"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 senorita. He looks to me like he's the kind of Texas Ranger who visits the serioritas."

"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.

"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."