One good turn

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

“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.