Maude March on the Run! (11 page)

“Maude,” I said in surprise.

Then the water turned pure dark. It did give me pause.

“You'd better come up for air,” I said.

She reared up with a sploosh. “I might just as well have used the boot polish,” she said tearfully, and dunked her head again.

I started thinking up things to say right off. “It's supposed to be darker,” I said when she came up for air again.

“Not black,” she said.

“It's just wet.”

Maude grabbed the soap and lathered up and rinsed. I handed her the shirt we were using for a towel. She rough-dried her hair, or as near as she could come, considering the shirt was already quite damp.

She held up the piece of mirror. She was wearing the look of a tantrum. “It'll dry lighter,” I said in some desperation.

“Sallie, why don't you go on outside for a while?”

“They only had brown, Maude. She didn't tell me—”

“I just need to get used to it,” Maude said. “Alone.”

“It ain't that bad,” I said. “Besides which, if it don't wash out, it'll grow out.”

“Just go on outside.”

“You ain't going to cry, I hope.”

“If you say ‚ain't' to me once more in the next hour, I'm going to slather
you
with boot black.”

I went out to where Marion was sitting on the front step. “How'd it go?”

“Her hair's dark,” I said in the tone of dire news being given.

“What she needed,” Marion said, as if that had anything to do with it.

“She ain't exactly happy about it.”

“Well, it's just temporary,” he said.

I decided not to go over that territory again.

The horses had eaten everything they liked out of the fenced-in place. Marion had picketed them outside the fencing to graze. He was reading the slice of a dimer I had left on the floor. That is, he held it upside down.

This surprised me. “Why, you never said you couldn't read.” Though now I thought about it, he'd several times done a fair job of getting me and Maude to read for him.

He went pink. “I don't care to let on to Maude,” he said. “Your aunt having been a teacher and all, Maude thinks everybody reads.”

“She shoots better than me,” I said, “but she doesn't look down on me for it.”

He looked away.

“How'd you read the map last night?” I said. “How did you do the lettering?”

“For the letters, I followed the lines,” he said. “I don't have to read letters to read a map.”

“Here, if you're going to make a secret of it,” I said, turning the dimer right-side, “you have to know the top from the bottom. See this letter like a pointed hat? That's an A. And this here is T. Look for them and make sure they look right to you.”

“Thank you.”

“I can teach you to read when Maude isn't listening in,” I said.

“I'll help you work on your aim,” he said. “We should have plenty of time to practice out there in Colorado Territory.”

I showed him a few more letters and had him find them on the page, sounding them out. He picked out a couple of words all by himself. He was getting it in no time at all. Don't believe what they say, that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks.

As for my aim, it was better than I let on. I'd discovered I only had to look and shoot, the way Marion had once told Maude to do. It was just I didn't like to hit birds and such.

Maude came out of the house ten minutes later, ready to ride. Her hair wasn't pulled up to the top of her head but hung straight at the sides of her face.

“Well, now,” Marion said at the sight of her. “That is some darker all right.”

Maude didn't reply.

Once her hair was darkened, I should have been satisfied.
But I wasn't. The stuff didn't give her a natural brown color but one with a strange purplish cast. She suddenly looked to me more like those wanted posters than ever she had. Like she was drawn in dark pencil. This didn't strike me as a good idea, although I didn't have a better one. Not just yet.

I reached into the sack for the kerchief.

Marion was thinking along the same lines, for he handed his hat to her. “Keep the sun off,” he said, and Maude took it without a thank-you. It came down over her ears, which was an advantage. We didn't mention this.

We rode into a sunset made up of pearly pink clouds and a burning sun, prepared to stay on our horses through the night.

A
T FIRST MARION FELT WE SHOULDN'T RIDE BY DAY,
and don't get close to any encampments by night. In this way, we saw no one on the trail. We didn't see trouble, which counted for a great deal.

At the end of one night's travel, we couldn't feel comfortable sleeping in daylight. After the horses had a good feed, we pushed on, staying off-trail and following the water.

Maude began to complain once more she lacked a rifle.

“We shouldn't shoot game,” Marion said. “Nor do much cooking, unless we run out of store-bought. The smoke and the smell of it may draw unwanted attention.”

“Then we'll need more canned beans,” Maude said.

Not much later, we came upon the remains of a small mule train. Arrows scatter-marked the sides of the wagons. It wasn't a recent event; the animals had dried and shrunk to a thin stretch of leather over the skeletons.

“I still need a rifle,” Maude said. “‚Should not' is a sight different than ‚cannot.'”

The next break in this landscape was a small town called by a woman's name, Eudora. Marion said I should ride in to
get Maude a gun. This was no sooner suggested than she worried aloud if this was a good idea after all.

“If a posse comes across us,” Marion said to her, “put your hands in the air. But you can't protect Sallie by being defenseless.”

I went into the store looking to get her the selfsame kind of rifle we had left hanging on the kitchen wall in Independence. As it happened, the fellow had a Springfield carbine up for sale.

I hefted a few likely ones, shut one eye, and squinted through the sights of two of these. When I picked up the Springfield, it was with the air of a man convinced he would find nothing at all that interested him.

Right out, he named me a reasonable price.

When I tried to talk him around to more reasonable yet, he threw in a box of cartridges, and we called it a deal.

I got hats to fit me and Maude and better bedrolls for all of us. I got corn bread and soft cheese for two days. Marion was partial to it. We had some beans left, which would have to do, for their cans were dented and I would not buy them.

I got a dimer,
Olen Rushforth, Texas Ranger.
I considered this a wise purchase, since we were on the run from the law. I learned practically every useful thing I knew from dimers.

I rode away feeling I had better enjoyed wanting to ride into a town than being there. At this, I was more fortunate than Maude, who didn't get to see that much.

“Lawrence is ahead of us,” she said, consulting the map. “It's a big enough city for me to ride through unnoticed.”

Marion said, “It's a big enough place to have its own newspaper.”

Maude gave him the look of, So what?

“A place with a paper has newspaper
men,
” he said, “who are by their nature the nosiest of people.”

“I just thought of something,” Maude said. “Uncle Arlen could see a paper before we reach him.”

“It didn't sound to me like he has time for newspapers,” Marion said. This didn't make us feel any easier, so we picked up the pace some. We rode around the outskirts of Lawrence. There was enough traffic on the road to scratch Maude's itch to see the inside of someplace. One woman looking at her with curiosity was all it took.

Not long past it, we didn't have a river beside us anymore.

No river. No trees. No clouds.

No hope of a town in the next few miles.

“These horses need to rest,” I said as the afternoon wore into evening. Uncle Arlen didn't think much of pushing horses hard, and I didn't care for it, either. “They're getting too tired to grab a mouthful of grass.”

“We've done nearly thirty miles since I found you,” Marion said. “They've earned a good feed and a fair rest.”

Thirty miles was a drop in the bucket, but I didn't say so.

Not long after, we stopped for the night. I pulled Uncle Arlen's map out of my pocket and tried to measure out three weeks of travel on it. We ate from our supplies and tried out our new bedrolls. I suspected they were fine, as Maude fell asleep before I could ask.

We passed three days in this manner, uneventful. Then Maude ran out of peppermints. She started to complain. We passed a place too small to boast of township but likely to have candy to sell.

Marion wouldn't agree to go in for something we didn't need. We needed beans, but I kept quiet.

“I don't see how it looks safer to you that Sallie can go into town to buy dimers, but I can't get a twist of peppermints.”

“You
had
peppermints,” I said. “You ate them.”

Maude showed her teeth at me, saying, “I had help.”

I said, “Not that awful much,” for she had been eating them quietly for a time before me and Marion asked for any.

“Here now, let's have an end to the bickering,” Marion said.

“We aren't bickering,” Maude said with some venom.

Marion did not give in to the peppermint argument, but Maude did not leave off wanting to go into town.

At first I felt some satisfaction in this, for I'd always thought I ought to be the better range rider, what with everything I learned reading dimers and all.

I had to admit, Maude had unexpectedly turned out to have more grit and gumption than I had credited her for. But I saw now that she didn't have the pluck to make it over the plains. She was probably going to turn out to be like one of those pioneers who finished the trip with glassy eyes and dull expressions, who had lost touch with something of themselves they needed.

The moment this thought was finished, I said, “Maude has to get into a town now and again. This range-riding is not for everybody.”

Maude shot me a look, but let the remark stand.

Marion said, “If we were to ride a little off-trail, and come across some small burg, we might could send your uncle a telegram. Have it waiting for him at Fort Dodge.”

“I'll do that,” Maude said.

Marion said, “I can wire him. Tell me what you want to say.”

“You can't leave me to stand out here in the grassland by myself,” Maude said in a more reasonable tone than she had used in some hours. “Something might get me.”

“It would have to be something with great big teeth,” Marion said.

Maude looked a little flattered by this.

Not long after, we stopped beside a creek for the night. We planned the telegram over and over.

“We have to tell him we're coming along behind him,” I said.

“That's my worry,” Maude said. “I can't feel it's right to slow him down.”

Marion said, “We have to warn him Macdougal's one man down. That'll keep him on the move.”

It may have been we all slept badly for we were up early the next morning. We weren't long on the trail before Maude took up whining about going into town. She wanted to send that telegram. She wanted peppermints. She wanted to see a paper.

I wanted to buy beans and potato hash.

We didn't see another town until mid-afternoon. Maude said, “There are a few small houses in the distance.” My stomach stood up to take a look, was how it felt to me.

“All right, then,” Marion said at last. “I need to trade my horse in. It's looking a little fagged and we can't favor it.”

“We're low on water,” Maude said, not wanting to let the thing go.

After a time, I saw these houses stood on the fringe of a larger town. We didn't stop at any of the homesteads, not even to fill our canteens. Our faces had gone unwashed, and we couldn't be certain of the reception we would get.

We let the horses slow to an ambling walk so they could nibble on dandelions as they found them. In this way, we gave ourselves time to sort out the kind of town it was.

Industrious, since people had gone to the trouble of putting up little whitewashed fences with roses tumbling over them. There was corn, beans, and squash growing tepee-style in another yard.

Prosperous, because the sow in a nearby pigpen had half a dozen little ones rooting around. As we passed another such house, Maude pointed out a sign on the gate. It read,
B. GOOD & KIND.
“Somebody's name, do you think?”

I said, “Maybe the preacher lives there.”

An older lady popped up from behind the fence. “Nope, not the preacher,” she said.