The Misadventures of Maude March Read online

  “What do you plan to do with that?” Maude asked him after a time. Slow riding did breed talk.

  “I feel like having a real dinner,” Marion said. “It'll take some doing. When we make camp, I'll go off and do some hunting.”

  “Maude can shoot real well,” I said. “Maybe she can pop a rabbit or two before we even find a place to camp.”

  “That so?” Marion said, and turned a curious eye on Maude. She turned red up to her hairline. She busied herself with readying her rifle, and by the time she finished, had recovered her businesslike manner.

  We came upon a rabbit not a hundred yards further on. Maude snapped her rifle up, stood in her saddle, and aimed. Some rabbits will sit still as a stone. Not this one. It zigzagged across the field and leaped over a bush. When the bullet hit, the rabbit dropped out of the air. Dropped straight down.

  Some horses will tolerate gunshot, and some will not. Maude's did well enough, especially considering Maude was doing the shooting. Mine startled and ran with me to a point long past the rabbit before I could settle him down.

  Having impressed Marion with her rabbit-popping skills, Maude shot one more, and got a prairie chicken as well. We made camp by another river. Iowa was full of rivers. Marion skinned the dinner and had me walk the fur and feathers out of sight and then some. Meanwhile, he cooked the pieces slow, cooked them in the chicken's own fat, cooked them fit to feed a king. I followed my nose back to camp.

  Maude had done her part, tending to the horses. While I gathered more kindling for the next morning's fire, Marion made milk gravy to pour over the meat. Maude smiled the first smile I'd seen in some time as we sat down to eat.

  “I still have that man's six-shooter,” she said when we had begun to fill our bellies.

  “You don't say,” Marion said, showing some interest. “You let me have a look at it later, and I'll see if we can't find some cartridges for it.”

  “Out here?” Maude said.

  “You have to know where to look,” Marion said.

  We didn't talk much more than that. Marion was a restful kind of man to be with. Not at all what the dime novels would lead a person to believe a frontier fighter would be. Especially a frontier fighter turned bank robber.

  After supper, he looked through the saddlebags from Maude's horse and found a box of cartridges, about half full. He held them up like he'd found a pouch of gold nuggets. Maude made a face at him, but she looked willing enough to give the six-shooter a try.

  I spread the horse blankets in the spot I figured would do for a bed. The food made me sleepy. So did the air. The cooler it got, the more the air made me want to sleep. But I watched the shooting lesson for a time, resting my head on the saddlebags.

  “It's some different than shooting a rifle,” Marion said. He stood behind Maude and helped her set up for a shot. “You can sight along your arm, if that's the only way you feel sure. But you might try just looking at what you want to shoot and expecting your bullet to go there. It works just as well, if not better, for someone who can shoot like you do.”

  “What should I try to hit?” Maude asked him as he stepped away from her. For a fact, there wasn't much to look at but grass and more grass.

  “Don't try to hit anything,” Marion said, coming back to the fire. Shooting lessons had come to an end without anyone firing a shot. “Don't waste what cartridges you've got. When you have cause to shoot, try it.”

  “I hope I don't have cause,” Maude said, and threw our blanket over me.

  As I drifted between the sweetness of wanting to sleep and the good taste hot gravy left in my mouth, I heard Maude say to Marion, “Tell me the truth about how you got your name.”

  “I told you. I made it up.”

  “You expect me to believe you have nothing to do with those dimers?”

  Marion said, “I swear on my grave, I don't.”

  “You can't swear on your grave,” Maude said. “You don't have one.”

  “Men who ride rough don't always get graves,” Marion said.

  Maude said, “I'm not in the mood to feel sorry for you.”

  There was a silence that left me thinking Marion had lost patience with her entirely. “I know it's hard to believe,” he said with an air of starting over. “But the first one I saw was in your sister's hand.”

  “Then how could this happen?”

  “What I know is this. I ran into a newspaper fellow some years back. He was heading east. This was just after I started using the name Joe Harden. I think maybe he's been writing those stories.”

  “How come?”

  “I was riding shotgun on a stagecoach then, and when some fellers tried to hold us up, well, the newspaper fellow was pretty impressed with my shooting. The way he hung around after we got to the end of the run, always scribbling in that little notebook he had, made me curious at the time. I wondered why he didn't just get on eastward if that was where he was going.”

  “I don't know that that's enough proof for me,” Maude said.

  “Me either,” Marion said. “But one of those stories Sally recited came too close for comfort. Some things we really said were in that story. So now I'm just putting two and two together, and I believe it's coming up four.”

  “I don't want you to tell Sallie,” Maude said. “She sets too much store by dimers as it is.”

  “All right.”

  Maude said, “We can't go on riding with you.”

  “Why not?” “Because of the bank. I can't be sure what else you'll do.”

  Marion said, “We all do things we regret. I didn't think it out. I'm sorrier than you may believe.”

  “Even if I believe it, I have Sallie to think of. She has no one to look up to. She can't remember our folks, and now Aunt Ruthie's gone.”

  “She could look up to you,” Marion suggested.

  Maude said, “She looks up to you, sad to say, and you forget she's only a little girl. You ride too rough for a little girl. I can't let her ride so rough. She's young yet, and she'll forget how things ought to be.”

  “I don't intend to rob another bank.”

  “I can't change my mind, Marion. The next time we come to a town, you will go your way, and we will go anywhere else that looks likely.”

  WE DIDN'T COME ACROSS ANOTHER TOWN IN THE NEXT eight days. We did cross three more rivers. One of them we crossed by ferry, which is a grand word to describe a water-logged raft. A rope lay in the water, pulled into a narrow letter C as the current dragged at it. We got on the raft in a gingerly fashion. Water washed across our feet. Maude and I looked at each other doubtfully. Even Marion seemed to have his doubts.

  We stood silent as two boys Maude's age pulled on a tighter second rope to take us across. The current did most of the work, it looked like. On the other side, where our feet touched dirt again, we became very cheerful. It was a mood that lasted for some time.

  Later in the same day, we met up with an oxen train carrying some fellows who were headed out to work on the railroad in Kansas or Nebraska. Marion paid out some of the bank money to buy the necessaries we'd otherwise be doing without once we went our own way. Not that Maude or Marion, either one, made mention of this fact as he tied a sack full of flour and lard and such to the pommel of her horse.

  He hung the fry pan and the Dutch oven from my horse. He couldn't get the right supplies for Maude's rifle, but he got pellets for my shotgun. While Marion did his trading, the railroad workers stood around the wagons, joshing the cook about bugs in his flour and such. It was easy to see they didn't mean anything by it. Then one fairly high-spirited sort said, “That older boy is almost pretty enough to be a girl.”

  “Almost makes all the difference,” Marion said in a voice to dampen spirits. “He'll grow out of it.”

  “No offense,” the man said.

  “None taken,” Marion said back. But he finished his business in a crisp way that settled everyone down.

  I knew how Maude felt, that Marion wasn't a man to look up to, that he wasn't Jo
e Harden's kind of man anymore. I agreed with her, it wasn't right to rob banks or to go around shooting people. But it wasn't right to steal horses either, and sometimes people did what they knew wasn't right.

  Reading those dime novels, I had always figured there was something different in people who did wrong. That they had changed somehow, along the way, and it didn't hurt them to do wrong. Now I saw it did hurt them. But it didn't change something deep inside them, necessarily.

  The best part of Marion had not been changed; he was still a man to look up to. I only wished Maude could see that too. I wished she could see that before we went our separate ways.

  I knew Marion was figuring on leaving us pretty soon. All day he kept telling us the things he thought we might need to know. He told us we'd gone west far enough, so what we needed to do was head south.

  A river ran along our left side, and he said we ought to follow that for a while. “But when it takes on an easterly direction,” he said, “you keep going south. If the land continues dry, don't go looking for water, just keep moving south. Either you'll find it, or the rain will come.”

  This could have been taken for thinking out loud, for planning ahead. Then his thoughts moved in another direction, and he told us what to do if we got caught in a blizzard.

  “It's early for a blizzard,” Maude said.

  “Stranger things have happened in these parts. Dry weather like this, and then a flood. Early snows. Late snows. Ice storms. You have to know how to manage, that's all. The almanac predicts a big snow.”

  “You a big reader of the almanac?” Maude asked him with a faint challenge in her voice.

  “People pass that kind of information along,” he said easily enough, but I could see they were going to get into it again. They were getting as testy as the Peasley children.

  But then Maude's mood changed. “So tell us about snow,” she said.

  “Find shelter and build a fire, of course,” Marion said. “But if that isn't possible, let yourselves be covered with snow. Keep pushing it away to make a little air space, and shove an arm through to the outside every so often to make a kind of chimney so fresh air can come in. Don't go to sleep.”

  “I read Wild Woolly,” I told him, hoping to interest him in something besides our education. “That's the very thing he has to do.”

  He gave me an impatient look and said, “Here's what to do if you meet up with Indians. Look them in the eye, and go about your business. Don't be bullied into trading. In the old days they didn't know any better, but now they know the white man trades with money.”

  I mentioned another dimer, one that told of renegade Cheyennes that were a present danger on the Kansas frontier. But neither Marion nor Maude understood the value of a good book.

  Marion said, “Most Indians that you might run into these days just want to know that you don't mean harm either. The ones you had to worry about have been sent to Oklahoma or further west or north.” It seemed to me Marion worried about us a lot. But he was still going to send us on our way. I was sorely tempted to point this contradiction out, but chose silence as the wisest course.

  It was still daylight when we settled down to camp. Maude had popped some prairie chickens, and Marion had it in mind to fry them up. He was laying wood for a fire when he told us to stop moving around. He put his ear to the ground.

  “What are you doing?” Maude asked.

  “Shh,” he told her.

  Maude looked the question at me: what is he doing?

  “It's an Indian trick,” I whispered. “He's listening.”

  “Listening to what?”

  “Riders,” Marion said. “Several riders. I want you girls to get on your horses and keep riding south. Due south, you hear, till you reach Independence. Go on now,” he said as Maude and I stared at him.

  He gave Maude a little kick at the side of her boot, and sure enough, we both got moving. I picked up the chickens. I'd nearly plucked them clean. No sense in wasting them.

  “Where are you going to be?” I asked him.

  “Leading them in another direction. Then I'll lose them.”

  “Don't do that,” Maude said, surprising me and Marion, both.

  “Go. There isn't time for talk,” he said. “I won't try to catch up to you, so don't look for me. Remember all the things I told you.”

  “We were going to ride together till Missouri,” Maude said.

  “No, we weren't,” Marion told her, eying the dust cloud we could see just rising in the distance. “But if we were, our time is up. You're standing in Missouri. Now ride. Ride!”

  “Good-bye, Marion,” I shouted as he slapped my horse's rump.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw Marion riding straight toward the dust cloud. At first this confused me. After I thought about it for a while longer, it saddened me.

  WE RODE. WE RODE FAST. DUE SOUTH.

  We rode that way for nearly an hour before we let the horses slow down. Our horses weren't so fast as Marion's, but it wouldn't do to run them into the ground.

  “What do you think?” Maude asked me, now that we'd slowed enough to talk.

  I told her the truth. “I think Marion was afraid a posse was catching up to us, and he didn't even lead them a chase. I think he gave himself up.” I thought it ought to sadden her a little too.

  “He's been too smart for them before,” she said. “Too smart and too fast.”

  “He never had anybody else to worry about before,” I said.

  There was a question that had been knocking around in my head for days, that I hadn't dared ask her. If there was ever going to be the right moment, this was it. “What if Uncle Arlen isn't the kind of man you think he is?” I asked her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It might be like you said to Marion. Maybe he won't want us.”

  “We're his blood kin,” Maude said.

  “So was Aunt Ruthie, and this is nothing against her, but she was much different from our momma, right?”

  “Well, she turned out to be good enough,” Maude said.

  “What if Uncle Arlen turns out to be a lot like Marion, unpredictable-like? Are we going to stay with him? Or do we keep on going?”

  “When did you turn into such a question box?” she said to me. “I don't remember you ever asking so many questions.”

  “I never had so many questions staring me in the face.”

  “I don't know why they would still be looking for him after all this time,” she said.

  “Looking for Uncle Arlen?”

  “Marion. I don't think a posse would follow him all the way into Missouri.”

  “Not all posses are made up of lawmen,” I said.

  “Who, then?”

  “Men whose money he took.” I was sorry as soon as I said it. Maude would never have thought of that. I could see right away she was unhappy to think it could really be a posse of angry men that was chasing Marion.

  “We should go back,” she said without turning her horse.

  “No, we shouldn't,” I told her. It was too late to do anything for Marion. For once, I kept my big mouth shut.

  The night came on cold, making me think about the fact that it could get colder yet. Riding at a trot got our blood moving. We headed due south until the moon disappeared behind a bank of clouds.

  We'd hit a wide piece of pastureland, from the looks of it, which made us feel like we could see for miles. So it was just as well we didn't feel up to cooking the chickens by the time we stopped for the night. I set the saddles over them, hoping they might not get carried off in the night by a fox. We shared a can of beans.

  We no longer had Uncle Arlen's letters, which Maude felt pretty bad about. “I wish we had them so we could give them to him, that's all. It would show him Aunt Ruthie cared enough about him to keep them.”

  “If he's there, we'll find him,” I said, hoping she would tell me that she still felt confident of finding Uncle Arlen. She didn't. We didn't mention Marion to each other, either, although we
slept under his blanket, huddled together for warmth.

  In the morning, we saw what Marion would have called a bump on the flat. It was much nearer than the wagon Marion had pointed out, though, and we could see it was a house.

  “We'll just ride in and ask if we can't buy another blanket. How's that?” I said, thinking of how cold we had been during the night. I kept waking up to wish we had one of Aunt Ruthie's quilts to throw over the blanket.

  Our tattered gloves and scratchy scarves were going to be missed, unless we bought some others. It seemed to me a woman might be willing enough to sell an unused item if she could add some coins to her sugar bowl.

  “Fine with me,” Maude said in a tone that meant it wasn't. She went along with me, though. We rode in, slowing our pace as we got nearer.

  “Something's funny there,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just let me figure it out,” I said, pulling my horse to a stop.

  The house was real nice, painted white, and kept up the way Aunt Ruthie wanted to keep ours, but never could. Lacy curtains in all the windows. Porch on the near side. Big barn out back. Chickens scratching around in the yard. “Is there anything that doesn't look right to you?” I asked finally.

  “Wood smoke,” Maude said after a moment. I had to hand it to her. Maude was quick. “There isn't any. It's cold out here and there's an awful lot of wood stacked right there on the porch.”

  “You think nobody's home?” I started forward again.

  “Sallie—”

  “Right back.”

  I meant it when I said it. That was before I heard cattle lowing in the barn. And there was something else, something heard so low I couldn't know what it was, but it raised the hair on my arms.

  THE CLOSER I GOT TO THAT HOUSE, THE MORE I DIDN'T see any sign of things happening the way they should— no one came out to meet me. I knocked on the door and went in.

  Behind me, Maude yowled. I heard the hoofbeats that meant she was coming after me. Which was fine by me all over. Maybe I should have headed back to Maude instead of going into the house. That would have been the smart thing to do. The kind of feeling I had always made a range rider take warning. But I figured if I wasn't going to be the kind of range rider who was smart, I'd have to be the one who was brave.