One good turn
Date: 2024-05-13T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short stories; California -- Fiction; Fugitives from justice -- Fiction; British Columbia -- Fiction

The Project Gutenberg eBook of One good turn

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Title: One good turn

Author: Bertrand W. Sinclair

Release date: May 13, 2024 [eBook #73619]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Street & Smith Corporation, 1920

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/73619

Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE GOOD TURN ***

One Good Turn

By Bertrand W. Sinclair

Author of “A Jack and Two Jills,” “Ten Thousand Bucks,” Etc.

Many a tragedy is concealed by the seemingly unpopulated woods of our great Northwest. This tale of Sinclair’s pictures the result of one, and the strange consequences, developing in later years in a way to confound more than one actor in the drama.

Goodrich propped himself up on one elbow. Among the thickets below there sounded the muffled clumping of an animal’s feet, the faint intermittent crack of dry twigs trodden upon. Goodrich rose from the blankets upon which he had lain down to gaze at stars peeping through the lofty tops of the sugar pine. He expected his hunting partner, and that partner would be hungry—almost as hungry for food as he, Bill Goodrich, was for the tobacco his partner was bringing. While he poked up the dying fire, laid on fresh wood, and hung a kettle of water to boil for coffee, the sounds of approach drew nearer.

But when the man and loaded burro should have passed from the thicket on the slope into the open grass under the big pines, the faint sounds ceased altogether, and they did not appear. For five minutes Goodrich watched and listened impatiently. Then as he began to think his ears might have deceived him, a man, leading a burro, came slowly into the circle of firelight. Goodrich stifled a grunt of disappointment. The wayfarer was not his expected partner.

Goodrich, however, was an outdoor man, habituated to camps and the easy hospitality of lonely places.

“Hello,” he greeted, “I thought you were another fellow when I heard you coming, and I’ve got the kettle on. But you’re just as welcome, especially if you happen to have any tobacco that isn’t working.”

The man was a young fellow about Goodrich’s age. He carried a carbine in his hand. A stout gray burro, heavily packed, trailed at his heels.

“I’ve got some pipe tobacco,” he replied.

“Like manna from heaven, that sounds,” Goodrich returned. “I haven’t had a smoke all day. My partner hiked out to the stage road yesterday to try and rustle some tobacco and grub. Well, the coffee will boil in a minute. Stake your mule over there by mine. There’s good feed.”

The stranger passed Goodrich a sack of tobacco. He undid his pack lashings and laid off the load and saw-buck saddle, watered his beast at the small, cold spring which bubbled from under the roots of the pine by which Goodrich had his camp, and picketed him among tall grass and pea vine. When he came back Goodrich had the breast of a grouse frying. The stranger produced bread from his pack. They ate and smoked, talking a little.

“Going to hunt up here in the pines?” Goodrich asked at length.

“I’m hunting—a job,” the other said. “Heading for a logging camp at the mouth of Slate Creek. Short cut across the divide.”

Goodrich turned into his blankets. He wanted to be out in the morning before sunrise sent the deer back to inaccessible thickets. The stranger gathered ferns and grass for a mattress and likewise spread his blankets. In a matter of minutes both men were asleep.

Until an hour before dawn Goodrich slept soundly. Then he sat up, rubbed his eyes, and reached for his boots. Even in California four thousand feet in the air brings a chill before dawn, any month in the year. Goodrich had a brown shooting coat at the head of his bed. When he pawed around in the dark he could not find it, only a woolen something where his coat should have been. Impatiently he struck a match. His coat was gone. A red sweater lay in its place.

He held the match above his head. In the still air it burned steadily, showing him a vacant pile of ferns and grass where the other man had made his bed.

“Huh,” Goodrich grunted. He sat on his haunches a second, thinking, listening, until the match burned to a charred stub. Then he lit his fire. In the halo that cast he began to look about him, to take stock.

Goodrich had a black burro picketed in the grass. He had a .25-.35 Winchester standing against a tree. He had laid a tattered old gray felt hat near the brown shooting coat when he went to bed.

All these things were gone. But he had not been robbed. Far from it. In the place of his black mule, an indifferent sort of beast, he had a stout young gray burro. In lieu of his old .25-.35 a nearly new .30-.30 carbine leaned against the tree, a well-filled cartridge belt beside—and hooked by the string to the lever hung a sack of tobacco and a book of brown papers. In the hat exchange he had come by a new black Stetson.

“They say a fair exchange is no robbery,” Goodrich muttered. “I’m all to the good on the trade, but I’ll be hanged if I sabe why. I wonder what’s the idea?”

He got an insight upon the idea at noon. He did not sit about his camp puzzling about what had happened in the night, but took the .30-.30 and pursued his business along a ridge to the west. But luck was against him as it had been for a week. He failed to catch the wise old buck deer in the open, and he failed also to get a shot at any of those he stirred up in the heavy brush. So he trudged into his camp under the tall, solemn pines about twelve o’clock.

And as he sat whittling shavings to start a fire two men stepped out from behind separate trees with rifles trained on him and ordered him to put up his hands. Goodrich promptly obeyed. One possessed himself of Goodrich’s rifle, felt the prisoner carefully for concealed weapons, stepped back, and remarked to his companion.

“’S him, all right.”

“I don’t get you,” Goodrich snapped.

“Well, we’ve got you, Baker,” the man with the rifle drawled. “No use making the innocent-stranger play.”

“Baker, eh?” Goodrich remarked. “Are you officers?”

“You’ve guessed it, first shot,” one answered sarcastically.

Goodrich dropped his hands.

“I’m tired pawing the sky,” he said bluntly. “You got the wrong man. My name’s not Baker. It’s Bill Goodrich. I’m from Monterey. I’ve been up here camping for two months, nursing a bad lung. I’ve been hunting deer off and on for two weeks with an old fellow called Sam Hayes.”

The man, with the rifle still pointed unwaveringly at Goodrich’s middle, smiled.

“About five foot ten,” said he. “Fair. Grayish eyes. Pretty husky about the shoulders. Twenty-five or so. Thirty-thirty Winchester carbine. Black Stetson hat, nearly new. Red sweater. Brown laced boots. Gray mule. Hell, Baker, what’s the use of stalling? It won’t get you anything. Anyway, you’re under arrest. Don’t make any breaks because we don’t aim to lose you. This ain’t no joke, Baker. Your man died in the hospital two hours after you lit out.”

Goodrich saw it in a flash while the man was speaking, understood that swapping of goods in the night. This man Baker knew he was being trailed, pressed close. Goodrich opened his mouth to recount the experience, to put the officers on the right trail. But he refrained. He could see they were quite sure he was their man. They would only laugh at his story. They would take him out to the county seat—and dozens of men could identify him there. And somehow or other the man hadn’t struck him as a criminal. Goodrich felt like giving him a chance. He decided to stand pat. The officers wouldn’t believe him, anyway.

“It’ll be a joke on you,” he said pleasantly. He had settled himself to say nothing of how he came by the things which identified him. “There’s no law against a man having a .30-.30, a black hat, and a gray mule. I guess you’d find half a dozen men in the Monterey Forest Reserve heeled like that. I tell you I’m not this guy Baker. I’m Bill Goodrich. You take me out to Monterey and you’ll see.”

“No chance for an argument,” one officer said shortly. “We’ll have a bite to eat and get on.”

They took the precaution of shackling his wrists while they cooked. Goodrich burned with resentment at the handcuffing. Then they gathered up his stuff, packed it on the gray burro, brought two saddle horses out of concealment in the brush, and set off down the mountain trail.

They rode. Goodrich had to walk. He had hunted hard that forenoon, and he was tired. With his ironed wrists it was difficult for him to walk with ease. He could not keep the flicking branches from lashing him across the face. The cocksureness of the men grated on him. A most ungodly anger grew in his breast. Curiously it was not directed toward Baker, who had bestowed upon him the goods and chattels directly responsible for this error in identity, but against the two deputy sheriffs. They were pluming themselves on his capture, and they were callously indifferent to the misery they were inflicting upon him. They refused to free his hands so that he could travel more easily, even though he promised not to attempt escape.

Ten miles out from the big pines, two thousand feet lower down, the trail forked. Goodrich stopped.

“Look here,” he said angrily. “I’ve told you straight I’m not this guy Baker. There are a hundred people in Monterey who can identify me. You aren’t going to drag me all the way to Salinas, are you?”

“Surest thing you know,” they jeered. “You suppose we don’t know you got two brothers and a swarm of friends between here and Monterey? No foolin’ now. You hike right along.”

“I’ll be damned if I do,” Goodrich said sullenly. “I’ve walked as far as I’m going to.”

The upshot of this was that one officer finally dismounted and grudgingly permitted Goodrich to ride. But they took the Salinas road. And at the stage station, in late afternoon, Goodrich, with sweat-grimed face and handcuffs on his wrists, was an object of rural curiosity while the officers hired a motor car. By that means they covered the intervening thirty miles of road and landed Bill Goodrich in a stuffy cell at the county jail just as dusk was falling.

Next day, by dint of protest and demand, he got in touch with a lawyer. The following day he was freed, after a brief grinding of the ponderous wheels of the law. There were men to bespeak him as Bill Goodrich, and other men to prove that he was not the much-wanted Baker—who had shot and killed a rancher in the Salinas valley.

Bill Goodrich learned that even in Salinas there were people who believed Baker had ample justification for the shooting. Personally, after his experience with those two deputies and the county jail, Bill Goodrich spitefully hoped that Baker got away. He kept a close mouth on how he came by the gray mule and the black hat. He sneered at officers who questioned him. And he left Salinas as soon as he could.

Goodrich was a rolling stone. That incident left a very bad taste in his mouth. He would wake up sometimes out of a dream in which he was back in that foul-smelling jail. It managed to spoil that section of California for him. He was about through there, anyway. A touch of tuberculosis had sent him to the Monterey Forest Reserve under a doctor’s advice to get high in the mountains, to sleep outside, to eat plain nourishing food, and take plenty of open-air exercise. Thus he had achieved health. He went back to the same doctor and had his lungs examined. And when the medical man pronounced him sound, with a warning to repeat the same course of treatment if the symptoms recurred in future, Bill Goodrich began to roll again. In time he rolled himself clean out of the United States into the British dominions to the north—specifically, into the coastal region of British Columbia.

Here Bill Goodrich tarried a while, long enough to take root in a certain locality. He worked in logging camps, made a hand on cannery tenders, prospected a little, trapped, fished salmon, tried his hand at various things, using a cabin and a plot of cleared land on Cortez Island as a pivotal point for his ventures. He liked the country. It was covered with noble forests, in which game abounded. Bill Goodrich was a lineal descendant of men who had crowded frontiers off the map, men handy with either a rifle or a plow. Bill was at home in wild places. He was never satisfied without elbowroom. B. C. looked good to him, its woods and clear streams and enormous mountains. When he accumulated a few hundred dollars he filed on a hundred and sixty acres of government land. He began the stupendous battle with the stumps around his cabin.

When five years had passed over his head since the autumn night he spent in the Salinas jail, instead of being on the highroad to a pioneer’s modest fortune Bill Goodrich had to acknowledge two rather significant items on the debit side of his ledger. One was a recurrence of his old lung trouble, a touch—just a touch—of tuberculosis.

“Get off the coast. Get away from this damp air. Go as high as you can get in the mountains, preferably where it’s warm. Do that and you’ll soon shake it off. The bugs can’t stand dry air and sunshine.” Thus a doctor.

The other item was a man in the neighborhood, a bullying individual who didn’t like Bill Goodrich. Ever since he took possession of this government land Goodrich had recognized this dislike as a menace.

And on a mild September afternoon, at a steamer landing on the east side of Cortez, Bill Goodrich killed this man—shot him neatly between the chin and collar bone in the presence of twenty people. Goodrich hadn’t wanted to kill this man. He had hoped to avoid a clash with him, especially when he learned that he must leave Cortez and seek the high mainland ranges if he wanted to beat the white plague. But the man was a natural trouble hunter. He had been making Goodrich’s life miserable for six months. He died with his boots on and a gun in his hand because he had made the very common error of mistaking quietness for timidity, self-control for fear, and so had put himself and Bill Goodrich in a position where one of them had to go under.

Nevertheless, even justifiable homicide brings a man foul of the law. Bill Goodrich knew himself to be justified. He was not sorry. The thing had been forced on him.

But—the other man cut quite a figure in the logging business. There was money behind him. There were others willing enough to carry on his feud, to get Bill Goodrich legally since a personal clash had failed to eliminate him. There was an economic motive functioning behind the purely personal one.

It seemed to Bill Goodrich that the hills offered a more desirable sanctuary than the courts. He might come off clear in court—in the hills, those rugged hills up-thrusting into blue sky, his life and liberty depended solely upon his own unaided effort, his skill, his fortitude, his own individual quickness of hand and brain.

So he left an awed group staring at the dead man sprawled limp in the mellow sunshine and trudged back to his own cabin, some two miles distant. No one stayed him. He knew no man who had witnessed the affair would meddle with him. But he knew also that a telephone line ran from the scene of the shooting to Campbell River, whence shortly a provincial constable in a government launch would set out to arrest him. And Bill Goodrich had no mind to suffer arrest. He had a distrust of courts, a horror of jails—which last dated back to his Salinas experience. That had remained a vivid picture in his mind those five years. He could so easily visualize that cramped, foul-smelling steel cage, the drab walls. The memory filled him with a sense of living burial, which he swore he would never undergo. Right or wrong he was for freedom, the open sky, the friendly silence of the woods. A man, he said to himself, might as well be dead as in jail—better, if the tubercle bacilli had gotten a tiny foothold in one of his lungs.

So he put a reasonable quantity of staple foods, a small silk tent, two blankets, his warmest and stoutest clothing and boots, his rifle and cartridges, some fishing gear and a good ax in a Peterboro canoe. He waited till dark—chancing the arrival of an officer meantime—that no watchful eye might note the direction of his flight.

He paddled then in the dusk across the head of Lewis Channel, passed between the Redondas and the mouth of Malaspina Inlet. At the lower end of a nameless islet standing in the mouth of Desolation Sound he picked up the thrum of a motor. But this gave him no uneasiness. It came from far up channel, not from the westward whither the police launch must come. He bore in for the shadow of the islet, however, as matter of precaution. He did not want to be seen, even casually.

But while he was still a cable short of the nearest point, a finger of light, dazzling white, split the darkness and made a round, brilliant spot on the shore. It swept slowly over weedy bowlders and beached driftwood, and came wavering out across the water until it rested upon him.

The beam held him in its white circle like an actor in the spotlight. To the eyes behind that searching shaft he knew he and every detail of his equipment must stand out bold as a single black letter on a sheet of white newsprint. Then the light flicked out. The launch passed him almost within hailing distance. By her dim outline and her cabin lights Goodrich recognized her as a provincial forestry boat, driving down out of Desolation Sound. Her crew knew him. They would hear of the killing. They would talk.

Goodrich considered, watching the stern light of the cruiser grow dim across the water. He had started with a well-defined plan. It called for many hundred miles of travel in the highest, roughest part of the roughest mountain chain in North America. It meant hardship indescribable. But it meant ultimately that he would gain reasonable immunity from the consequences of his act— and also give him an even chance to destroy the tubercle bacilli which had once more gained foothold in his lung tissue. He did not want to change this plan. He could think of none better, none so good.

He paddled across to the mainland shore. Up the long sweep of Homfray Channel he traveled under cover of the dark, lying up on bold, cliffy points during the day, with his canoe hidden in thickets of salal. Finally he passed into the narrow reach of Toba Inlet, a thirty-mile stretch lined by cliffs that lifted a thousand feet sheer from salt water, by thick-forested slopes, by mountains that were but a setting for glaciers which gleamed ghostly in the moonlight. He was an infinitesimal speck creeping along a sullen shore, a little awed by the heights above and the gloom below.

Goodrich was very glad when he passed over the bar into Toba River at the Inlet’s head, stole by an Indian village, and made his solitary camp five miles upstream. For he was now beyond the last settler’s clearing, fairly into the wilderness. He need no longer move furtively in the dark. He could bare his face to the sun, travel openly and unafraid. Pursuit could come from only one direction; from behind. It must come as he himself had come, by paddle and pike pole.

Three days up Toba Valley, Bill Goodrich was forced to admit that they must have guessed right and followed fast—also that some one must have seen him. Perhaps a Siwash had watched him from cover on the bank on the lower stretches of the Toba, and talked when the officers came seeking.

Goodrich had followed around a great sweeping bend in the river, a twelve-mile loop that brought him after six hours’ labor at the pike pole back within twenty minutes walk of where he had cooked his breakfast. A narrow neck of land separated the two channels. Goodrich had heard of the “Big Bend.” When he found himself above it, something of the same instinct that wakes a deer double on its track, sent him across the neck. He had been told long ago that there was a portage across this neck. It might be as well to know about this portage. And he had a sudden craving to look back downriver.

He found the portage with a little difficulty, a level trail blazed through heavy cedar—a trail craftily blind at both ends. He found something else, less to his liking. Peering from a screen of brush on the downstream side of the neck he saw a Siwash dugout coming up a long, straight stretch. Two men stood in it, thrusting stoutly on pike poles. A third walked the gravel bars along shore.

Goodrich watched till they came up. They beached the canoe within forty yards of him. Two men were white. One was an Indian, a stout, wooden-faced Siwash.

“Po’tage da’,” the Siwash indicated.

The two men gazed at the heavy stand of cedar on the valley floor, the mat of undergrowth that ran to the river bank, fern and blackberry vines, thorny devil’s club, all the foot-tripping and skin-raking tangle that clothes the floor of B. C. forests. They did not regard the prospect with pleasure.

“How far across?”

“Maybeso half mile,” the Siwash answered. He stood staring indifferently.

“Pack the infernal dugout and our junk through half a mile of that jungle? Well, I guess not,” one said. “Me for the river. Chances are we’d lose time on a carry in that brush.”

“Let’s take a look from the top of the bank,” the other man suggested.

They climbed up. A six-foot cedar trunk and a clump of elderberry separated them from Bill Goodrich when they stopped. He imagined they must be able to hear his heart beating. He crouched on his haunches, scarcely breathing, his fingers hooked in the lever of his gun. The men stood talking.

“Looks worse. Supposed to be a trail, but that damn Siwash don’t act like he wanted to show us much. Personally, I’d rather pole ten miles of open river than pack five hundred yards through this brush.”

The man’s companion agreed.

“There’s the chance that we might miss Goodrich on the bend,” he continued. “He can’t be so far ahead now. We have to go careful—keep a good lookout.”

The first man stuffed his pipe full of tobacco and lit it.

“I wish I knew just how close we are on him,” he said. “I don’t suppose he’ll shoot on sight. Still, he’ll probably be pretty shy. And he might be quick on the trigger, too. I can’t say I’m stuck on this little job. If the darned fool’d had sense enough to give himself up after the shooting he’d come clear, with a good lawyer, from all accounts.”

“If we can overhaul him and manage to make camp with him,” the other said, “we can casually let out that we’re cruising timber for Mayer & Runge. I’ve got those blue-print maps to stall around with. He don’t know either of us. Get him off his guard once, and it’ll be easy. I’d take a chance on making the arrest sooner than work my passage through this brush with a load.”

“I wonder how far he’ll go,” the first man said.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care.” A boastful note crept into the other’s voice. “If he goes to hell I’ll still be on his trail. I ain’t started after a man in six years that I didn’t get him.”

They took another look at the thicket on the neck and went back to the canoe. One got in. He and the Siwash leaned on the poles again, pushing the long, narrow craft up over a swift shoal. The other shouldered his rifle and walked along the bank.

When they had gone a hundred yards or so, with the ripple and croon of the stream to drown any small sound his feet might make, Bill Goodrich rose from his hiding place and hurried back across the narrow neck. He had six hours start. They could scarcely pole around the bend in less time.

Goodrich slid the red canoe afloat. He looked back whence he had come over the portage, down the river where the law personified in two men with rifles bore up after him.

“Well, here’s one you won’t get,” he muttered defiantly.

He did not stop when dark fell. Even on the darkest night the sheen of running water makes a path which can be followed. Late in the night a crescent moon sailed up from behind a mountain, and made his way easier. He pushed on till daybreak, rested two hours, and went on. All that day, though his arms and legs ached, and blisters grew on his fingers from surging on the pole, he bore up a stream which steadily grew swifter and shallower.

But he had taken a lead which he meant to keep. He felt reasonably safe from surprise. If he could hold that gait they would never come up on him. And in another day or two he would be near the divide. At the first natural barrier he meant to cache the red canoe and on the ridges he would shake pursuit cleanly from his trail. Without dogs no man could follow him among the high places of the coast range.

So, thinking only of the men following him upstream, reckoning nothing of a possible danger from ahead, Goodrich turned a sharp bend in the river late that evening and blundered squarely upon a camp on the water’s edge. A dugout was drawn up on the gravel. A fire was burning, and a man beside the fire hailed him pleasantly. Goodrich knew he could not go on, he could not withdraw without arousing suspicion. He was very tired. The man couldn’t possibly know he was a fugitive. And the officers were too far behind to matter for that night at least. He returned the man’s hail, and beached his canoe beside the other.

For twenty-four hours he had kept going with only brief intervals to rest and cook food. He had traveled the last six hours on his nerve alone. His body was a worn-out shell. When he sat down beside the fire and took off his boots and hung his wet socks on a limb to dry, he grew drowsy at once. Every fiber of his body was slackening, crying aloud for rest. The strain of long-continued exertion had started an intermittent cough.

The man had a pot of tea brewed. There was fried venison and potatoes in a pan, bread—the staples of woods travel.

“Dig in,” he invited. “I just ate. No use you bothering about grub outa your own pack.”

“Thanks,” Goodrich accepted. “I feel sort of all in, all at once. Tough going.”

The other man talked a little. Goodrich learned that he was a trapper, going into a region he had trapped before. Goodrich knew that he ought to account for his own presence. No man bore so far up those lonely valleys without definite object. But he was too tired to care. And the man asked no questions, betrayed no curiosity whatever.

“I had an idea nobody trapped this far up,” Goodrich said at length, feeling that he must say something. “I figured on looking over the ground myself.”

The other grinned.

“There’s oceans of room,” he replied. “I kinda wish some good, square guy would run a line up here. It gets pretty lonesome before spring. I stick it out because it pays, not because I like the hermit life so well.”

Goodrich coughed behind his hand. He didn’t want to talk. He rose stiffly, sore in every muscle. It was pitch-dark now.

“I’m going to turn in,” he said briefly.

He gathered stuff for his bed, spread his blankets, laid the silk tent over these to fend off the dew. His eyes closed in sleep while the other man still sat humped beside the heap of glowing coals in an attitude of profound reflection. There was nothing uncommon about that. It is a woodsman’s habit.

Well toward morning Goodrich awoke, alert, refreshed, very much alive to his situation. He hadn’t reckoned on running into anybody. He had not meant to be seen by a soul in the valley of the Toba. But he had grown tired and less watchful and so blundered into this man’s camp. He lay now thinking upon his next move. The constables would come up with this man. They would learn positively that Goodrich was bearing upstream, so many hours ahead of them. They would hunt him as they would hunt any predatory animal. If there had been a doubt of his presence on Toba headwaters this hunt might soon have grown perfunctory. But coming upon this trapper they would know.

He couldn’t turn back now. He could, of course, lie up in the brush, and when the officers passed double back downstream. But he was aware of an increasing double risk in returning to the coast. He would have to dodge furtively to avoid recognition. And another sea level winter would kill him as surely as a jail. High in the hills, among dry snows, breathing dry sun-washed air, that sore spot in his lung would heal. He could win health and keep his freedom on the summit of the coast range.

A picture leaped up before his eyes with such vividness as to make him catch his breath. A gray mule, a black Stetson, and a .30-.30! He paralleled that with a red canoe, a 303 Savage, a black and green Mackinaw coat. On the beach lay a black Siwash dugout of cedar. The other man’s rifle stood within reaching distance. The man’s clothing lay beside his bed. The man himself slept soundly.

Bill Goodrich lay debating with himself. It seemed a rotten thing to do. Yet the man would suffer nothing beyond inconvenience. The officers would take him out. By the time he had established his identity Goodrich would be far in the depths of those grim mountains, his trail lost for good. With a week’s grace a hundred men could not locate him in that wild jumble of peaks and cañons.

Goodrich decided. He rose softly, took first of all the two rifles so that if the man did wake he would be safely disarmed. Then Bill packed his bedding. Moving stealthily he transferred his stuff to the dugout. Last of all, he crept furtively near the bed to exchange clothing. He brought with him his own rifle to set against the tree.

As he came near the foot of the bed he became aware of the man’s eyes, wide open, alert, fixed on him.

“What’s the idea?” the man asked casually.

“I’m pulling out,” Goodrich answered.

“With all my stuff? I guess not,” the other’s voice sharpened. “Don’t move. I got you covered with a .45.”

He sat up, baring the blue-barreled Colt. With his left hand he fumbled about and struck a match and took a steady look at Bill Goodrich.

“I don’t aim to rob you,” Goodrich said quietly, at last. “All I want is your canoe and rifle and your Mackinaw. I’m leaving you my own things. They’re better than yours. That ain’t robbery.”

The man struck another match. His eyes narrowed in scrutiny. He smiled suddenly, broadly, at last.

“Lay down the rifle,” he ordered.

Goodrich obeyed. The man let his revolver rest on the blankets. The match in his fingers burned out. The pale gleam of the moon through a tangle of boughs showed them dimly to each other.

“Let’s get down to cases,” he said. “What kind of jack pot have you got into?”

“I killed a man on Cortez Island a few days back,” Goodrich answered quietly. “There’s two officers about twelve hours behind me on the river. I figure I was justified. I don’t intend to be taken. I’ve got a bad lung—a touch of T. B. A month or two in jail would probably set me back so I’d never shake it off—even if I come clear on trial. I don’t like jails nohow. Life’s too short for me to lay in one. That’s all.”

“H’m,” the man grunted. “So you were going to swap outfits with me. I was to be the fall guy for these constables, eh? They’d grab me and turn back? Was that it?”

“Something like that,” Goodrich admitted.

“That’s a mean hole to put a man in,” the other commented. “What give you the idea?”

“A fellow did it to me once down in California,” Goodrich answered dispassionately. “It didn’t hurt me much, though I was pretty sore at the time. Spoiled a hunt in the Monterey hills was about all. These fellows don’t know me by sight. While they were taking you out and you were getting identified, I’d make my get-away clean.”

“Suppose I take you in myself,” the man observed suggestively. “According to your own account you’ve killed a man. You were going to put me in a nasty position. I might have got gay with these constables not knowing what I was up against, and got shot all to pieces myself. I don’t know but I ought to take you in myself.”

“You won’t,” Goodrich answered soberly. He meant this. There was no doubt in his mind; only a grim determination. “There’s times in a man’s life when he has to do something desperate. I didn’t shoot this fellow because I wanted to. I had to. I don’t propose to be penalized for it. No, you nor nobody else will take me in. At least, not alive.”

The man laughed softly.

“No,” he said, “I have no idea of even trying to take you in, either dead or alive. Look here, I’ll take a sporting chance on you. Go ahead. Take any part of my outfit you need. Leave me yours. I’ll go through with the play. You’ll get a week’s start. I don’t know as it’ll do me any harm. I kinda like the notion of helping a man out of a jack pot.”

“You mean it?” Goodrich asked, dumfounded at this turn.

“Sure, I mean it!”

Goodrich could see the man grinning as if the idea tickled his fancy. He dropped the six-shooter and began to roll a cigarette. Goodrich sighed relief.

“Well, I don’t know why you should,” Bill said. “But it’s darned white of you. I guess I’ll take you at your word and drift before you change your mind.”

There wasn’t much more to do. The man flung Bill Goodrich a cartridge belt to go with his rifle. Goodrich took the other’s gray Mackinaw.

When he had finished these simple preparations the man had got on his boots. He walked down to the canoe with Bill.

“Look here,” he said. “About twenty miles above here you’ll strike the head of canoe navigation—a sixty-foot falls. Three hundred yards above that a creek makes in from the nor’west. You go up that creek a half mile and you come to a big slide. Climb the hill to the east, and in the timber on the first bench you’ll strike a blazed line. Follow that till it runs out. That’ll be a matter of fifteen miles. When you pass the last blaze you’ll come out on an open fern sidehill. On the opposite side of the creek you’ll spot another big slide. You cross the creek, go up on the north side of the slide till you strike a narrow bench about five hundred feet above the stream. When you get on the bench face north and you’ll see a big bald mountain away off. There’s two sharp knobs on this mountain and a glacier between. Head straight halfway between the two knobs and keep going along the bench. You’ll come on a cabin inside of half a mile if you hold a straight line. There’s plenty of grub there. Nobody but me knows that cabin’s there. I got another one farther up the divide. The air’s like old port wine up there of a winter morning. Be good for that bad lung of yours.”

He hesitated a moment.

“You can stay at the first cabin till I come,” he said. “Unless you got a better plan; unless you aim to hit the long trail by your lonesome. They ain’t a ghost of a chance anybody will come in there after the first snowfall.”

“I’ll be there,” Goodrich said unhesitatingly.

“All right,” the man nodded. “Can you remember what I told you about the way?”

“I got a picture of it in my mind,” Goodrich declared.

“If you’re a woodsman you’ll find it, I guess,” the other said. “It’s going to be daylight soon. Better beat it. Good luck.”

He thrust out his hand. The hearty pressure of his grip conveyed to Bill Goodrich a great deal more than words could have done. Goodrich was almost gay as he drove the cedar dugout up the narrowing river, and the rising sun flooded the closing valley with warmth and light. He didn’t quite fathom the man’s readiness to shoulder a dubious load. But it showed that his heart was in the right place, Bill Goodrich said to himself. He was a little puzzled, too, by the quickness with which the man had grasped the situation. But it was a generous impulse for which Goodrich was deeply grateful.

He reached the big falls in time, hauled the dugout far into a deep thicket. Then he took a pack and bore on till he found the smaller creek and ultimately the blazed line. He had some difficulty locating the cabin, even though each mark stood in his mind’s eye like a beacon. But he found it eventually. And when he stood under its roof and slipped the pack from his shoulders it was like getting home.

The law would never come at him there. He was high in one of the ruggedest sections of the coast range. He could win back his health, grow a beard and mustache. When he went out among men again, with time to dim their recollection, no one would know him. A man could live in the hills a long time, if he were at home there.

He recalled Simon Gun-a-noot. Simon had been accused of killing a man. And Simon was a Northern Indian who feared the white man’s legal processes. So Simon had taken to the mountains and stayed there. For thirteen years the constable had hunted Simon Gun-a-noot. The chase cost the province thirty thousand dollars. And Simon had hunted and trapped in the highest and loneliest ranges until he learned that he was sure of acquittal if he gave himself up. The case of Simon Gun-a-noot comforted Bill Goodrich. He, himself, did not mean to be caught. He was no criminal. He felt no prickings of conscience. What he had done he had to do. There had been no way out of that clash save the way he had taken.

The cabin was roomy, built of heavy logs, roofed with split cedar shakes, tight, dry, and warm, with a rough fireplace at one end in lieu of a stove. The door was heavy, hand-hewed planks, oddly fitted with a heavy bar to be set in place from within. It stood on a narrow bench with a small spring bubbling out of a cliff that rose sheer behind. The front view commanded every possible approach. And it was very hard to find. To Bill Goodrich it seemed made to order for security. One man could hold that place against a dozen, if occasion arose.

So after he had made another trip down to the falls in Toba River and packed in the last of the supplies, he spent his days pleasantly learning the lay of the country for miles around. He shot a deer for meat. He watched bear feeding on the slides. The creek below was full of small trout. There was abundance of small fur sign. Goodrich was not lonely, but as the days passed he began to grow anxious for a sight of the man who had made this oasis of peace accessible to him.

He stood in the doorway of the cabin one evening at sunset. In the hush that shrouded those rugged solitudes a stick cracked sharply on the slope that rose steeply from the creek. Goodrich listened intently. At rare intervals he caught faintly the sound of something moving up toward the bench. He stepped back within the shadow of the door to watch, his rifle handy. Presently a head, and then a pair of shoulders, burdened by a pack sack, lifted to view. It was his man. He came up to the door, looked in.

“Hello, old-timer,” he greeted Goodrich. “I see you made it all right.”

He backed up to the table and Bill helped him slide out of the pack straps. They shook hands. The man wiped his sweaty face.

“I see you got some meat hung up,” he remarked. “Say, I could chew the leg off a deer raw, right now.”

“Sit down. I’ll get you some supper,” Goodrich directed.

When he had two big venison steaks sizzling over the fire, and a pot of water slung on the hook to boil, he asked:

“How’d you come out with them?”

The man laughed.

“All right. I told ’em who I was, but naturally they didn’t swallow it. They took me clear to Vancouver. I got identified there easy enough.”

“How’d you account for the red canoe and things?” Goodrich asked.

“I didn’t,” the other replied. “There ain’t no law against anybody having a red Peterboro, nor a 303 Savage, nor a black and green Mackinaw. I just stood pat about them things—like you did about the gray mule and the black Stetson that time in the Monterey hills.”

Bill Goodrich stared in sheer amazement.

“Was that why you took it up so quick?”

“Sure,” the other man grinned. “I had a good look at you that night in the pines. I read the papers while I was making my get-away. I could easily see that you had stood pat on what happened that night. I thought you were just trying to get away with my outfit down there on the river until you told me what you were up against. It was easy for me to put myself in your place, seeing I’d been through the same mill myself. And—darn it all, Bill Goodrich, one good turn deserves another.”

What Bill Goodrich answered to that is neither here nor there. But it is a matter of record that he has never been brought to trial for that Cortez Island shooting.

Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the June 20, 1920 issue of The Popular Magazine.

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Table of Contents

- One Good Turn

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