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
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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