One good turn

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.