The Misadventures of Maude March (23 page)

A path had already been cleared from his barn to his back door. A buckboard, loaded with household furnishings and covered with a waterproof, had been pulled inside the barn. “See here?” he said, as if the buckboard were a piece of evidence. “No one expected this snow.”

“I believe the almanac mentions it,” I said.

“Whose wagon is it?” Maude asked.

“Belongs to the Newcombs,” Ben Chaplin told us. “Folks just passing through. You'll meet them when we get back up to the house. They came close to being caught out in it the way you youngsters were. It's some worse, getting a wagonload snowbound.”

We walked past a herd of sheep standing out in the sacrifice, the area that was always so stamped over that no grass grew there at all. Of course we couldn't see ground. It was just snow and sheep, sheep and snow. “Dogs brought 'em in,” he said. “That's when I knew we were in for some weather. Just had no idea how
much
weather.”

There were no less than thirty mules and horses in the barn. It was blessedly warm, and the work helped to warm us as well. We brushed the mule dry and tossed him some hay, while Ben Chaplin went around telling his hired hands what he wanted done that day.

By the time Ben Chaplin came back to us, my feet had begun to ache like a bad tooth. “Good,” he said when I
complained. “If it took much longer, I'd be worried you were in really bad shape.”

“Where is it you're headed?” Ben Chaplin asked us.

“Texas,” Maude said, and threw a look at me. I didn't need that look. I knew not to tell him where we wanted to go.

“We'll get you outfitted,” Ben Chaplin said. “Plenty of time to talk about that. Nobody's going out of here till the snow melts.”

We were shepherded into the cabin, which was of a good size and smelled good—it smelled of breakfast. Plates of food were set out on the table. I made a meal of bacon wrapped in a flapjack. I asked for cold milk to wash it down. It felt too warm in the cabin after working in the barn, but I was not complaining about it.

Mrs. Newcomb knew right from the start that we weren't boys, but she didn't give us away. The only way we knew she was on to us was the way her eyes laughed and her voice put a question mark at the end of our false names when she used them. She knew the trick to bringing our feet back. She made us soak them in pans of cool water that she added hot water to, little by little, until our feet were warm.

The Newcombs were fine enough company, if it came down to that. He played a mean game of gin rummy and told good stories. She had taken over the job of cooking in return for shelter, and shortly regarded Maude and me as regular kitchen help, which we did not mind in the slightest. Peeling potatoes or washing dishes was a fine trade for bedding down near a woodstove and waking to the smell of coffee on the boil.

We met the hired hands again at dinnertime. They were called Mack and Joe. They didn't talk much, but they
were mannerly enough at the table. We learned they slept in the barn. There were two alcoves for sleeping, one belonged to Ben Chaplin and the Newcombs took the extra.

We would be sleeping in the front room that night, if we didn't mind sleeping on the floor. I was glad we weren't expected to sleep in the barn. I liked being able to sidle up to the woodstove and toast myself.

“I guess this is a regular thing for girls to do if they have to travel alone,” Maude said as we lay in front of the open woodstove and watched the flames dance. Ben and the Newcombs could be heard snoring behind the curtains that shut off the alcoves at each end of the cabin.

“It's funny how the women know and the men don't,” I said.

“Cleomie says it takes one to know one,” Maude said.

“Yeah, but what does it take to know when you ain't one?”

“Sallie, your grammar gets worse all the time.”

“Good, huh?” I said, knowing she didn't think so at all. But I had a notion my grammar wasn't going to be very important where we were going. It would be more important that we could ride long and hard, and survive a night in the snow. I was proud of us.

Maude turned over with an exasperated sigh and fell asleep.

The next morning we joined the men in cleaning out stalls. It was only in the late afternoon that we were freed up to go into the house to help out there.

It came as a nasty shock when Maude laid some newspaper on the table for potato peeling. “Would you look at this?” she said to me in a whisper, and set to reading.

I looked. It was a copy of the same paper we'd picked up at Cleomie's. “Oh, boy,” I said, knowing we were in for some sparks now.

I yanked the paper away and folded it under my arm. “I need the outhouse,” I said. Mrs. Newcomb gave this fast action a surprised look. Being glad suddenly that she knew we were girls, I acted younger than my age. In a mewly voice, I asked Maude, “Would you come with me?”

Once outside, Maude snatched the paper back and strode ahead of me. If we had been breaking snow, she could have taken us all the way to Independence. In the outhouse, we read all about Mad Maude.

“Notorious?” Maude wailed. “Notorious! What is the matter with these people? Do they think they're writing dimers? Don't they feel a responsibility to report the truth? Or don't they even know the difference between the truth and their fevered imaginations?”

“Marion said it's just how they sell papers,” I said. “Don't take it to heart.”

“Are you crazy?” Maude yelled. “Next they'll be telling the world we ride with Jesse James and Cole Younger. Texas won't be far enough for me to go, Sallie. It might not do for me to stop in Mexico.”

“You have to calm down,” I said. “Aunt Ruthie would have told you it will all come out in the wash.”

Maude said, “Aunt Ruthie never said that about anything more serious than a misunderstanding with Mrs. Golightly,” and let the matter drop for the time being. But I knew we would be having this talk again.

I
BURNED THAT NEWSPAPER AND PUT SOME FRESH ONES
on the table, while Maude took refuge in a bad mood, being snappish if she talked at all. She lost Mrs. Newcomb's good opinion, I could see, but there was nothing to be done for it. It was not till the men came inside that Maude settled herself in a corner to look boylike.

They were all in good spirits. The weather had warmed, and they had hopes of a melt. The Newcombs were interested in making the last twenty miles of their journey with furnishings they had gleaned from a relative's attic. Ben Chaplin and his men were cheered to think the winter had not begun in earnest.

Maude took up a game of dominoes with the hired hand named Joe. “That your real name?” she asked him, but of course I was the only one who knew this was just Maude's sense of humor. Joe took the question seriously and told her he was called Joe, but his name was Joseph.

Once they had begun the game, Maude seemed over the worst of the shock she'd had. If she didn't share everyone's cheerful mood, they didn't know it. Later, when we'd turned
in for the night, Maude said, “What if they are all wrong? What if we are trapped here till spring?”

Thinking her mind was on that newspaper, I said, “We don't need to worry. No one can chase after us either.”

“We don't know that. There might be enough of them to break snow without getting so worn out,” she said. “Or they might have snowshoes.”

I had pointed these contraptions out to her in the mercantile the previous winter, mostly to make a point of what I'd learned while reading
Wild Woolly
. I was sorry now for being such a show-off. Maude might never have noticed such things and known what they were for.

“We never actually saw anyone use snowshoes,” I said. “Even if they tried, they certainly aren't going to be able to follow our trail; it's covered over.”

Maude said, “We've come so far. If they had stopped us sooner, even after Des Moines, it wouldn't have been so bad. I still wasn't sure we were going to make it this far. It will break me in half to be stopped now.”

I stewed over this as the fire in the woodstove burned down and the room cooled. I asked, “How far do you reckon we have to go?”

“Ben Chaplin mentioned it today,” she said sleepily. “We're a week's ride from Independence.”

This was better than I had hoped to hear. I could almost get up the gumption to do it. We still didn't sleep for some time after that, because I went on to miss Cleomie. Maude said she hoped Cleomie didn't worry about us in the snow. Or about her mule.

We woke the next morning to the sound of rain falling outside. It was not a hard rain, more of a drizzle. But rain meant warmer air. If it was warm enough to rain instead of snow, it might get warmer yet.

The less fortunate side of this turn of events was that it made for slippery going once we stepped out the door. There was not one of us who did not take a nasty fall on our trip to the outhouse, getting ourselves soaked to the skin in the icy snowmelt.

But soon after breakfast, Ben Chaplin and his boys rigged a rope from the back door to the outhouse, and to the barn and to the water pump, the only places we could want to go.

We went out to the barn and cleaned stalls with the others, leaving Mrs. Newcomb to “enjoy some privacy,” as Mr. Newcomb put it. By this, we gathered she planned to take a bath. For the first time, I wished I wasn't pretending to be a boy.

The rain went on all the livelong day. The snow on the roof had been washed away by evening. The roped-off paths had turned into muddy trenches. The boot scraper was put to frequent use. The next day was the same, and by the end of it, the snow lay not much higher than my knees.

A hopeful look had begun to light Maude's eyes. If the weather continued warm, we might be on our way in another day. Talk around the table reminded us that if it turned cold overnight, all of the outdoors would be a sheet of ice.

This talk did not discourage Maude. She believed it would remain warm. She and Ben Chaplin talked horses, and she arranged to buy some supplies from him as well. She had
twice gone back out to the trees with a nosebag filled with oats and sprinkled the ground for the deer. We were going to need more grain for the horse she bought.

It was well past dinner, as cards and dominoes were being put aside, when we heard the sound of riders. Ben Chaplin looked up from making his nightly mess of crumbling salted crackers into a bowl of milk, a concoction he swore made him sleep sound as a baby.

“Aw, now my crackers will get too soggy,” he said.

Maude's face had turned white at the sound of hoofbeats, and she did not stand to join the hands as Mack said, “We'll take care of the horses, boss, and tell the riders to bed down in the barn. Eat your mess.”

I knew what Maude was thinking. Whether they bedded in the barn, or on the floor near us, we could not avoid running into them.

We had very little time to think about this. The hands went outside, and as Ben Chaplin dug into his mess, a gunshot rang out.

Someone set up a howl, but this was only the background music to the dance being done inside. Ben Chaplin leaped from the table to snatch his rifle off the gun rack. Maude did the same, for her rifle and my shotgun were there too. A blanket covered my saddlebag, and I pulled it all over to where I sat. Marion had loaded the six-shooter, and I was anxious to try it.

The Newcombs ran for their bed. The curtain had not yet been yanked across to hide them when the door burst open and three men rushed in with a great deal of yelling and other noise. One of them knocked Maude against the wall
and knocked Ben's rifle to the floor. That quickly, they had the upper hand.

Another of them motioned with a gun at the Newcombs, to make them go back to their chairs. The third man looked all around the room like he expected someone else to shoot at them.

He did not give me a second glance.

I had jumped up without thinking, without the six-shooter in my hand. I knew this for a mistake, and I felt terrible about it. I was not used to seeing Maude treated in such a manner, that was true, but without the gun I could be no help to her either.

“Anybody else here?” the first man asked Ben Chaplin. I say “man,” but what came clear to me in those moments was that these men were not very much older than Maude. Fat and soft-looking, short, except for the one that was taller than anyone else in the room. That one looked like he'd been run through a wringer to get that stretched. They were all of them soaked and dripping water; that was the next thing I noticed. They were cold, which made some sense of the crazy way they had about them. They were crazed, but they were only boys.

“No,” was Ben Chaplin's answer. “Nobody else.”

And the boy waved someone else in.

The two hired hands came in. Joe was clearly hurt and still making a lot of noise about it. He wasn't able to put one foot down it seemed and was pretty much being carried by Mack and another man whose clothing slapped wetly as he moved. They took him straight over to a chair and set him down in it.

Mrs. Newcomb was crying as loudly as Joe. This noise
added to the general mood, which was one of upset and anger. It is true that in moments such as these, someone making an awful lot of fuss—for no reason at all that I could see, no one had knocked her against the wall—could get herself shot for no reason. I had read of it in my dimers. For this reason, I was grateful that my sister was not the weepy sort.