The Misadventures of Maude March Read online

  “She was nearly bit by that rattler. I know exactly how she feels,” I said. “She looks like an orphan to me.”

  “All we have in common with that goat is our dirty faces.”

  “We drank her milk,” I said, “and now I just don't feel right about leaving her to fend for herself.”

  I'd begun to regret this decision an hour later. We'd eaten our breakfast in the saddle, cheese and crackers, then goat's milk, then more cheese and crackers. We were ready to put some miles on the day, but we were still moving along at the nanny goat's pace.

  It halted Maude and me in our tracks when we heard laughter. The goat trotted on ahead till it ran out of line and then looked like it was leading the horse.

  After a moment we heard it again. High, girlish laughter.

  It came from behind some blueberry bushes off to one side of us.

  We rode over and found two little girls in the middle of a tea party. One of them wasn't so little, she was nearly my age, but she seemed awful young to me. They stopped their play and looked up at us, a little afraid.

  “You are just the two we've been looking for,” I said in a friendly way.

  “We are?” the older one said.

  “We found this goat here, wandering around all by her lonesome and looking for a home.” I got off the horse so I wouldn't look so tall.

  “Does it butt?” It was just that girl and me doing the talking. The little one and Maude sat like they'd been struck dumb.

  “Not that I've seen,” I said, and joined her in looking the goat over for any sign of bad habits. “Her milk tastes good.”

  “My ma wants a goat,” the girl said. “I'll take her, if she isn't mean.”

  “I don't believe this one's mean.” I led the goat around so the girl would see. That animal acted like she thought she was the star of a parade. It made me glad I took the trouble to find her a home, seeing her show off like that with her rumpled coat and dirty face. “She needs a little cleaning up,” I said.

  This girl was not put off by a few smudges. “We'll take her.”

  “Shall I tie her to this bush till you're ready to take her home?”

  “I'll take her now,” the girl said. “We can come back here later.”

  “Where do you live?” I asked her.

  “That way.”

  I nodded. “We're traveling a different way. Can you manage on your own?”

  The girl took the rope and started off; that was all the answer I got. Her little sister sat for another few seconds, then got up to follow. Maude and I waited till they moved out of sight behind some more bushes. “Now that looks like a happy ending,” I said as we started out again.

  “You never know,” she said, turning down the offer of a peppermint.

  “What do you mean?” It wasn't too late to snatch that goat back if I had to. But Maude wasn't thinking about the goat.

  “Those girls. They could have been us the day our folks died. They were about the same age we were then. And we played tea party that day. I remember. We played tea party to stay out from underfoot.”

  MAUDE AND I RODE QUIET AS WE PICKED UP SOME MILES. When we stopped again, as we came across a railroad track aimed in a southwesterly direction, she was feeling very low. “If we follow these rails, they might take us straight into Missouri,” she said. “The riding would be a lot easier.”

  “I don't think we should risk it,” I said, thinking a posse might guess two green girls would follow laid track when they could.

  “I don't think anyone would go on looking for us this long. They're looking for Marion, mostly.”

  “Let's don't do it,” I said. I didn't want to say so, but everything I'd read in those dimers made me think it didn't matter who the posse caught, so long as they caught somebody they could hang.

  “All right, then,” she said. “Give me a piece of that licorice you're harboring.”

  “You don't like licorice.”

  “That's why I want some. I don't want to ruin peppermints for myself by eating them when I don't feel well.”

  As the day wore on, she didn't eat much other than licorice and began to complain of a sore throat. I got worried. I had no idea what we would do if she got sick out here.

  “What's that up ahead?” Maude asked me some time later.

  I couldn't see a thing. I'd finally had to accept it; Maude's eyes were better suited to range riding than were mine. She didn't see all that well up close. She complained the tiny print in the Bible looked fuzzy, and it gave her a turn to thread a needle, but she could see a crow out of sight. I wondered if that wasn't what made her such a good shot.

  We rode on a bit and she said, fast and low, “It's a rider. He's going the same way we are.”

  “What'll we do?” I said.

  “Stay behind him.”

  “What if he finds out we're here?” I said. This was her question the other day, and I thought it was a good one.

  “We'll know it if he does. He'll turn off one way or the other. Or he'll ride back to find out who we are.”

  “You've toughened up, Maude,” I said admiringly. “You're real good at range riding too.”

  “Now that's high praise, coming from you,” Maude said with a grin.

  We followed the man for two hours before he dropped out of sight. Maude's hair liked to stand on end. “I knew it. We should have ridden north,” she said, her toughness fading fast.

  I would have replied smartly to her remark about riding north, but she added, “I hope you know what to do now.”

  I thought quickly; many of the stories I'd read had situations such as this. “Keep your rifle cocked,” I said. “Get down and walk. Stay between the horses. And then we'll move up on him real slow.”

  We walked for some time before we got a whiff of wood smoke on the air. “He's made camp,” I said. “There must be a hollow up ahead.”

  “Now what?”

  “Wait here,” I whispered, and gave her the reins to my horse.

  Maude didn't wait but followed, staying only a few steps behind me. This was annoying, but I couldn't argue about it. I moved through the grass as quietly as I could and found I was right; he had set up camp in a hollow.

  The closer we got, the sweeter the air smelled. My stomach started to growl. Before it could give me away, I stepped up on a ridge of land that dropped off sharply.

  “We've got the drop on you, so just sit real still,” I said.

  “I've been waiting for you,” Marion said without turning around. “I threw on some fatback and sliced you some real fine bread. I didn't think it would take you so long to get the drop on me, so I'm afraid the meal's grown cold.”

  A brief bewilderment crossed Maude's face. Then she set about making herself at home. She led our horses down the rise and hobbled them the way Marion had shown us. Once I saw we were to stay, I slid down the rise on my butt and headed over to take the saddle off my horse. We worked over the horses in silence.

  I noticed Marion had shaved his grizzled beard off. I kept sneaking glances; it was like looking at a new man. A strangely young man. He was looking back, one time I glanced, and I wished he'd turn his back to us, so I could talk to the Marion I knew best.

  It was not until we had finished that he came up with something to say. “I'm glad to see you had the good sense to steal yourselves some better horses.”

  “All our worldly goods were tied to that plow horse, including my momma's Bible,” Maude complained as she sat down by the fire.

  I had already beat her to it and stretched my fingers toward the warmth. The one thing I missed about town living was warmth.

  “We don't have a blanket,” she said, “or a change of dry clothing, and if I didn't have some money in my pocket, we wouldn't have had a bite to eat this whole livelong time.”

  I didn't even try to point out it wasn't Marion's fault we hadn't run for our horses. Neither did he.

  Maude had another bone to pick with Marion. “You've gotten us into a heap of trouble,�
�� she said. “If there was one thing we didn't need more of, it was trouble.”

  I had finally figured out what really bothered me about the beard. He now looked a whole lot more like the Joe Harden on the dimer covers; if Marion had a little more hair in front, he'd have looked exactly like him. Maude didn't seem to notice his new face. She didn't say one word about it. But then neither had I.

  “I'm sorry,” Marion said. “It's the life I lead. You can go along for years with people looking at you like you're some kind of hero. Then, one bad break, and you're a hunted man. Once you're a hunted man, it's a lot easier to act like one.”

  “I believe it was Aunt Ruthie who got the bad break,” Maude said.

  Marion's face flushed dark and for a minute he didn't say anything. When he did, he had decided to ignore the remark about Aunt Ruthie. “I'm talking about the bank now. I can't help that you were seen with me,” he said. “You wouldn't let me out of your sight.”

  “I suppose you're right,” Maude said. “But that wouldn't have been the case if you'd told us you planned to rob the bank.”

  “I didn't plan,” Marion said. “I just watch for opportunities and seize them when they come along. I never had the opportunity to rob a bank before.”

  “You mean you would have robbed a bank if you'd had the chance?” I asked. I would never have needed to ask the old Joe Harden that question, but now that we had turned this corner where Joe wasn't even Joe anymore, I couldn't be sure of anything.

  “No, no,” Marion said. “It was an act of desperation. I've never been threatened with hanging either, before I accidentally killed your aunt Ruthie. I thought if I had enough money to get to the Oregon territories, I could start over. Go straight again.”

  I was heartened by this whole conversation, in some way. I had not given much thought to the matter from Marion's side of things, but it made sense to me that he didn't regard himself as a murderer any more than we regarded ourselves as horse thieves.

  “So the bootmaker told you about the payroll, and it seemed like as good a time as any,” Maude said, her temper rising.

  “That's about it,” Marion said as if we were all reaching an understanding. His problem was, he didn't understand Maude.

  “Why, oh, why did you do it?” she cried, throwing the last piece of her bread at him. He startled, but otherwise took this treatment in stride.

  “I've been down on my luck for a while now,” he said. “I thought I might turn it around.”

  Maude yelled, “By robbing a bank?”

  I'd hoped Maude might be more forgiving once Marion said he had never done this before. But I could see that idea was dead in the water. “You owe us some of that money,” I said.

  “Sallie!” Maude swatted me hard enough to bowl me over.

  “It's true,” I said. “We were his partners in that robbery, whether we meant to be or not. We deserve a cut.”

  “We were not his partners,” Maude said. “Don't ever say that again.”

  “We helped,” I said.

  Marion said, “If you ask me, you were mostly in the way.”

  “Oh, yes, you had things well in hand before we got there,” Maude said bitingly.

  “There's no need to get into a fight over this,” Marion said.

  Seeing her attention was entirely taken up with Marion, I folded bacon into a slice of bread and took a bite. Maude had only begun to get the need to swat someone out of her system.

  “Did you kill that man in the bank?” she wanted to know, thwacking him on the shoulder with the flat of her hand. He reared back a little, but otherwise sat still for it. “Is he dead? I want to know. Did you murder that man?”

  “How did you get away?” I asked him as I enjoyed the taste of bacon in my mouth. “The town was full awake. We heard shots too.” Luckily for Marion, this was something that interested Maude enough to stop her in midswing to wait for the answer.

  “I know this Indian trick for riding at the side of my horse. If the shooters don't hit the horse, they probably won't get the rider either.” After a moment he added, “Of course, the horse has to be willing to go along with it.”

  “Where'd you learn all these Indian tricks, anyway?” I asked.

  “Aw, a man picks these things up if he lives from place to place, the way I do,” Marion said bashfully.

  “He learns how to rob banks too, I guess,” Maude said.

  “Now I hope you aren't going to go on holding that against me,” Marion said.

  “That bacon goes down real well, Maude.” I hoped to distract her from picking more of a fight with Marion. We could do with his company. He knew a lot of things we needed to learn.

  She sighed and turned her attention to the food. I could see Marion was burning to explain himself. However, he understood Maude well enough to let her put that first bite into her mouth.

  “If you and your sister had a chance to make out all right in that town, I never would have robbed the bank,” Marion said finally. “I wouldn't have sent you off on your own either.”

  “It's not just the bank,” Maude said. “We weren't really horse thieves before.”

  “I know you thought that way,” Marion said, “but the law thought different. When you take a man's horse, even if it's an old plow horse, you're a thief. It don't matter even if the horse's owner did you worse. It's your own actions that count against you.”

  “They might hang us too,” Maude pointed out. He'd gotten her all worked up again with his remarks about the horses. “They might hang us by the neck until dead,” she said when Marion didn't seem to hear the mention of hanging.

  I wished Marion would come up with an answer that would settle Maude, so I could relax. If it was me she was talking to, she would hit me right on the head, and I figured any minute Marion would get his. It didn't matter he was pouring coffee; Maude hated it when somebody didn't listen.

  But Marion just handed her the cup of coffee, and she took a swallow. “It's sweet,” she said in surprise.

  “I try to carry a little sugar for hard days,” he said.

  “Do you figure we're safe here?” Maude asked him. “Are you sure nobody followed you but us?”

  “They followed me, but I doubled back on a branch of the river and let them pass me by. That's an Indian trick too. Needs a fast horse, but I've got that.”

  Maude said, “Nothing worse than a man bragging about how fine he is.”

  “I passed you too,” Marion said, grinning. “Spotted you and passed you by before I slowed up to let you catch me.”

  Maude gave a snort that would have done a hog proud. Despite this, Marion gave us one of his blankets. It made me feel like he was taking care of us, but Maude only scolded him for the loss of her quilt. It looked to me like she was running out of steam.

  “She's somewhat crabby,” I told him. “She's got a sore throat.”

  “For how long?”

  “It started yesterday, with a cough.”

  “Let's get some sleep,” Maude said in a tone that made me think of Aunt Ruthie.

  But Marion threw a few of the morning's twigs under his fry pan. He started a new fire to melt the grease. “You got a clean rag?”

  I had only the toweling for the horse. But I went through Maude's saddlebags, as yet unplumbed, and found a white shirt. Marion tore the back out of the shirt and had me put the remains back into the saddlebag. “You may need it for something later on,” he said. “Or if you put a new back on it, you still have a shirt.”

  He took a little can of turpentine out of his saddlebags and doused the rag, then folded it and poured a little grease on it. “Here,” he said to Maude, “wrap this around your throat. Get under the blanket and breathe in the stink.”

  I expected Maude to voice a loud complaint, but she must have been feeling worse than I thought. She settled down quickly to making a warm space, the saddle blankets beneath and Marion's blanket atop. Maude and I slept as warm as the night before, even without a fire.

  Marion was r
ight about one thing. The turpentine did stink.

  DID YOU THINK UP ANOTHER NAME?” I ASKED MARION AS we saddled up the next morning.

  “I'm thinking Dusty,” he said. “I don't know the second part yet.”

  “Dusty Har de Har Har,” Maude said in a mean tone as she came out from behind a bush. Her cough was gone and so was the sniffle. She claimed not to have a trace of sore throat left, but she had not thanked Marion for his trouble.

  She'd been sharp with him once or twice already, and the sun hadn't yet burned all the pink off the horizon. I worried he would leave us flat, the way he did after the boot shop. I planned to speak with her about it as soon as we got a minute alone. But Marion decided to have it out with her right then.

  “I have explained myself more than I had to, Miss Maude. I won't explain myself anymore. If you don't care to ride with me, you and Sallie here can pick your direction, and I'll ride in another.”

  Maude shot him one of those narrow-eyed looks that should've sent him packing right then, but range riders are made of stern stuff. We all got on our horses and rode off in the general direction of Missouri, which is to say, mostly south but some west too. I had not had a chance to check my compass.

  After a time, even Maude's kinks worked themselves out, more or less. She didn't talk much, but she wasn't mean either. Marion and I talked a good deal. “How come you're sleeping on shop floors if you have all that money from robbing banks?” I asked him, which was a mistake.

  “For the first thing, I never robbed a bank before,” Marion said as if I'd hurt his feelings some. “I said that, didn't I?”

  “Sorry.”

  “The other thing,” Marion said, “you can get yourself shot up in them hotels easier than you think. It happens all the time. A little brawl starts up in the bar and next thing you know, a bullet comes up through the floor. That's all she wrote.”

  Talking to Marion was an education.

  We rode without coming across a sign of another human being until late in the day, when we stopped in a pasture to milk a cow. We drank most of what we got, but Marion caught more in a pot and carefully held it before him as we rode the horses at a walk.