Dead Man's Walk (16 page)

"Who can?" Call asked. He wanted to call out to Gus, but of course if there were Indians near, the calling would give them away. He was afraid Johnny might panic, if the risks increased much.
"Indians," Johnny said. "That big one with the hump could be right out there in the water." "Why would he be out there, this time of night?" Call asked. Mainly he was trying to distract Johnny from his fear by asking sensible questions.
"Well, he might," Johnny said. He had a great urge to shoot his gun, although he couldn't see a thing to shoot at. He just had the feeling that if he shot his gun, he might feel a little less scared.
To Call's shock and surprise, Johnny suddenly shot his gun. Call assumed it meant he had seen Indians--perhaps Buffalo Hump was in the river. Johnny Carthage was ten years older than he was, and more experienced--he might have spotted an Indian in the water somehow.
"Did you hit him?" Call asked.
"Hit who?" Johnny said.
"The Indian you shot at," Call said.
Johnny was so scared he had already forgotten his own shot. He remembered wanting to shoot--he felt it would make him less nervous--but he had no memory of actually firing the gun.
Gus McCrae couldn't get the stars above him to come into focus. He was lying on his back, a terrible pain in his left ankle, wondering if he was drunk or dead. Surely if he was dead, his ankle wouldn't hurt so badly. But then, he wasn't sure--perhaps the dead could still feel. He couldn't be sure of anything, except that his left ankle hurt. He could hear the lap of water against the shore, which probably meant that he was still alive. He wasn't wet, either--that was good. One of the things he disliked most about rangering was that it very often left him unprotected from the elements. On the first march to the Pecos, he had been drenched several times-- once, crossing some insignificant little creek, his boots had filled with water. When he took them off to empty them, he noticed several of the older Rangers laughing, but it wasn't until he tried to put his boots back on that he realized what they were laughing at. He couldn't get his boots back on--his feet, which had just come out of those very boots, wouldn't go back in.
They didn't go back in for almost two days, until the boots had thoroughly dried. Gus remembered the incident mainly because his ankle hurt so--he knew he could never force his foot into a boot, not with his ankle hurting so badly.
He would just have to go bootless on that foot for awhile, until his ankle mended.
While he was thinking about the difficulties that arose when you got wet, a gun went off nearby.
Gus's thought was that it was an Indian--he tried to roll under a bush, but there were no bushes on the river shore. Even though he disliked being wet, he didn't dislike it as much as he disliked the thought of being taken by an Indian. He started to roll into the water, thinking that he could swim out far enough that the Indians couldn't find him, when he heard nearby the voices of Johnny Carthage and Woodrow Call, talking about the very subject he had just been thinking about: Indians.
"Here, boys--it's me!" he cried out. "Come fast--I'm right by the bluff." A moment later Call and Johnny found him, to his great relief.
"I was afraid it was that big one," he said, when they came with the lantern. "He could poke that big lance right through me, if he came upon me laying down." Though glad to have found Gus alive, Call was still not sure exactly what the situation was.
Neither was Johnny. The fact that the latter had fired his gun confused them both. Though not quite dead drunk, Johnny was actually less sober than Call had supposed him to be back at the camp. He had seemed sober in comparison with Blackie and Rip, but now whatever he had drunk seemed to have suddenly caught up with him.
He couldn't remember whether he had fired his gun because he had seen an Indian, or whether he had just shot to be shooting--it could even be that the gun had gone off entirely by accident.
Call was exasperated. He had never known a man to be so vague about his own behaviour.
"You shot the gun," he reminded Johnny, for the third time. "What did you shoot it at--an Indian?" "Matilda et that big turtle," Johnny said--he was growing rapidly less in command of his faculties. All he could remember of his earlier life was that Matilda Roberts had cooked a snapping turtle in a Ranger camp on the Rio Grande.
"That wasn't tonight, Johnny," Call insisted. "That was a long time back, and I don't know what it's got to do with tonight. You didn't shoot at a snapping turtle, did you?" Johnny Carthage was silent, perplexed.
Call couldn't help but be annoyed. They were in a life-or-death situation--why couldn't the man remember what he shot at?
"What did you shoot at tonight?" he asked again.
Gus was feeling more and more convinced that he was alive and well--except, of course, for a damaged ankle.
"I hope my ankle ain't broke--it hurts," he said. "You might as well let up on Johnny, though. He ain't got no idea why he shot his gun." "I'd have to be hungry to eat a dern turtle," Johnny Carthage said. It was his final comment of the evening. To Call's intense annoyance he lapsed into a stupor, and was soon as prostrate as Gus.
"Now I've got two of you down," Call said. "This is a damn nuisance." Gus was too relieved to be alive, to worry very much about his friend's distemper.
"I wonder if that girl will be in the store tomorrow?" he asked, out loud. "I sure would like to see that girl again, although my ankle's bad." "Go see her, then," Call said brusquely.
"Maybe she'll sell you a crutch."
When Call helped Gus hobble back to camp --Johnny Carthage was no help, having passed out drunk near where Gus had fallen-- Bigfoot happened to be there, drinking with Long Bill and Rip Green. After a certain amount of poking and prodding, during which Gus let out a yelp or two, Bigfoot pronounced his ankle sprained but not broken. Gus's mood sank--he was afraid it meant that he would not be allowed to go on the expedition.
"But you wasn't going anyway, you were aiming to stay and marry that girl," Call reminded him.
"No--I aim to go," Gus said. "If I could collect a little of that silver we could live rich, if I do marry her." In fact he was torn. He had a powerful desire to marry Clara; but at the same time, the thought of watching his companions ride off on their great adventure made him moody and sad.
"You reckon Colonel Cobb would leave me, because of this ankle?" he asked.
"Why no, there's plenty of wagons you could ride in--a sprain's usually better in a week," Bigfoot said. "I guess they could put you in that buggy with old Phil Lloyd, unless they mean to transport him in a cart." "Ride with a general?" Gus asked. "I wouldn't know what to say to a general." "You won't have to say a word to Phil Lloyd, he'll be too drunk to talk," Bigfoot assured him.
The next morning, the sprained ankle was so swollen Gus couldn't put even a fraction of his weight on it. The matter chagrined him deeply --he had hoped to be at the general store at opening time, in order to help Miss Forsythe with her unpacking. Yet even standing up was painful-- needles of pain shot through his ankle.
"I expect they have liniment in that store," Call told him. "I guess I could walk up there and buy you some liniment." "Oh, you would!" Gus said, agitated at the thought that Call would get to see Clara before he did. "I suppose you'll want to help her unpack dry goods, too." "What?" Call said, puzzled by Gus's annoyance. "Why would I want to help her unpack? I don't work in that store." "Bear grease is best for sprains," Long Bill informed him.
"Well, do we have any?" Gus asked, eager to head off Call's trip to the general store.
"Why no--I don't keep any," Long Bill said. "Maybe we can scrape a little up, next time we kill a bear." "I seen a bear once, eating a horse," Gus remembered. "I didn't kill him, though." Call grew tired of the aimless conversation and walked on up to the store. The girl was there, quick as ever. She wasn't unpacking dry goods, though.
She was stacking pennies on a counter, whistling while she did it.
"Be quiet, don't interrupt me," she said, throwing Call a merry glance. "I'll have to do this all over if I lose my count." Call waited patiently until she had finished tallying up the pennies--she wrote the total on a little slip of paper.
"So it's you and not Mr. McCrae," she said when she was finished. "I rather expected Mr.
McCrae. I guess he ain't as smitten as I thought." "Oh, he's mighty smitten," Call assured her. "He meant to be here early, but he fell and hurt his ankle." "Just like a man--is it broke?" Clara asked. "I expect he done it dancing with a se@norita. He looks to me like he's the kind of Texas Ranger who visits the se@noritas." "No, he fell off a bluff," Call said.
"I was with him at the time. He's got a bad sprain and thought some liniment might help." "It might if I rubbed it on myself," Clara said.
Call was plain embarrassed. He had never heard of a woman rubbing liniment on a man's foot. It seemed improper to him, although he recognized that standards might be different in Austin.
"If I could buy some and take it to him, I expect he could just rub it on himself," Call said.
"I see you know nothing of medicine, sir," Clara said, thinking she had never met such a pompous young fool as Mr. Woodrow Call.
"Well, can I buy some?" Call asked.
He found it tiring to do so much talking, particularly since the girl's manner was so brash and her attitude so confusing.
"Yes, here--we have the best liniment of any establishment in town," Clara said. "My father uses this one--I believe it's made from roots." She handed Call a big jar of liniment, charging him twenty cents. Call was dismayed at the price--he hadn't supposed liniment would cost more than a dime.
"Tell Mr. McCrae I consider it very careless of him, to go falling off a bluff without my permission," Clara said, as she was wrapping the jar of liniment in brown paper. "He might have been useful to me today, if he hadn't been so careless." "He had no notion that he was so close to the edge, Miss," Call said, thinking that he ought to try and defend his friend.
"No excuses, tell him I'm very put out," Clara demanded. "Once I smite a man, I expect more cautious behaviour." 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 running buffalo in a few days, Mr. McCrae," Brognoli said. "I'll warn you though: be careful of your parts, once we're traveling. Colonel Cobb won't tolerate stragglers. If you can't make the pull, he'll leave you, and you'll have to come back as best you can." 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. Johnny Carthage was snoring, his head on his saddle, and no one else was in camp at all.
"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.