Maude March on the Run! (16 page)

I knew she meant for me to look for news. I looked for Marion. No one on the street looked the slightest familiar. I didn't see a newspaper. I wasn't eager to see the paper, truth be told, but I did feel I had to look for it.

A worn copy of
Ulee Derouen, Explorer of the Alaskan Territories
lay beside the register in one place I stepped into. I said, “Can I look at it?”

The fellow behind the counter said, “You can buy it, like four people before you. I'll buy it back for two cents.” I riffled through it to make sure all the pages were there before I paid half the original price.

I was halfway thinking it didn't interest me, for I wasn't one to read happily of cold toes and noses, unless I was to find a Wild Woolly. I'd had my share of breaking through snow to get a morsel of food, and it was my feeling that Wild Woolly knew the truth of such situations.

But then I thought of being without a book entire, and I gave in. I could read fast through any parts I didn't care for. I congratulated myself on retaining the better part of the dollar.

“Did you find a paper?” Maude asked me the minute I got back to the wagon.

“Nope.” It bothered me more we hadn't seen hide nor hair of Marion. “He could pass us right by,” I said to Maude. I didn't have to mention names.

“He told me he would ride ahead of us,” Maude said. “We aren't to meet up again until we have run through this string of towns. A week, maybe.”

A lot could happen in a week. These little towns didn't all of them sit square on the beaten trail, either. I had a sudden picture of Marion and Uncle Arlen and me and Maude all missing each other by scant miles, each going our own way and never coming together again.

Maude said, “Quit worrying. He's waiting for us at a point west of here.”

I felt for the map, the way I did several times a day, and said, “I hope that's the way we're heading.”

R
EBECCA CALLED TO ME FROM THE WAGON. “SALLIE,
come help me with these bottles, please.”

This was only an excuse to get me inside, where she presented me with a store-bought dress; a fine gingham, deep blue, the tiniest checks I'd ever seen. I'd had that bath recent enough I was still reasonable clean. It would have been too poor of me to refuse to try it on.

She'd matched up the dress with a bonnet of white eyelet. It was probably in the nature of a bribe she had also purchased bloomers with a white eyelet ruffle at the hems.

“You knew about this,” I said to Maude, who had come in right behind me. Her eyes were all a-sparkle with a good joke on me.

“Let me help you with the buttons,” Maude said.

I turned so she could get at them. “I didn't think I wanted a dress,” I said, enjoying the particular crispness of the cotton. “But I think I like this one.”

“If you come with me when I go shopping,” the missus said, blushing as if she were the one wearing the new dress,
“we'll look for button-up shoes. Those boots you wear are fine for riding, but not at all pretty.”

I said, “These boots were never meant to be pretty,” giving in to the idea of button shoes as well. I pulled my hair into a short stiff braid behind each ear. I didn't look half bad when I put on the bonnet.

“Thank you, Rebecca.”

It was only too bad to think of getting my whites dirtied by riding the trail. I couldn't bring myself to soil the bonnet, so I wrapped it in my sack and went on wearing my hat over the braids.

I thought our disguise couldn't have been improved much if we had been wrapped in rugs and smuggled away on camels like Poor Lula in the Perilous Fortunes line. I didn't know until the next day something else was happening that helped keep Maude's identity a secret.

A
T MIDDAY, BETWEEN ONE TOWN AND THE NEXT
, I noticed a sizable dust cloud coming from behind us. It wasn't much of a dust cloud, which probably ruled out a posse, and maybe it ruled out Indians.

This didn't make it good news.

“Someone's coming,” I said.

We couldn't hide here in this flat spread of low scrub and half-tall grass. Even if we roughed up the horses in a dead run we couldn't be sure of escape.

“It's almost certainly trouble,” Rebecca said. She put her parasol away.

We didn't stop our progress, which suddenly felt to me awful agonizing slow, but looked on that dust cloud as if it were an oncoming storm we could do nothing about.

Maude had ridden ahead, watching for game. She came back to us. “There are four of them,” she said. “We can make a stand of it, if it comes to that.”

Dr. Aldoradondo's answer was to pull his rifle up to lay over his lap.

Not only did the doctor have a gun, but so did Rebecca. I'd always believed that little reticule of hers to be heavy with coins.

Certainly there were some, because I heard them jingle as she pulled out a tiny pistol meant to shoot at close range. No bigger than her hand, it looked ready to do a damage.

“Do you know how to use that?” I asked her.

She replied, “What a silly question that is,” which surprised me more than a little. She carefully placed one of the folds of her skirt over her hand.

We stood at the ready, for that dust cloud was drawing near.

“No one shoot unless I do,” Dr. Aldoradondo said. “If they want money, I'll give it to them.”

The riders came a-hooting and hollering in our direction. They were a sight and sound to take the breath from the bravest man; not only loud and filthy, but reckless with their horses and ours, jostling us in a practiced manner.

They drew their guns as they pulled in tight around us, bringing us to a halt.

I got so scared I yelled for Maude. If not for the weight of the shotgun in my hand, I would have reached for her as if I were still truly a little sister.

One of the wild riders tried to take Maude's rifle, but she turned her horse away from them, which put the rifle out of reach. I'd been holding my shotgun pointing down my leg, so they may not have seen it at all in the crush.

“Reach for the sky,” one of them shouted in the midst of all the dust and yelling. “I am Mad Maude!”

“You?” Maude said to this pretender. Maude's voice shook, but only on that first word. “You're the one with her face on all the wanted posters?”

The woman met this with a horrible grin. “That's me.”

“You can't be,” I said, because one of her gang had stilled his horse, taking an interest in my Maude's willingness to answer back. “Maude March is a girl, and you are some years past that.”

She was a woman as old as Aunt Ruthie had been, if she was a day. She was missing a front tooth.

Her cohorts ceased their mindless caterwauling, since no one was bothering with them much. One of them said to the other, “What's she saying?”

I added, “You haven't the neighbor of a resemblance to Maude March,” and my Maude promptly swatted me to hush me up.

“How do you know that?” the pretender said.

“I have seen posters.”

“You can't make no never mind of those posters,” she said. “The people drawing them haven't seen me.”

“Her name is Maude,” one of her fellow riders added. “I've knowed her my whole life.”

“Then what has she done that's so terrible?” I asked him.

“She has been chased by two posses this week alone,” he said. “She has outrun them once and outwitted them the other.”

His Maude was far off the mark, but his manner was that of one friend standing by another, and I liked him for it.

“Stand and deliver!” another of them yelled, trying to get them back on track.

One of them reached for Rebecca's reticule, which was looped over her wrist under that fold of skirt. He reached for it roughly, which was no doubt how he believed these things ought to be done.

I couldn't be sure how the next event came about.

Maybe Rebecca shot him on purpose. But maybe the outlaw jerked her so hard she couldn't help it, and he shot off his own earlobe.

This happened quickly, and without any chance of Rebecca taking aim, so it was lucky for him the bullet did not land somewhere more likely to kill him.

But an earlobe is a surprisingly messy place to get shot.

All of us got sprayed a bit with blood as his horse startled and turned away from the sudden shouting and jostling and brandishing of guns. No more shots were fired, probably because we were all afraid of hitting one of our own in such close quarters.

Right in the midst of this, the one who claimed to have known this Maude pretender all his life groaned and slid from his horse. It brought us all to a standstill.

Although his shirt was sprayed with blood, it wasn't his own blood. There were some glances all around.

“Winslow!” The pretender holstered her pistol and slid off her horse to get to him. He was clearly a favorite with her. She delivered to him a swift kick. Nevertheless, he lay on the ground, his eyes open and glassy, like a dead fish.

“He cain't take the sight of blood,” she said sadly. “It's his weakness.” At this reminder, the actually injured man commenced to howling.

The “stand and deliver” fellow grabbed the pretender's
horse's bridle and kept it from running off. Horses don't care for yelling, which is why a person does it to get them to run faster. In fact, all of our horses needed handling as the smell of blood reached their nostrils.

The earlobe was bleeding something ruinous. As a sight, that fellow was enough to turn the stomach. Despite this I breathed a sigh of relief. Better mortally injured than already dead.

“The tip end of his ear is gone,” the pretender said.

A voice rose over the new confusion of voices that sprang up. “I'm a doctor. Let me tend to his wound before he bleeds to death.”

Mad as this Maude claimed to be, she knew a generous offer when she heard it. She waved a hand in a “come over,” and Rebecca took the reins while the doctor climbed to the ground.

“Hold your hand down tight over that ear,” the doctor said. He took a moment to wash his hands, dipping into the rain barrel.

While he was about this, I took Rebecca's place so she could do more important things. Under the eagle eye of one of those fellows, she rummaged through a leather bag to find a needle and thread.

She found other things there, too. She gripped Maude by the chin and passed a bottle under her nose. My sister wasn't easy with the sight of blood, and looked pale.

Then Rebecca took a bracing whiff of the stuff herself.

The pretender pressed against the ear as the doctor made ready to sew that fellow up. He didn't stop howling, but he didn't flinch, either.

I flinched. It didn't seem to me to be a natural thing to take stitches where earlobes used to be.

While this was being done, the pretender looked around at us and said, “I guess we cain't rightly rob you after you fixed up Heck thisaway.”

“I wouldn't need fixing if it weren't for one a them shooting at me,” Heck said. Whined, more like. I wanted to kick him.

“Nobody would've shot you if you were doing us a good turn,” Maude said. Our Maude, that is. “I could do with a cup of coffee.”

“Now there's an idea,” the pretender said.