Maude March on the Run! (21 page)

This had the makings of a lively debate.

John Kirby said, “People will read a book longer than they'll stand still and listen. You need to publish your story. You need me to write it.”

“Why you?” Maude said to him.

“I have been an eyewitness to all that you've done since being broken out of jail, including saving this man's life.”

“That isn't precisely true,” Maude said.

“It's close enough,” he said.

I took his point. If there was more than one crazy woman going around pretending to be my sister, the one thing we needed was someone who could claim they knew the truth. Better he was not a friend of ours, or a relative, like me.

Maude said, “Would you have returned Silver Dollar to Independence and paid us for the buggy?” She took matters of business very seriously.

“I would,” he said, his teeth flashing in the moonlight. “It would be horse thievery if I did not.”

We let the matter drop. It was a long night ahead of us, and tempers shortened by disagreement would not make it easier.

A
“T LEAST WE DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT WATER
for the horses,” Maude said sometime later. The trail had come to a point where it followed the river again, and the water looked like a bright ribbon shining in the moonlight.

“We need water for us,” John Kirby said.

“I've been refilling the rain barrels from the wells we passed,” I said. “We haven't seen one day of rain since we started out.”

“It's a drought,” John Kirby said. “It's in all the newspapers.”

I didn't remember reading about it. “That's not what I watch the newspapers for, I guess.”

Rebecca said, “Is anyone hungry?”

I climbed back into the wagon, where me and Maude dished up ham and potatoes and greens. In a low voice, I said, “We've both found ourselves in a situation of having horses that didn't belong to us and no clear idea how we might return them. We were lucky enough circumstances did the hard part for us.”

“I haven't forgotten,” Maude said.

Rebecca listened in as she moved shakily around the
table, poking forks and knives into the meat on the plates. This didn't worry me. It was John Kirby I didn't want to make part of this conversation.

She made up a dish for the doctor, choosing stewed corn and then fully half of the dried apple pie, mashed with a fork, for he wasn't up to chewing hard.

She meant to feed him like a child but was hardly able to handle the fork. I took this task on; it was not so distasteful as it sounds. He was grateful for the help and admired the apple pie so outrageously that Rebecca laughed.

By then, Maude had eaten and made up a plate for John Kirby. I stood near her and said, “I'm contented that circumstances have put Silver Dollar on the road to Uncle Arlen.”

I didn't need more than that. I hoped that same was true for Maude.

She made no sign of how she felt, only clambered over the wagon seat. “Let me spell you,” she said to him.

“Greens are for horses,” Rebecca said to me quietly when I got around to making up our plates. I agreed with her complete and didn't put them on our plates.

Hoping to be forgiven for having been leery of her earlier on, I said, “I'm sorry. I can't think what got into me.”

She said, “Let us admit we were both badly frightened and call that the end of it.” She patted the place beside herself on the bunk. Together we finished off the ham and potatoes and corn in a companionable way. We were quiet, though, for the doctor had fallen asleep and we didn't want to disturb him.

Much of the night was taken up with Maude telling bits and pieces of our story in answer to John Kirby's questions. He
had a way of turning a story that could polish coal to a gloss. I had to admire the man, and more, I came to realize that he might make the doubtiest parts of Maude's story believable.

Maude didn't admire this entirely. She didn't care for his method nor trust him complete. “This book-writing business has turned your head around,” she said. “These are dimers you are writing, not stone tablets.”

“What you are most in need of is a stone tablet,” he said back to her.

I thought dimers good enough, and one that explained Maude's circumstances would be useful. I climbed out onto the wagon seat to sit between them. I didn't offer an opinion.

Although we traveled westward, the sunrise in the east did paint the sky in a wash of color and shadow. Rebecca had become more like herself as the night wore on, and she was steady enough on her feet to stand behind the wagon seat with me to watch the show.

For Maude missed it entire. It was blue-dark when she fell asleep, leaning back, Rebecca's arms wrapped around her. The last streak of pink was fading when she jerked awake with a sudden sit-up.

“Oh,” she said, looking about us in some relief. “I had a bad dream.”

“I had a good one,” I said, wanting her to forget hers as quick as she could. I told her the one about dancing ring-around-the-rosy with Aunt Ruthie.

Maude's face lit right up. “Why, Sallie, that was Momma. You confuse them sometimes.”

“No, it was Aunt Ruthie.”

“I remember that day, I do,” Maude said. “I wore the green
calico in your dream, didn't I, and you were in my old rose-figured cotton. Those ones you cut the patches out of.”

“I remember the dresses,” I said. “I do think you were wearing the green one in the dream.”

“You remember Momma,” Maude said. She put one arm around me and squeezed.

“You are such good girls,” Rebecca said.

John Kirby snapped the reins a little. Those horses didn't change pace. But I saw the end of his nose was pink, and it struck me he was a sentimental man.

Maude woke me midmorning by standing on the wagon seat. She looked around and didn't see a worrisome cloud of dust being raised in any direction. On her worst day, and maybe this was one of them, she could see further than most people did on their best.

“I don't see any kind of cloud,” she said. “The sky is unbroken by any feature, save the sun.”

This news of more dry weather did not cheer me much.

We weren't stopped for but a moment before all of the horses busied themselves with getting a meal off the grass. My stomach growled at the sound of their teeth grinding.

To take my mind off it, I said to Maude, “You might go back to wearing your work dress and wrap your hair in that dark blue scarf.”

“Only a few days ago, you thought I should wear pants,” she said.

“I've changed my mind,” I said, turning to get my sack. “You look too girly to make anyone believe you are a boy. The same isn't true for me.”

“Just go on being a girl for a time,” Maude said, catching me by the arm. “It will not hamper your grip on a shotgun, but you will surprise the heck out of someone if you need to use it.”

“Don't swear,” I said to Maude, but only to have something to say. “It ain't becoming.” I picked up a blanket and went out the back door.

Maude met me on the ground. “Now that you're a girl again, don't say ‚ain't,'” she said in that lofty manner of she could boss me around. “It will ruin your disguise.”

“Girls can't go everywhere,” I said. While I sometimes gave in to pleadings, she'd pushed me too far with her big-sister ways. “It may prove useful for one of us to be a boy.”

“Now don't go getting rankled,” Maude said as I dragged my boy clothes out of my sack.

“Too late.”

I figured us for doomed if we do and doomed if we don't. Having been a girl and a boy, the only way left to disguise me for sure was to dress me up like Maude's poll parrot, in bright feathers.

The doctor came out of the wagon to walk a bit, leaning a little on Rebecca. John Kirby rushed to take the weight of him. When Rebecca walked toward us, I saw the medicine had worn off. She was pretty much her old self.

The doctor didn't look well, but then he had bruises. Maybe he'd begun to know he would live. There's something to be said for that at most times, but not when the body hurts.

I threw the blanket over my horse and started to unbutton, calling out the rest of my argument, which was mostly for Rebecca's sake. “Besides, this is the prettiest dress I've had since
outgrowing the ones Momma made for you, and I don't care to ruin it by riding it to death.”

Whether she agreed with me or not, Maude came to the other side of my horse to hold the blanket from falling. I stripped my braids and finger-combed my hair, then carefully packed my dress into a saddlebag. For what I'd said was true, it was the nicest dress I'd had in some time.

“Remind me to buy you a hat,” Maude said. “You'll get sunburned if you're giving up that bonnet.”

I figured this for her way of making up with me. Maude burned and peeled, over and over, like Aunt Ruthie. But I'd never been one to do worse than burn one day and turn brown the next, like Uncle Arlen.

By the next day, I was feeling some impatient.

“What about Marion? I don't know what to make of it he has not shown up,” I said when I had a moment with Maude.

She said, “We haven't reached the river crossing yet.”

I dug the map out of my sack and flattened it on the wagon step.

“We've got a town dead ahead of us,” I said. “I'm going in there for things we need, and I'll look around. If there's a telegraph office, I'll send a message on to the crossing.”

“We're low on water,” John Kirby said, overhearing. “I'll take the canteens,” I said.

John Kirby passed me a coin. “Buy a newspaper, if you come across one.”

I put away the map and set out to make a list of everyone's wants. Peppermints I put at the top.

“No soup,” the doctor said, “but something soft enough to chew only a little.”

“Don't stint,” Rebecca said.

“On what?”

“On anything tasty,” she said, fattening my wad of bills.

“We could all go in,” Maude said

“No, we can't,” I said. “We don't have the look of being well matched and the doctor is not in good shape. We'll be talked about.”

Further, the Aldoradondos' horses were unusual, to say nothing of the wagon. Maybe the law would be on the lookout for the wagon.

“How far do you judge us to be from there?” I asked the doctor, showing him the map. He'd done this route before.

“Be careful,” Maude said. “That last place looked rough around the edges before we ran into trouble.”

“Every place out here is rough around the edges,” I said. “I know how to stay out of trouble.”

“I'll go with her,” John Kirby said.

“I'm going alone,” I said. “You should be getting the details of Maude's several misunderstandings with the law.”

“If you're going in,” John Kirby said, “ride my horse. The shoe on his left hind hoof is slipping.”

“He is Uncle Arlen's horse,” I said.

I was rewarded with a look of exasperation. But he was right; we had no time to let Silver Dollar rest up from a sore. That hoof wasn't used to walking bare.

“We can't go on sitting here like ducks on a lake,” Maude said. “Let's ride.”

“
Y
OU'LL LEAVE US WHEN YOU MEET UP WITH YOUR
friend,” Rebecca said. Her voice was oddly toneless.

I said, “I'm sorry for it, but me and Maude have to ride hard to reach our uncle Arlen.”

Maude said, “There will soon come a town that boasts of a hotel where you and the doctor can be comfortable.”

“We would lay over with you until the doctor can travel,” I said, “but we can't.”

“As for riding hard,” Rebecca said, “you'll be striking out across a terribly dry stretch of the Kansas plains. We know how to make it across.”

I looked at Uncle Arlen's map.

“She's right,” I said. “Once we cross the Cottonwood, the next decent-sized creek is four days' ride at the least. It's hard to pack fifty miles' worth of water.”

Maude squinted over my shoulder. “What's this one? What does it say?”

“The Little Arkansas.”

The doctor said, “You must hook up with other riders who have done the trip before.”

Me and Maude glanced at each other. We expected Marion to know the way.

“There's a town up ahead,” John Kirby said.