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.”