“And then we’ll kill them?” Call said—he thought he understood now.

“Then we’ll try,” Bigfoot said.

To Gus’s DISMAY, THE order to move out of Austin came at three in the morning. Captain Falconer rode through the camps on a snorting, prancing horse, telling the men to get their gear.

“Colonel Cobb’s ready,” he informed them. “No lingering. We’ll be leaving town at dawn.”

“Dern, it’s the middle of the night,” Johnny Carthage said. Though he had been provided with two mules and a heavy cart, he had as yet totally neglected his instructions in regard to packing. Instead, he and Gus had got drunk. Nothing was packed, and it was raining and pitch dark.

Gus’s preparations for the grand expedition to Santa Fe consisted in dragging himself, his guns, and a blanket into the heavy cart. Then he huddled in the cart, so drunk that he was not much bothered by the fact that Johnny Carthage was pitching every object he could get his hands on in on top of him. The cooking pots, the extra saddlery, blankets and guns, ropes and boxes of medicines, were all heaped in the cart, with little care taken as to placement.

“Why do we have to leave in the middle of the night?” Gus asked, several times—but Johnny Carthage was muttering and coughing; he made no reply. He had an old lantern, and was searching all around the large area of the camp, well aware that he would be blamed if he left anything behind. But with only one eye and a gimpy leg, and with Gus too crippled and too drunk to help, gathering up the belongings of the whole troop on a dark, rainy night was chancy work.

At some point well before dawn, Quartermaster Brognoli made a tour of the area, to see that the fifteen or twenty different groups of free-ranging adventurers, many of them merchants or would-be merchants, were making adequate progress toward departure. Gus stuck his head out from under a dripping blanket long enough to talk to him a minute.

“Why leave when it’s dark?” he asked. “Why not wait for sunup?”

Brognoli had taken a liking to the tall boy from Tennessee. He was green but friendly, and he moved quick. Years of trying to get soldiers on the move had given Brognoli a distaste for slow people.

“Colonel Cobb don’t care for light nor dark,” he informed Gus. “He don’t care for the time of day or the month or the year. When he decides to go, we go.”

“But three in the morning’s an odd time to start an expedition,” Gus pointed out.

“No, it’s regular enough,” Brognoli said. “If we start pushing out about three the stragglers will clear Austin by six or seven. Colonel Cobb left an hour ago. We’re going to stop at Bushy Creek for breakfast, so we better get moving. If we ain’t there when the Colonel expects us, there won’t be no breakfast.”

The mules were hitched, and the cart with all the Rangers’ possessions in it was moving through the center of Austin when Gus McCrae suddenly remembered Clara Forsythe. More than thirty wagons, small herds of sheep and beef cattle, and over a hundred horsemen of all ages and degrees of ability were jostling for position in the crowded streets. Some of the mule skinners had lanterns, but most didn’t. There were several collisions and much cursing. Once or twice, guns were fired. Occasional lightning lit the western sky— the faint grey of a cloudy dawn was just visible to the east.

The reason Gus remembered Clara was that the little cart, driven by a wet, tired, apprehensive Johnny Carthage, happened to passright in front of the general store. Gus suddenly recalled that the pretty young woman he had such a desire to marry had been meaning to come and rub liniment on his wounded ankle sometime during the day that was just dawning. He had been drinking for quite a few hours—most of the hours since he fell off the bluff, in fact—and had reached such a depth of drunkness that he had temporarily forgotten the most important fact of all: Clara, his future wife.

“Stop, I got to see her!” he told Johnny, who was urging the mules through a sizable patch of mud, while at the same time trying to avoid colliding with the wagon containing the comatose General Lloyd. He knew it was General Lloyd’s wagon because a kind of small tent had been erected in it so the General could be protected from the elements while he drank and snoozed.

“What?” Johnny Carthage asked.

“Stop, goddamn you—stop!” Gus demanded. “I’ve got business in the general store.”

“But it ain’t open,” Johnny protested. “If I stop now we’ll never get out of this mud.”

“Stop or I’ll strangle you, damn you!” Gus said. It was not a threat he had ever made before, but he was so desperate to see Clara that he felt he could carry it out. Johnny Carthage didn’t hear it, though —one of the mules began to bray, just at that moment, and a rooster that had managed to get in General Lloyd’s wagon was crowing loudly, too.

The mud was thick—the cart was barely inching forward anyway, so Gus decided to just flop out of it. In his eagerness to get to Clara he forgot about his sore ankle, though only until the foot attached to it hit the ground. The pain that surged through him was so intense that he tried to flop forward, back into the cart, but the cart lurched ahead just as he did it, and he went facedown into the slick mud. The patch of mud was deep, too—Gus was up to his elbows in it, trying to struggle up onto his one good foot, when he thought he heard a peal of girlish laughter somewhere above him.

“Look, Pa, it’s Mr. McCrae—come to propose to me, I expect,” Clara said.

Gus looked up to see a white figure, standing at a window above the street. Although he knew he was muddy, his heart lifted at the thought that at least he had not missed Clara. It was her. She was laughing at him, but what did that matter? He looked up, wishing the sun would come out so he could see her better. But he knew it was her, from the sound of her voice and the fact that she was at a window above the store. The thought of her father seeing him in such a state was embarrassing—but in fact, there was no sign of the old man. Perhaps she was just joshing him—she did seem to love to josh.

“Ain’t you coming down?” he asked. “I’ve still got this sore foot.”

“Shucks, what kind of a Romeo would fall off a bluff and hurt his foot just when it’s time to propose to Juliet?” Clara asked. “You’re supposed to sing me a song or two and then climb up here and beg me to marry you.”

“What?” Gus asked. He had no idea what the woman was talking about. Why would he try to climb up the side of the general store when all she would have to do was come down the stairs? He had seen the stairs himself, when he was in the store helping her unpack.

“What, you ain’t read Shakespeare—what was wrong with your schooling?” Clara asked.

Gus’s head had cleared a little. He had been so drunk that his vision swam when he got to his feet—or foot. He still held his sore ankle just above the mud. Now that he was upright he remembered that his sisters had been great admirers of the writer Shakespeare, though exactly what had occurred between Romeo and Juliet he could not remember.

“I can’t climb—won’t you come down?” he said. Why would Clara think a man standing on one foot in a mud puddle could climb a wall, and why was she going on about Shakespeare when he was about to leave on a long expedition? He felt very nearly exasperated—besides that, he couldn’t stand on one foot forever.

“Well, I guess I might come down, though it is early,” Clara said. “We generally don’t welcome customers this early.”

“I ain’t a customer—I want to marry you, but I’ve got to leave,” he said. “Won’t you come? Johnny won’t wait much longer.”

In fact, Johnny was having a hard time waiting at all. The expedition was flowing in full force through the streets of Austin; there was the creak of harness, and the swish of wagon wheels. Johnny had tried to edge to the side, but there wasn’t much space—a fat mule skinner cursed him for the delay he had caused already.