said.

  “And if you haven’t found the Terror by then?”

  “I reckon you’ll do whatever it is you think you have to do.”

  Chamberlain snorted in disgust. “I’ll put that bounty back on the monster’s head,” he declared. “Only, it won’t be ten thousand dollars next time. It’ll be twenty thousand!”

  Frank bit back a curse. Quite a few people had gathered around to watch the angry confrontation between him and Chamberlain, and they all heard what the timber baron had just said. Gasps of surprise came from several of them, followed by excited murmuring. In half an hour, maybe less, nearly everybody in Eureka would know that Chamberlain was talking about reinstating the bounty—and doubling it.

  To men like Erickson and his pards, that would mean Frank was the only thing standing between them and a chance at twenty grand.

  Chamberlain had just painted an even bigger target on Frank’s back than the one Frank usually wore there just because he was the infamous Drifter.