Dead Man's Walk

When Call reported the conversation to Gus, Gus blamed it all on him.

“I suppose you informed her that I was drunk—you aim to marry her yourself, I expect,” Gus said, in a temper.

Call was astonished by his friend’s irrationality.

“I don’t even know the woman’s name,” he told his friend.

“Pshaw, it don’t take long to learn a name,” Gus said. “You mean to marry her, don’t you?”

“You must have broke your brain, when you took that fall,” Call said. “I don’t intend to marry nobody. I’m off to Santa Fe.”

“Well, I am too—I wish I’d never let you go up to that store,” Gus said. He was tormented by the thought that Clara Forsythe might have taken a liking to Call. She might have decided she preferred his friend, a thought so tormenting that he got up and tried to hobble to the store. But he could put no weight on the wounded ankle at all—it meant hopping on one leg, and he soon realized that he couldn’t hop that far. Even if he had, what would Clara think of a man who came hopping in on one leg?

He was forced to lie in camp all day, sulking, while the other Rangers went about their business. Long Bill Coleman grew careless with the jug of whiskey he had procured the night before. While he was trying to repair a cracked stirrup, Gus crawled over to Bill’s little stack of bedding, uncorked the jug, and drank a good portion of it. Then he crawled back to his own spot, drunk.

Brognoli, the quartermaster, showed up about that time, looking for men to load the ammunition wagons. Call and Rip Green were recruited. Gus was fearful Brognoli would remove him from the troop once he found out about the ankle, but Brognoli scarcely gave him a glance.

“You’ll be ru

Gus managed to sneak several more pulls on Long Bill’s jug, and was deeply drunk when he woke from a light snooze to see a girl coming toward the camp. To his horror, he realized it was Clara Forsythe. It was a calamity—not only was he drunk and too crippled to attend himself, he was also filthy from having accidentally rolled into a mud puddle during the night.

He looked about to see if there was a wagon he could hide under, but there was no wagon. Joh

“There you are—I had hoped you would show up early and help me unpack those heavy dry goods,” Clara said. “I see you’re unreliable—I might have suspected it.” She was smiling as she chided him, but Gus was so sensitive to the fact that he was drunk and filthy that he hardly knew what to do.

“Let’s see your foot,” Clara said, kneeling down beside him.

Gus was startled. Although Call had informed him that Clara intended to rub liniment on his foot herself, Gus had given the report no credit. It was some lie Call had thought up, to make him feel worse than he felt. No fine girl of the class of Miss Forsythe would be likely to want to rub liniment on his filthy ankle.

“What?” he asked—he was so drunk that he could hardly stammer. He wished now that he had not been such a fool as to drain Long Bill’s jug—but then, how could he possibly have expected a visit from Miss Forsythe? Only whores prowled around in the rough Ranger camps, and Clara was clearly not a whore.

“I said, let’s see your foot,” Clara said. “Did the fall deafen you, too?”

“No, I can hear,” Gus said. “What would you want with my foot?” he asked.

“I need to know if I think you’re going to recover, Mr. McCrae,” Clara said, with a challenging smile. “If you do recover, I might have plans for you, but if you’re a goner, then I won’t waste my time.

“What kind of plans?” Gus asked.

“Well, there’s a lot of unpacking that needs to get done around the store,” Clara said. “You could be my assistant, if you behave.”

Gus surrendered the wounded foot, which was bare, and none too clean. Clara touched it gently, cupping Gus’s heel in one hand.

“The thing is, I’m a Ranger,” Gus reminded her. “I signed up for the expedition to Santa Fe. If I try to back out now, the Colonel might call it desertion and have me hung.”

“Fiddle,” Clara said, feeling the swollen ankle. She lowered his foot to the ground, noticed the jar of liniment sitting on a rock nearby, and removed the top.

“Well, they can hang you for desertion, if they take a notion to,” Gus said.

“I know that, shut up,” Clara said, scooping a bit of liniment into her hand. She began to massage it into the swollen ankle, a dab at a time.“My pa thinks this expedition is all foolery,” Clara went on. “He says you’ll all starve, once you get out on the plains. He says you’ll be back in a month. I guess I can wait a month.”

“I hope so,” Gus said. “I wouldn’t want no one else to get the job.”

Clara looked at him, but said nothing. She continued to dab liniment on his ankle and gently rub it in.

“That liniment stinks,” Gus informed her. “It smells like sheepdip.

“I thought I told you to shut up,” Clara reminded him. “If you weren’t crippled we could have a picnic, couldn’t we?”

Gus decided to ignore the comment—he was crippled, and wasn’t quite sure what a picnic was, anyway. He thought it was something that had to do with churchgoing, but he wasn’t a churchgoer and didn’t want to embarrass himself by revealing his ignorance.

“What if we’re out two months?” he asked. “You wouldn’t give that job to nobody else, would you?”

Clara considered for a moment—she was smiling, but not at him, exactly. She seemed to be smiling mostly to herself.

“Well, there are other applicants,” she admitted.

“Yes, that damn Woodrow Call, I imagine,” Gus said. “I never told him to go up there and buy this liniment. He just did it himself.”

“Oh no, not Corporal Call,” Clara said at once. “I don’t think I fancy Corporal Call as an unpacker. He’s a little too solemn for my taste. I expect he would be too slow to make a fool of himself.”

“That’s right, he ain’t foolish,” Gus said. He thought it was rather a peculiar standard Clara was suggesting, but he was not about to argue with her.

“I like men who are apt to make fools of themselves immediately,” Clara said. “Like yourself, Mr. McCrae. Why, you don’t hesitate a second when it comes to making a fool of yourself.”

Gus decided not to comment. He had never encountered anyone as puzzling as the young woman kneeling in front of him, with his foot almost on her lap. She didn’t seem to give a fig for the fact that his foot was dirty, and he himself none too clean.

“Are you drunk, sir?” she asked bluntly. “I think I smell whiskey on your breath.” ‘“Well, Long Bill had a little whiskey,” Gus admitted. “I took it for medicine.”

Clara didn’t dignify that lie with a look, or a retort.

“What were you thinking of when you walked off that cliff, Mr. McCrae?” Clara asked. “Do you remember?”

In fact, Gus didn’t remember. The main thing he remembered about the whole previous day was standing near Clara in the general store, watching her unpack dry goods. He remembered her graceful wrists, and how dust motes stirred in a shaft of sunlight from the big front window. He remembered thinking that Clara was the most beautiful woman he had ever encountered, and that he wanted to be with her—beyond being with her, he could conceive of no plans; he had no memory of falling off the cliff at all, and no notion of what he and Woodrow Call might have been discussing. He remembered a gunshot and Call and Joh

“I guess I was worrying about Indians,” he said, since Clara was still looking at him in a ma