Part 1

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.