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 Johnny finding him at the base of the bluff. But what had gone on before, or been said up on the path, he couldn’t recall.
“I guess I was worrying about Indians,” he said, since Clara was still looking at him in a manner that suggested she wanted an answer.
“Shucks, I thought you might have been thinking of me,” Clara said. “I had the notion I’d smitten you, but I guess I was wrong. I haven’t smitten Corporal Call, that’s for sure.”
“He ain’t a corporal, he’s just a Ranger,” Gus said, annoyed that she was still talking about Call. He didn’t trust the man, not where Clara was concerned, at least.
“Why, that’s better, perhaps I have smitten you.”
She closed the jar of liniment, eased his foot to the ground, and stood up.
“It does smell a little like sheepdip?that’s accurate,” she said. “What do you gentlemen use to wash with around this camp?”
“Nothing, nobody washes,” Gus admitted. “Sometimes we wash in a creek, if we’re traveling, but otherwise we just stay dirty.”
Clara picked up a shirt someone had thrown down, and carefully wiped her fingers on it.
“I hope the owner won’t mind a little sheepdip on his shirt,” she said.
“That’s Call’s extra shirt, he won’t mind,” Gus assured her.
“Oh, Corporal Call?where is he, by the way?” Clara asked.
“He ain’t a corporal, I told you that,” Gus said. He found her use of the term very irritating; that she felt the need to refer to Call at all was more than a little annoying.
“Nonetheless I intend to call him Corporal Call, and it’s not one bit of your business what I call him,” Clara said pertly. “I’m free to choose names for my admirers, I suppose.”
Gus was so annoyed that he didn’t know what to say. He sulked for a bit, thinking that if Call were there, he’d give him a punching, sore ankle or no sore ankle.
“Well, good-bye, Mr. McCrae,” Clara said. “I hope your ankle improves. If you’re still in camp tomorrow, I’ll come back and give it another treatment. I don’t want a crippled assistant, not with all the unpacking there is to do.”
To his surprise, she reached down and gave him a handshake? her fingers smelled of the liniment she had just rubbed on him.
“We’re supposed to pull out tomorrow?I hope we don’t, though,” Gus said.
“You know where the store is,” Clara said. “I certainly expect a visit, before you depart.”
She started to leave, and then turned and looked at him again. “Give my respects to Corporal Call,” she said. “It’s a pity he’s not more of a fool.”
“If he’s a corporal, I ought to be a corporal too,” Gus said, bitterly annoyed by the girl’s manner.
“Corporal McCrae?no, that don’t sound right,” Clara said. “Corporal Call?somehow that has a solid ring.” Then, with a wave, she walked off.
When Call came back to camp in the evening, sweaty from having loaded ammunition all day, he found Gus drunk and boiling. He was so mad his face turned red, and a big vein popped out on his nose.
“She calls you a corporal, you rascal!” Gus said in a furious voice. “I told you to stay clear of that store?if you don’t, when I get well, I’ll give you a whipping you’ll never forget.”
Call was taken completely by surprise, and Long Bill, Rip Green, and a new recruit named Jimmy Tweed, a tall boy from Arkansas, were all startled by Gus’s belligerence. Jimmy Tweed had not yet met Gus, and was shocked to find him so quarrelsome.
Call didn’t know what reply to make, and so said nothing. He had known that sometimes people took fevers and went out of their heads; he supposed that was what was the matter with Gus. He walked closer, to see if his
