Maude March on the Run! (24 page)

I felt this was a trick, so I gave Maude's and Marion's names but not my own. He allowed this to pass, which surprised me.

He said, “If you care to ride with us, we'll see you make it
to the old Fort Zarah site at the bend of the Arkansas River. From there you can get anywhere you want to go.”

I said, “What about the Little Arkansas?”

“Why, you've crossed it,” he said. “This summer is terrible dry and it's down to nothing but a creek. The big one has fared better, and you are nearer to it anyway.”

One of the older men hefted a canteen and held it out in Maude's direction. She refused it at first, but Marion took the canteen and asked her to please drink from it.

She took a polite swallow, and then had to be stopped. “It takes some of them that way,” that man said. The boy passed a canteen to me.

We all had a long drink, and I thanked the boy in my deepest voice when I handed the much lighter canteen over to him.

T
HE WATER REVIVED US.

But if I thought we were quiet before, it was because I didn't know the meaning of the word. When we made the occasional stop or walked a bit, not one of those fellows uttered a sound.

Neither did we. After a time, it felt like a contest. Maude's eyes met mine once, her eyebrows danced up and down, and I felt the beginnings of laughter in my belly.

I looked away with a shake of my head. I didn't care to look foolish to them, at least not more foolish than to be out in the middle of nowhere without enough water.

Surely we were a match for these fellows.

We didn't just ride until dark, but rode until the moon was high, and then we rode some more. The air couldn't be called cool or damp, but I thought it easier to ride at night than with the sun beating down on me. At a certain point I was too numb to feel the pain in my feet or that my sit-down had fallen asleep.

It was still full dark when the horses began to show a little
life, with skin twitches and arched tails. “They smell the river,” Billy Bat said.

The moon had moved to the place where it flirts with early morning before
we
could smell it, some freshness that rode the air.

“There's the fort,” Zeb said to us when the sun was on the rise.

I couldn't see it.

“Why is it flying two flags?” Maude said to him.

He gave her a sharp look of surprise. No doubt he met very few people with eyesight to match his. “That other'n is the flag of Kansas,” he said.

Some time passed before I could see the remains of a fort in the distance, let alone the colors flying. The adobe wall was a surprise to me.

Tents had been raised around it, and some shanties built out of scrap wood. The pale covers of a few wagons caught the sunlight.

Dogs barked, warning everyone we were approaching, and a few came out to meet us, hackles standing. Our horses were too tired to be bothered with this and didn't hardly raise their heads.

Only those hunters still sat tall on their horses, riding as fresh as if they were starting out in the morning. “Who goes there?” someone shouted from the protection of those walls.

“Zeb Smith,” the boy shouted out. “He's bringing in some new friends.”

We rode in and straight over to the well. The horses took
to the trough while we hauled up a bucket to drink our fill. We all used the same tin ladle that hung from a string to serve the purpose.

Those two old buffalo hunters became talkative once we reached the camp and they came across some old friends. They called the boy by both his names, Billy Bat, as the talk moved on to what they had seen out there on the prairie. Buffalo was the main thing. Dry was the other. They didn't mention finding us there.

The boy said nothing, but hung on every word the men said.

These folks had settled here permanent from the looks of things. It had the look of a men's camp, though women and children were among them. Everyone was dressed in a practical way that worked, homespun cloth and leather. Nothing was worn for the look of pretty or fine.

We drank more water, tended the horses, and waited for the place to wake up. Daylight broke with an odd splash of purple on the horizon and the smell of coffee and bacon on the air.

It began to look like a small town sprang up here when the rays of the morning sun hit the dirt inside the broke-down walls of the old fort. There was a kind of dining hall, with a few rough tables set up. We were almost first in line for the eats.

I could say this for the cook at that place: she was good. Her biscuits were tender, her eggs weren't fried but stirred fluffy, her fatback was crisp, and her coffee generously sweetened.

Billy Bat sneaked looks at me as he ate, and I behaved as
boylike as I was able. I wouldn't mind it if I could keep him wondering.

I said, “Is this place still a fort? Where's the cavalry?”

“This is the old fort,” he said. “The soldiers moved west to be closer to the Indian fighting.”

There were several Abe Lincoln look-alikes loading a wagon. Amish, I thought, remembering a picture in a textbook.

“Quaker,” Maude said.

“Mormon,” Billy Bat said as the men brought their filled plates to the table.

“Makes me feel like I could use a shave,” Marion whispered, though he wore only a dark stubble on his face.

Something in this simple talk pleased me more than I could say and I laughed, making all but Maude stare at me.

“There's a sound I haven't heard in too long,” she said.

“You could stay here for a piece,” Zeb said to us.

“We can't,” Maude said.

We went over Uncle Arlen's map, which was some tattered by now. We knew we had another two weeks of hard riding to go, but we did keep wanting to measure the distance every few days.

Just as he had done, I'd marked Fort Larned as a place to lay over for a day. “We'll ride on,” Maude said.

I didn't argue this. We were still forty miles off. Beyond that lay a likely five-day ride to Fort Dodge. From there it would be another hundred miles to the western border of Kansas.

“How much further to Liberty?” Maude said.

“Hard to say.” I was using the width of my finger as a ruler.
“Maybe two days' ride.” She fell backwards into the grass, as if she was giving it up. “This trip is a bear, all right,” I said in full agreement.

“A bear?”

I said, “That's what heroes in dimers say. When something tests their mettle, they compare it to the hardest thing to kill, I guess, and that's a bear.”

“Are these the dimers written by John Henry Kirby?” she said. “He will have made that up.” This caught me by surprise and then struck me funny. I fell back beside her and we had a good laugh over this.

We bought foodstuffs and sweet feed for the horses. We filled our many canteens, though we expected to follow the river the rest of the way.

Billy Bat did an odd thing. He brought to me a paper-wrapped parcel I took to be a pencil. He had about him the air of giving me a present and I thanked him more forcefully than I might have, considering I didn't know what he was about.

“My name is Sallie,” I said, and because I was used to saying Uncle Arlen's name now, added, “Salome Waters.”

“William Bartholomew Masterson.” He held out his hand. We shook. He said, “I didn't think you the least prissy for a boy.”

“That is the best compliment of my whole life so far,” I told him. He was smiling as he turned away.

“What is that he gave you?” Maude asked of the package. I opened it to find a peppermint stick. This made us both grin as we broke off a piece.

W
E PASSED FORT LARNED LATE THE NEXT DAY, STAY
-ing close to the river's edge. Marion called the fort a bump in the flat, and Maude said it didn't look much different than the place we had recently left behind.

I said to them it was the most interesting thing I had not seen all day.

To say we enjoyed uninterrupted travel would be stretching it.

We had sufficient water, we didn't go hungry, and we saw no one—which suited us just fine. We talked a good deal, but not without long, comfortable periods when no one had a thing to say. We slept reasonable well, and nobody got snakebit at the water's edge.

We didn't enjoy it because the land had turned into a thing that got on the nerves. The sky hung flat blue and cloudless, just too big all around us. There were no cities, nothing until Fort Dodge to break up the tiresome hours. Nothing by which to measure our progress.

For another thing, there had been no rain and the land
looked parched. Even at the river's edge there was little enough green to rest the eyes.

We began to feel like we were starting off each morning on the same piece of land we had started from the day before. I put marks on Uncle Arlen's map so I wouldn't lose track of the days.

We sighed from pure relief to come upon a short string of wagons one evening, drawn into a hodgepodge cluster. They were fenced by clotheslines full of billowing linens.

“I think we ought to let our hair loose so it will be plain we're women,” Maude said. “You hang back some, Marion. Ride with me, Sallie, so they can see how young you are.”

I said, “Why?”

“They have only ladies' things hanging on the line.”

“Just ride in slow,” Marion said.

I looked at him in a sizing-up way that had not occurred to me in some time. He'd grown a rough stubble after leaving the Aldoradondos, but at Fort Zarah it would have seemed odd to see him clean-shaven among so many whiskered faces. But now he had a short dark beard. To my eye, it made up for the bald spot, but it also made him look like someone to reckon with.

There were several women at work around those wagons. I did notice two men sitting off under a tree on what looked like nail barrels. We aimed ourselves anyway at a big woman wearing a scoop-shovel bonnet and a newly bright print dress.

She was feeding chickens in crates affixed to the sides of a wagon. Two half-sized pink pigs snuffled the ground at her feet. They were mighty clean, for pigs. Maude said to her,
“We'd like to put down our bedrolls near your wagons. We won't be any bother to you.”

“It's just the few of you I see?”

“Three of us,” Maude said. “No drinking, and none of us plays the piano.”

The woman grinned. “Where you headed?”

“Home,” Maude said.

Within the circle of those wagons, women worked together in a clump or sat on the end of a wagon in twos and threes. Two of them were folding some of the dried clothes, which were crisp as thick paper. A couple of women were having a friendly squabble over the vegetables they were cutting into a pot. It felt homey.

“Have you got the strength left to peel some potatoes?” one of them said in our direction.

“I am ever fond of peeling potatoes,” I said, though it wasn't strictly true. It was eating potatoes I was ever fond of.

“You have a place for the night,” the one standing before us said, like she'd taken it upon herself to keep us out of harm's way. “I'm Betsy. This is Lucy, here.”

Lucy was older, and if she was more cautious, she was also more curious. She didn't miss a detail of us.

Maude gave Marion a come-on-in wave. She introduced herself, using the name of Waters, and before she could decide for me, I said, “I'm her little brother, Sallie.”

Betsy took a long look at me, already sure she knew me for a girl. “Sallie is an odd name for a boy, isn't it?” I said to her.

“That it is,” she said as Marion rode near. “If you prefer it, it makes no never mind to me.”

“This is our good friend, Marion Hardly,” I said.

“Ma'am,” he said, and tipped his hat. He hadn't yet gotten down from his horse.

“You all look like some corn bread and buttermilk would go down the right way,” Betsy said. “Between the cow and the chickens, we don't go hungry around here.”

“Picket your horses over there by my cow,” Lucy said.

As me and Marion led our horses away, Maude said, “I hope we'll be good company.”

“Don't worry,” Betsy said. “After a day's travel we ain't so lively ourselves.”

We poured dusty piles of oats into the grass and the horses began to eat. Betsy carried over to us a bowl of horse treats, some dried-out corn bread on the verge of getting musty. If the corn bread was on its last legs, so were the horses, and they greeted this bit of color like pure gold.