One Good Turn
Bertrand W. Sinclair's "One Good Turn" traces how a single act of impersonation, committed twice a decade apart, ultimately saves a man's life. Bill Goodrich, a young outdoorsman camping in California's Monterey mountains to recover from tuberculosis, shares his campfire with a stranger one night. In the morning he discovers the man has vanished, leaving his own rifle, hat, mule, and gear swapped for Goodrich's identical items. Goodrich soon learns why: the stranger, a fugitive named Baker wanted for killing a rancher, engineered the exchange so that pursuing deputies would mistake Goodrich for him. Two officers duly arrest Goodrich, refusing to believe his protests, and march him in handcuffs to the Salinas jail before he is finally identified and released. Though angry and humiliated, Goodrich holds his tongue about how he came by Baker's belongings, quietly hoping the real fugitive escapes. The ordeal leaves him with a lasting horror of confinement. Years later, cured but restless, Goodrich has drifted north into British Columbia's coastal wilderness, homesteading on Cortez Island. A recurrence of his lung trouble coincides with an ongoing feud with a hostile neighbor backed by logging interests. When the neighbor forces a gunfight, Goodrich kills him in self-defense before witnesses. Convinced that even a justifiable killing means jail—an ordeal he cannot face with his health failing—he flees by canoe rather than await arrest, choosing the rugged coast mountains over the courts. Paddling by night up the inlets toward Toba River, Goodrich narrowly avoids a police launch and pushes into the wilderness beyond the last settlement, believing pursuit must come only from behind him. Three days upriver he discovers two armed officers with an Indian guide closing in, having tracked him via a shortcut across a river bend. Evading them by slipping across a portage trail, Goodrich gains roughly a six-hour lead and drives his canoe hard upstream through exhaustion, blisters, and a worsening cough. Worn out, he blunders into the camp of a solitary trapper heading into the same remote valley. Too tired to invent a convincing story, Goodrich accepts the trapper's hospitality and sleeps, aware that the officers will soon reach this camp and learn definitively that he is just hours ahead. Before dawn, recognizing that the trapper's outfit—a similar canoe, rifle, and coat—offers his only chance to vanish cleanly into the deep ranges, Goodrich attempts to duplicate Baker's trick: he means to swap gear while the man sleeps, letting the officers detain the trapper as a decoy while he escapes into country so rugged that pursuit without dogs would be hopeless. The trapper wakes mid-theft, draws a revolver, and demands an explanation. Goodrich, resigned, tells him the truth: the Cortez Island killing, his conviction that it was justified self-defense, his dread of jail compounding his tuberculosis, and his determination never to be taken alive. Rather than turning him in, the trapper strikes a bargain remarkably like the one that once ensnared Goodrich himself—he will let Goodrich take his canoe, rifle, and coat and impersonate him to the pursuing constables, buying Goodrich time to disappear into the high country. He even directs Goodrich to a hidden, well-stocked cabin deep in the mountains, past waterfalls, blazed lines, slides, and landmark peaks, where he can wait out the winter undetected. Goodrich reaches the cabin, secures it as a stronghold, and settles into the solitary work of survival: hunting deer, fishing, learning the terrain, and steadily regaining his health in the dry mountain air, drawing comparison in his own mind to the real-life case of Simon Gun-a-noot, an Indigenous fugitive who evaded British Columbia authorities for thirteen years before being cleared. Weeks later the trapper arrives at the cabin as promised, having been taken by the officers, questioned, and eventually identified and released in Vancouver—all without betraying Goodrich's route or story, exactly as Goodrich himself once stood pat about Baker's mule and hat. Over supper, the trapper reveals the story's turning point: he was the very stranger who tricked Goodrich in the Monterey pines years before. He recognized Goodrich in the dark at their first meeting on the Toba River, had read the newspaper accounts of the Cortez Island shooting, and understood exactly what kind of desperate bargain Goodrich was attempting because he had once engineered the same deception himself. Rather than resent being used as a second decoy, he embraced the debt, reasoning that one good turn deserves another. The narrative closes on that reciprocal act of frontier loyalty, noting simply that Goodrich was never brought to trial for the Cortez Island killing—his freedom secured not by law but by an old kindness returned in kind, between two men who each once wore the other's stolen identity to save himself from the thing he feared most: not death, but captivity.
By Bertrand W. Sinclair · First published 1920 · Genre: Adventure Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction