The Misadventures of Maude March Page 5

  One item had slipped my mind entirely: a canteen. “We're going to have to travel with our noses trained on the scent of water,” I said. I did feel a little stupid.

  Maude reached over to get a drink. Something jumped out of a patch of weeds and landed on her hand. Maude shrieked and jumped up and all around—swearing loud enough to be heard in Missouri, which was still some distance away—and spooked the horses into jogging a little distance away.

  “It's only a toad,” I said when I knew for sure. Startling, I'd give her that, but harmless.

  “I thought it was a snake,” Maude shuddered. “Let's eat on the go,” she said, picking up the bread and cheese. Maude disliked snakes something fierce.

  A bull snake had once fallen from an overhead beam to land right in her dinner plate, and she had never forgotten the experience. As we walked slowly toward the horses with offerings of handfuls of grass, I blamed that snake for ruining this meal.

  “It wasn't a snake, though. A toad can't do you worse than a wart,” I said. “If it comes back. Let's sit and eat.”

  “My appetite is spoiled now,” she said when we had the horses well in hand.

  I didn't much want to get back on that horse. Not right away, anyway. But Maude had her ways. She pinched my shoulder. Pulled my hair. Short hair hurt worse than long, I couldn't say why. So we did go.

  It might have been easier on the horses if we'd ridden single file, taking turns at breaking the path. But Goldie wouldn't tolerate walking behind Flora, and Maude couldn't tolerate riding behind Goldie. “That horse has a digestive problem,” Maude said, showing some delicacy.

  “She does that,” I agreed. So we rode side by side. The hours stretched before us as long as the miles, and we resorted to rushing the horses every now and again to feel that we were making distance. But we couldn't rush them long, nor did we want to, for easy riding was what we did best.

  “Hey, you know what I picked up?” I said at the first hint of late afternoon light that set a rosy glow over the land. “That packet of letters that Aunt Ruthie had in her desk.”

  “Those could have been Momma's, you know,” Maude said. “It was her desk too.”

  “Let's just take a look at them when we stop for the night,” I said.

  So we started to watch for a place to camp, but we happened on a well-traveled road bordered by a split-rail fence. “We'd better find a place a little less popular,” Maude said.

  We tried, but we found another road shortly and then another. “Awful lot of people must live around here,” I said.

  We soon found this was true. We pulled up outside a town. Nothing fancy, no boardwalks. Just eleven or twelve weathered gray buildings scattered about, with hard-worn paths running between them. Even though it was fairly dark by then, suppertime on a Saturday, the town was bustling with wagons and horseback riders.

  So many windows were lit it looked welcoming. Or maybe I was just tired of looking at short grass and long horizons. “We need a canteen,” I said.

  “We can't just go riding in there. What if the Peasleys had the sheriff telegraph all over the place? What if they're watching for us here?”

  “They aren't watching for two boys,” I said. “They aren't watching for one. I'm going to ride in.”

  “No, you're not,” Maude said.

  “Yes, I am,” I said, not wanting to be treated like a child. I would have begged and pleaded, but that didn't sit well with my picture of myself as Sallie March, Range Rider. I had packed us up for this trip almost single-handedly, and I was leading the way to Independence, Missouri. Surely I didn't need Maude's permission to buy a canteen.

  Maude said, “You can't go in there windburned and riding bareback like an Indian. People will ask questions.”

  I had not thought of this.

  Besides, we needed to find a place to settle for the night. And from the looks of things, that wouldn't be an easy place to find.

  THE AIR COOLED QUICKLY ONCE THE SUN STARTED TO GO down. I might have been tempted to wrap a blanket around my shoulders and travel on, but Maude looked weary, and I figured we shouldn't push the horses any harder unless we had to.

  Besides, I wanted a look at those letters.

  We found a stand of cottonwood and willow trees for shelter. If it proved to be a horrible cold night, at least the wind wouldn't get at us so bad. We ate bread and cheese again, being afraid to draw attention with a campfire so close to town.

  All day long I'd been thinking admiring thoughts about the heroes in my dime novels, about the real men who rode like this day in and day out. No one ever wrote about how sore their heroes' butts were, or how their feet swelled after hanging at the side of a horse for hours. Jumping down from the buggy pony sent sharp pains shooting up my legs.

  I tethered the horses to a branch, but Maude wouldn't rest until she'd cut another tether rope from the clothesline and tied Flora to her ankle. She insisted I do the same with Goldie.

  “I don't know that I want this pony tied to my ankle. If she decides to run, she could drag me for miles,” I pointed out.

  “You just told me they weren't going to get loose,” Maude said to me.

  “They aren't, but you want them tied to our ankles in case they do. So I'm just saying what would happen if they do. What mine would do. I grant you, that old plow horse isn't going anywhere.”

  Maude got a stubborn look. “I can't rest till I know we aren't going to lose these horses. If we don't hang on to them, we'll die out here.”

  I wasn't sure this was true. Not till we got further from civilization anyway. But in the interest of peace and quiet, I tied Goldie to my ankle. I gave her a long lead so she could graze over some distance without bothering me.

  I dug those letters out from the bottom of the sack. “There are only five, but they're all addressed to Aunt Ruthie,” I said.

  “Let me see,” Maude said, so I handed her one after I looked to see if it had a return address. It did not, and neither did the next letter. I opened it anyway and looked to see who it was from.

  “Signed 'A.' No return address in here anywhere,” Maude said as I was finding the same thing. She went on reading while I went through the letters.

  “Here it is,” I said, unable to hide my excitement. “This one has the earliest date, and it's from Uncle Arlen. I think this postmark says 'Independence.' ”

  “Give it to me,” Maude said, but I threw her the rest of the packet. This was my find. “He says, 'Hope this letter finds you and the girls well. Have finally found someone I can work for and may not get shot up in the course of the day. You were right, as you often are, no one gets rich here without working.' ”

  There was more, but I skipped to the bottom where it was signed, “Your brother, Arlen.”

  “Doesn't that sound like he wanted Aunt Ruthie to come along with him?”

  “I wonder if he wanted her to bring us along,” Maude said.

  “He asked after us.”

  “Yes, and here, this one says he has enclosed money to help pay down the house.” Maude glanced at me. “He sounds like a nice enough fellow to me.”

  We hurried through the remaining letters because it was getting too dark to make them out easily. In one, we found bad news. Maude read, “'I cannot say exactly where I shall end up, but will write to you once it is decided. I would write more often if I thought you welcomed my letters. Do not worry about me, for I am more of a man than you remember.' He sounds sad, doesn't he?” Maude said.

  To my ears, he sounded like a man about to move on, and I didn't like the sound of that at all. I slumped into a position best suited for staring into the darkness, when it came on full.

  Opening the last letter, Maude said, “Here he says he got shot full of arrows.”

  I sat up straight. “Let me see that.” Sure enough, he wrote: “The Indians have been rough around here. Last week I took six arrows in the back and would've died but for the fact that an army patrol rode over the hill in time to run off my attackers.”
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  “Not much to go on,” Maude said as I skimmed through the rest of the letter. There was not so much as a hint of where this happened.

  “It has the same postmark,” I said, inspecting the envelope. I could just barely make it out.

  “But then at the bottom of the letter he says someone is going to mail it for him, as he isn't moving around much just yet. They could have carried a letter back to Independence to be mailed, couldn't they?”

  “I'm too tired to wonder,” I told Maude.

  I found rocks in my mattress when I stretched out, so I knew it was going to be a poor night's sleep. I wondered why the likes of Joe Harden never complained about bruises. But then, that's what made them heroes, I figured.

  “Sallie,” Maude said. She lay beside me, and the horses munched steadily, making a soothing sound. “We'll be fine, even if we don't find Uncle Arlen. But somehow I think we will.”

  “You don't have to treat me like a child,” I said.

  “I'm not. I'm telling you I have faith in what we're doing. That we'll be okay, no matter what.”

  “All right, then.” I wished I felt some of the same faith, but mainly I felt cold and uncomfortable.

  “You're really good at this,” Maude said, somewhat reluctantly. “I want you to know I see that.”

  Before I could think of the right thing to say back, something humble but in full agreement all the same, she said, “We have to find Uncle Arlen. We have to.”

  “We will,” I said, realizing she felt miserable too.

  “You think so?”

  “Yes,” I said very surely. Maude didn't say anything right back, and she didn't say anything for a while and neither did I, waiting to hear what it would be if she did.

  She began to snore.

  I wished I could sleep so easily. In sleep I wouldn't still notice how hard and full of small stones this soft-looking grazing land had turned out to be. But I lay awake for a time. It was a lucky thing I did because that buggy pony did act up. Instead of lulling us to sleep with the sound of steady chewing, both horses acted some bothered, and started blowing through their noses, and brought Maude and me quickly to sitting up.

  I was struggling to get the rope off my ankle, and telling her to do the same, when an old dog wandered into view. I stood and quieted the horses as the dog made one trip all around us. “It's afraid we'll throw rocks or something,” I said to Maude.

  “Maybe it's wild,” she said. “Maybe it's wondering if it ought to attack.”

  “If that were so, it would snarl,” I said, making a guess. Aunt Ruthie had never allowed us to have a dog, so the truth of the matter was, we were neither one real sure of how a dog would act. “Give me a piece of cheese.”

  Maude rummaged in the bag, cut a piece, and tossed it to me. The dog watched this with interest but didn't come any closer. I held out the cheese, and still he wouldn't come.

  I walked out nearly to him and set it on the ground. When I walked away, he took it. “Give me another piece,” I said.

  “That cheese is to fill our bellies,” Maude said. “Let him go home and eat.”

  She had the right of it, so I didn't bother her for more. But the dog slept in that spot where I laid down the cheese. The horses had calmed down enough that we could tie them to our ankles again.

  This time when I laid my head down, I slept.

  Maude woke at first light.

  Those horses were better than roosters for waking a body up, yanking me this way and that. I'd been awake on and off for better than an hour but reluctant to leave the blankets. In between the awake moments, I'd had bad dreams.

  “Get up, lazybones.”

  “I'm awake,” I said, still not making a move to get up. The morning was chill. Heavy dew had dripped off the leaves of the trees and wetted down the blankets. My stomach felt like it hung in my middle like an empty sack. I was in no mood for roughing it. I wanted the smell of biscuits to be on the air and the sweet taste of bacon in my mouth, and I didn't want to rustle up a fire to get it.

  Maude gave me a smart kick to my rump.

  I put one arm out to test the weather and found it every bit as unpleasant as I expected. “Here,” Maude said, putting a fork in my hand. “I thought we might as well finish off this cheese today. But then I found pie. You crazy girl, you brought pie?”

  “Doesn't seem so crazy at just this minute.” I sat up, still rolled in my blanket.

  “It's broken up some, but the forks don't care,” she said. “Eat up.” We ate mostly pie, saving the rest of the cheese and one pie for later.

  But we felt rich enough to give the dog another piece of cheese, and he followed us for about half an hour. Maybe by then we were taking him too far from home, for I looked back once to see he'd gone. I was sorry to see him go.

  I felt the lack of company, although Maude rode alongside me. Even days spent in only Aunt Ruthie's company had been more filled with the doings of the world around us. Out here, it was hard to be sure that somewhere else people were working together, sitting down together, someone was probably getting a tooth pulled. I decided I was lucky not to be that one. For her part, Maude could tolerate going for hours without saying a word.

  At first I worried that she was let down by the letters, which we'd read through once more before starting out. We had no idea where Uncle Arlen might be found; we had only the strongest feeling that he'd already moved further west when he wrote the last letter. We had agreed not to worry about it till we got to Independence. “One worry at a time,” Maude said, echoing Aunt Ruthie's advice on meeting trouble.

  We rode all day at the same good clip we'd done the day before. We moved north of any wagon tracks we came across. I didn't want to ride north. It made no sense to me, but Maude was of the firm opinion this was the same thing as moving to higher ground. Anyone could see the land was flat, but logic was not a partner to Maude's opinions.

  I agreed to move a mile north, not because I believed we could see around us any better but I figured the further from the wagon trail we got, the fewer people we'd meet. Then we traveled due west for a while. I turned us south again as soon as I could manage to do it gradual.

  “We can't go around dressed like this and calling each other Maude and Sallie,” Maude said.

  She had been quiet for so long, we both had, that her voice came as a surprise. “Why not?” I said, slowing up a little to make it easier to talk. “That's our names.”

  “We might come up on some other people, and we do want them to believe we're boys,” she reminded me. “We ought to get used to calling each other something else.”

  “What do you want to be called?” I asked.

  “Something that starts with an M. Monty?” “Monty?” I didn't much care for the sound of it. “I think I'd get confused and call you Maude in a heated moment.”

  “A heated moment?”

  “Like if we were under attack or something.”

  “I doubt it will matter if we're under attack,” she said in a tone that reminded me of Aunt Ruthie. A moment later, she asked, “What name do you suggest?”

  “How about Pete?”

  “Only if I get to call you Repeat,” she said.

  “I like Johnnie. How does that hit you?” I said, thinking I would take that name.

  “I'll be Johnnie, you be Pete,” she said.

  I didn't want to be Pete, but I only frowned and said, “Let's think about it.”

  I kept an eye on the sun, but I could only make the sorriest guess which direction we were going. Every so often I had to ride ahead a little to steal a look at the compass. “Why do you keep doing that?” Maude complained after one of these forays. “It makes me nervous.”

  “I'm learning to ride faster on bareback,” I said. It wasn't an out-and-out lie. “If we got chased by something, I'm not sure I could stay on. Why does it make you nervous? You can see me the whole time.”

  “I don't know; it just does.”

  “Well, get over it.”

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sp; We didn't stay mad at each other the way we once would have. We couldn't. We only had each other, and we knew it.

  BY LATE IN THE DAY I HAD GROWN USED TO THE LONELY feeling it gave me to never see another soul. We had been moving at a trot for some time. I didn't like bouncing around so much in a saddle, but it was some worse riding bareback.

  I spotted a stand of trees maybe a mile or so away. “Let's head for those trees and set up camp.”

  “I'm not so bone tired today as I was yesterday,” Maude said.

  “I'm bone sore,” I said, and scootched around a little on the horse. We'd only recently nibbled at the last of the cheese as we rode. Now I wished I was hungry. When my belly was full and feeling good, I noticed my every other complaint all the more.

  “We sound like Mrs. Golightly in the middle of winter,” Maude said to me, “nursing her achy bones.”

  I reached into my pocket and brought out a peppermint candy. “Want one?”

  “Oh,” Maude said in a little-girl voice. Tears stood on her eyelashes, but she didn't say anything about Aunt Ruthie's fondness for peppermints.

  “We don't have many,” I said, reluctant to use them up too quickly. “Maybe we ought to save them for special occasions or something.”

  “I will always buy peppermints,” Maude said fiercely. “No matter what. I would steal them, if need be.” I couldn't imagine Maude stealing anything but food and horses, and I had to bully her to get her to do that. But I decided to let the remark pass.

  “I want to fry up those chickens,” Maude told me as we settled on a place to camp for the night. “Before they spoil.”

  While the chicken sweetened the air, she got me to help her collect greens to boil up. They were not the sort of thing to grow on a person, even with the right gravy of bacon fat and onion, which Maude said she wouldn't waste on them even if she had the onion. She boiled some of the eggs over the same fire that fried the chicken.

  “You'd make a decent range rider,” I told her.

  “Don't look now,” she said, “but I am a range rider. And so are you.”