The Last Gunfighter

by William W. Johnstone

  Ben took a tentative step toward Frank and said, “Nan…cy?”

  “You want me to take you to Nancy?”

  “My…siiiiister.”

  Frank kept smiling as he nodded. “That’s right. Nancy is your sister, and she loves you, Ben. She wants to see you. I’ll take you to her.”

  If he could get Ben back to the Chamberlain mansion, then maybe Rockwell, Cobb, and those other hardcases who worked for Rutherford Chamberlain could keep any mobs from storming the place and killing him once word got out that he was there, as it was bound to do. That might buy Frank some time, until he could consult with Chamberlain and the law and figure out what needed to be done. Maybe Ben could be locked up somewhere, in a place where he couldn’t hurt anybody anymore.

  But being locked up like that might be an even worse punishment than death for someone like Ben, Frank reflected. He still wasn’t sure that a bullet in the brain wouldn’t be the most merciful course.

  He was damned if he was going to be judge, jury, and executioner, though, at least not without knowing the full story. He motioned for Ben to come closer and said, “Come on. We’ll go see Nancy. I’ll take you to her.”

  Ben stepped out into the sunlight. Frank got his first really good look at the man who was now known as the Terror of the Redwoods.

  It was a fitting name. Ben’s appearance was enough to strike terror into anyone’s heart. With the long, tangled hair that fell around his shoulders and the thick, bushy beard that reached to the center of his chest, plus the bulky coat, he looked more like an animal than a human being. He was so hairy that not much of his face was visible except for the deep-set, burning eyes and a few patches of pink, sick-looking bare flesh. After a moment, Frank realized that those pink patches were scars. From the looks of them, Ben has suffered some severe burns on his face, sometime in the past.

  Ben was at least six and a half feet tall, maybe a little more. It was difficult to judge his weight because the coat concealed the shape of his body, but Frank reckoned he weighed at least two hundred pounds, probably more like two-thirty or two-forty. With that size and those razor-sharp talons, Ben Chamberlain was one of the deadliest two-legged weapons Frank had ever encountered. He had seen with his own eyes that Ben was incredibly fast and strong, too.

  Frank knew that if he hadn’t been able to get through to Ben and awaken the man slumbering inside the monster, he never would have been able to take him alive. With a still-maddened Ben, killing would have been the only option. And it might come to that yet, of course, if Ben lost control of himself again. Frank knew he would have to be mighty careful in the way he handled the young man.

  He put a foot in the stirrup and swung up into the saddle. Ben stepped back hurriedly, an upset look on his face.

  “It’s all right,” Frank said. Clearly, Ben didn’t like men on horseback. That might mean something. Quickly, Frank went on. “This is a good horse. He won’t hurt you.” Dealing with Ben was a little like dealing with a young child, he realized. “His name is Goldy.”

  “Gol…dy,” Ben repeated.

  Frank nodded. “That’s right. And the other horse is Stormy.”

  “Stor…my.”

  “You’re getting it.” Even that tiny bit of praise brought a sudden smile to Ben’s face under the bushy beard. Frank pointed to the big cur and said, “Dog.”

  “Dog!” Ben could handle that one without any trouble, and he was excited about it.

  Frank pointed to himself. “And I’m Frank.” He supposed that Ben had never heard his name until now.

  “Fraaaank.”

  “Yeah, close enough,” Frank said with a grin. “Come on, walk with me now.”

  They started through the forest. Ben shuffled along, his long legs easily allowing him to keep up with the horses. As Frank rode, he tried to spot some landmarks and figure out exactly where they were. He wanted to avoid Ben’s old cabin, since that place might hold such bad memories for Ben that he could lose the fragile grip he had on his humanity if he saw it again.

  However, in a vast expanse of timber like this, finding any landmarks was difficult. Even steering by the sun wasn’t easy once you were under the trees, because it wasn’t very visible. The branches diffused the sunlight, so that it might have come from any direction, and gave it a greenish tint.

  Frank was pretty sure they were headed north, though. If they kept going in that direction, sooner or later they would reach the coastline, and he could follow that all the way to Humboldt Bay and Eureka if he had to. That wasn’t what he wanted to do, though. He wasn’t sure if he could persuade Ben to enter the town, and if he did, the sight of him would be liable to set off a riot. If Frank could get Ben to the Chamberlain mansion, he was counting on Nancy’s presence to keep him calm enough to deal with.

  “Beautiful day, isn’t it, Ben?” Frank said. He wanted to keep talking to Ben, keep making contact with the man inside the monster.

  Ben didn’t say anything, but he looked around at the trees for a moment, and Frank would have sworn he saw the giant nod and smile a shy little smile.

  Definitely like a child, Frank thought.

  They moved on, Frank talking about nothing in particular, and after a while they came to a rough road, one of the logging roads that Rutherford Chamberlain’s men had cut through this wilderness. Ben stopped short and acted like he didn’t want to venture out onto the road. Frank had to coax him onto it with promises that it would be all right, that nothing would hurt him. Finally, Ben began to trudge along beside Goldy.

  They hadn’t gone very far, though, when Frank heard axes ringing against trees somewhere not far off. Ben heard it, too, and reacted violently. He drew back, shaking his head from side to side, and rumbled, “Baaaad! Baaaad!”

  Frank reined in and quickly dismounted. He stepped toward Ben, holding out a hand in a calming gesture. “Take it easy, Ben,” he urged. “They won’t hurt you. If you leave those men alone, they won’t bother you. I won’t let them. I swear it.”

  “Baaaad!” Ben rasped again. Frank could tell that he was about to bolt, and he knew that if Ben started running through the woods, he would be so caught up in his frenzy that he would attack anyone who crossed his path.

  But as Ben took several stumbling steps backward, he suddenly swayed as if he couldn’t keep his balance. He tried to turn, but as he did so, he fell to one knee. A deep groan came from him. He tried to struggle up, but couldn’t do it, and Frank didn’t dare get too close because he might startle Ben and set him off on a rampage. Frank remembered how Ben had collapsed in the cave the night before. He never had found out why that happened.

  Ben tilted his head back, groaned again, and then toppled over. He crashed to the ground on his side and didn’t move. Frank circled him warily. Dog came up and sniffed at him, equally wary.

  “Looks like he’s passed out, Dog,” Frank said. Ben’s eyes were closed. For a second, Frank couldn’t even tell if he was still breathing. The bulky coat make it difficult to determine if his chest was rising and falling. As Frank leaned closer, though, he heard the raspy wheeze of air moving through Ben’s throat.

  What the hell had happened to him? Frank risked reaching for the coat. It was held together with crude fasteners made of gut and bone, probably from the small animals that provided Ben with his food. Frank worked at them until he was able to spread the coat open.

  His breath hissed between his teeth at what he saw. Under the coat, Ben wore a shirt that might have been a red-checked flannel at one time. It was so dirty that the original color was hard to determine.

  But it wasn’t just dirt that stained the fabric. In several places, large black blotches stood out. Frank knew those were dried bloodstains, and as he touched them, he could tell that they weren’t too old. Ben had been wounded recently, and more than once. He might have matching wounds on his back where the bullets had gone through, but Frank would have been willing to bet that the giant was carrying around some lead inside him, too.

  No won
der Ben wasn’t moving as fast now. He was badly injured. He must have been hit during that battle with Bosworth’s men the day before. As Frank hunkered there beside him, he knew that he had to get some medical attention for Ben, and soon, if the young man was going to have a chance to pull through.

  There had to be a logging camp somewhere close by. He could still hear the axes. The loggers would probably have a wagon, and with their help, Frank could load Ben into the vehicle and take him to the Chamberlain mansion. Chamberlain could send someone to town to fetch Dr. Connelly.

  Frank straightened to his feet. He didn’t like it, but he was going to have to leave Ben here. He couldn’t just ride off and abandon him in the middle of the logging road, though. He fetched his rope from the saddle and went to work getting it looped around Ben’s massive chest, under the huge arms. Frank’s own injured arm made that difficult, and he was sweating by the time he finished, but he finally managed. Then he tied the other end of the rope to his saddle horn and took up Goldy’s reins.

  “Come on, boy,” he urged. “You can haul that much weight without any problem.”

  In a few more minutes, Frank had used Goldy to drag Ben off the road and into the thick undergrowth. He pulled some brush and fallen branches around and used them to conceal the unconscious behemoth as much as possible. Most likely, anybody passing by wouldn’t notice Ben, at least as long as he remained passed out.

  Frank coiled his rope and then swung back up into the saddle. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, Ben,” he said, even though he knew Ben couldn’t hear him. Then he set out to find those loggers.

  They might try to argue with him when they found out they were going to help save the Terror’s life. He would persuade them to cooperate, though, Frank thought…at gunpoint, if necessary.

  At least the rain had stopped, Jack Grimshaw thought as he led the other ten men toward the spot where they had last seen Frank Morgan the day before. It wasn’t much of a starting place, but it was all they had.

  “If Morgan don’t show up back in Eureka with the Terror by three o’clock this afternoon, Chamberlain’s bounty is back on,” Radburn said as he rode alongside Grimshaw. “Only it doubles to twenty thousand. I heard some fellas talkin’ about it.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “If that happens, we’ll have a hundred men out here pokin’ through the woods, lookin’ for that monster so they can collect. We won’t be able to do anything without somebody noticin’, Jack.”

  Grimshaw nodded. “I reckon in that case, Bosworth will want us to lay low for a while.”

  “What about Morgan? He’ll still be huntin’ for the Terror, too.”

  “Hell, I don’t know!” Grimshaw exploded, taking Radburn by surprise. The whole thing had been simple starting out. Bosworth wanted what Chamberlain had, and he was willing to pay tough men, men good with their guns, to take what he wanted. To force Chamberlain out. Then Bosworth had gotten cold feet for a while, because of what had happened early on, and now that he’d finally decided it was time to start moving against Chamberlain again, Frank Morgan had to come along and foul everything up.

  It sure wasn’t like the old days, when you loaded up your guns and went out to fight, and the ones who lived took what they wanted and everybody else could go to hell. Grimshaw missed those days.

  The way he understood it, Chamberlain had some big house in the woods, guarded by gunmen he had hired. If Grimshaw had been running things, he would have taken his men and gone there and shot it out, maybe burned the place to the ground. If Chamberlain survived, he would know better than to stay around here. He’d turn tail and run, and then Bosworth could move in and take over. Simple. No deception, no making things look like something they weren’t.

  But those days were gone now, Grimshaw reflected with a sigh as he ignored the hurt look Radburn gave him. Businessmen like Bosworth didn’t really care whether or not they broke the law, but they wanted everything to look like they were upstanding, law-abiding citizens. They didn’t want any evidence connecting them to the men they hired to do the dirty work for them. That was why he had to meet with Bosworth in secret, why the rest of the bunch had to get together in the back room of the Bull o’ the Woods. You could lie, cheat, steal, even kill, but you couldn’t let anybody see you doing it.

  “Who put a burr under your saddle, Jack?” Radburn asked.

  “Nobody,” Grimshaw replied. “Just modern times, that’s all.”

  “Oh.” Clearly, Radburn didn’t understand. He wasn’t going to press the issue, though.

  After a few minutes, an idea came to Grimshaw. He didn’t like it, but it made sense and it might help them find Morgan. Frank was looking for the Terror after all, and sooner or later he was bound to come across the place where the whole business started. Grimshaw intended to leave some of the men there to set up an ambush while the rest of them continued searching for Morgan.

  “Where are we goin’ now?” Hooley asked as Grimshaw turned his horse back toward the east. “I thought we were headed over to the coast where we had that dustup yesterday.”

  “I changed my mind,” Grimshaw said. He didn’t feel like explaining himself to anyone, least of all Hooley.

  “Fine. No need to bite my head off.”

  “Yeah,” one of the other men said to Hooley, “the Terror will do that, one of these days.”

  “Like hell. I’m gonna blow that damn monster full o’ holes.”

  “Bosworth wants him alive for the time being,” Grimshaw said.

  “Well, once that twenty-grand bounty goes into effect, Bosworth ain’t gonna have much say in the matter, now is he?”

  Grimshaw didn’t reply, but he had to admit to himself that Hooley was right. After today, everything would be different, and there wouldn’t be anything Bosworth could do to change that.

  A short time later, they came to the long, narrow clearing next to the bluff where trees had toppled off to form a crazy jumble of logs at the bottom. Grimshaw was the only one who had been here before.

  “What’s this place?” Radburn asked. “Is that a cabin over there at the base of the bluff?”

  “Yeah,” Grimshaw said. “A fella used to live there, but it’s empty now.”

  “What are we doin’ here?”

  “I think maybe the Terror comes here sometimes. If Morgan gets on the thing’s trail, then he may show up here, too.” They rode up to the cabin and reined to a halt. Grimshaw went on. “Hooley, you and Darrell and Whiteside are gonna stay here. Find some place to hide your horses, then hole up inside that cabin in case Morgan comes along. If he does, he won’t be expectin’ anybody to be in there. You can ambush him and be done with it. Just be sure you kill him.”

  Hooley frowned as he looked at the cabin’s empty doorway. “I dunno,” he said. “Looks sort o’ snaky in there to me.”

  “There aren’t any snakes, and even if there are, you can shoot ’em.”

  “What about the rest of you?”

  “We’re gonna keep on lookin’ for Morgan,” Grimshaw explained. He was starting to lose his patience.

  “What if the Terror comes along?” Whiteside asked. “Do we kill it?”

  “No, blast it, I told you Bosworth wants the damn thing alive for now, so it can take the blame for things like us wipin’ out that camp of Chamberlain’s yesterday. It’s Morgan he wants dead. That’s how we’re gonna proceed until Mr. Emmett Bosworth his own self gives us different orders.” Grimshaw jerked a thumb toward the cabin. “Now get in there.”

  “All right, all right,” Hooley muttered. He swung down from his mount and drew his rifle from its saddle boot. “I’ll check the place out while Whiteside and Darrell hide the horses.”

  Grimshaw nodded. He didn’t care how they went about it, just as long as they went ahead and got hidden in there so they could bushwhack Frank Morgan if he came along.

  Hooley gave his reins to Darrell, then stalked into the cabin, pausing at the door to look around for a second first. He went out of si
ght, then a second later exclaimed, “What the hell!”

  Grimshaw stiffened in the saddle. “Hooley!” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  A woman’s scream came from inside the cabin. The men outside drew their guns. They didn’t have anything to worry about, though, because Hooley reappeared in the doorway a moment later, one arm looped around the neck of a pretty blond woman about twenty years old. She was well dressed and looked scared out of her wits.

  “Look what I found!” Hooley crowed with a lecherous grin. “You didn’t tell me this ol’ cabin was furnished with its own pretty little gal, Grimshaw.”

  “Son of a…” Grimshaw breathed. He recognized the young woman. He had seen her in Eureka the day before in Rutherford Chamberlain’s carriage. She was Chamberlain’s daughter.

  And if she’d been hiding in that cabin for some reason, then she was bound to have heard them talking about how they worked for Emmett Bosworth—and how Bosworth wanted Frank Morgan dead.

  As if things hadn’t been complicated enough already, Grimshaw thought bitterly.

  Now he was going to have to kill a woman, too.

  Chapter 25

  Frank followed the sound of axes for several minutes until he came to a clearing where several trees had already been felled. Four men were working on another of the giant redwoods. Frank recognized them as the crew he had met a couple of days earlier, when he first became aware of the Terror. Karl Wilcox was their leader, Frank recalled, and the other three men were named Neville, Peterson, and Trotter.

  The loggers heard the hoofbeats and stopped what they were doing, turning toward the road to see who was coming. Each man wore a revolver, Frank noted, and he saw several rifles and shotguns lying nearby on the big stumps. The air of tension about the men eased slightly as they recognized him.

  “Mr. Morgan,” Wilcox said. “Lots of talk about you in town this morning, since you didn’t come back last night. Folks were wonderin’ if you’d run into the Terror.”