I doubted they'd believe Joe Harden had changed his ways for once and for all. I told the sheriff it was because Joe died that we came to have the money from a bank robbery in our possession. I said here it is, every dollar, would he please see to it that it got back to that bank in Des Moines?
Of course we couldn't tell the sheriff where he could write back to us. We had to keep our eyes open for a newspaper from Cedar Rapids, announcing Maude's innocence.
I went back to my book to find out if Hardweather could outrun a buffalo. Lucky for him, there was a prairie dog hole about to slow that big fellow up.
“I think we need more than a letter,” Maude said to me, turning away from the prairie. “More than giving them the money.”
“What could be more convincing than the money?”
“I don't know,” Maude said. “Something that doesn't make people feel like they're just taking our word for it.”
On the ride back to town, she said, “I hear people talking over at George Ray's. They talk of Independence as the far edge of the East, rather than the near edge of the West.”
I could not disagree.
“I'm thinking we ought to move further west, Sallie.”
This was the last thing I expected to hear my sister say.
Only a year ago, it would've been me, dreaming about driving cattle to someplace woolly wild, like Abilene. Now I had every hope of clearing my sister's name. I wasn't anxious to go further west just yet.
“I'm surprised at you,” Maude said. “I thought you'd like this idea.”
“I like it just fine.” Though I didn't feel quite as eager to leave Independence as Maude did. I had not had my fill of being part of a family again. “I'll ride with you when the time comes. But right now we have to find out how our letter was received.”
She swept this idea away with a motion of her hand. “The trouble is, newspapers from Cedar Rapids don't often make it to Independence.”
“Let's don't rush into anything,” I said, sounding very like Marion.
“There must be a place where we could live without worry once more,” Maude said.
FOUR
MAUDE WENT BACK TO GEORGE RAY'S, AND I TOOK our horses back to the livery. Marion stood in the arch of the barn door, selling some fellow a horse.
Three good ones were standing there for a look-over. I brought our horses to a stop nearby. One of the finer things of working in a livery is the horse trading.
As I pulled the saddles off my horse and Maude's, Marion named the buyer a fair price. He said he would do some more looking around.
“Hey, Marion,” I said as the fellow left.
“Hey yourself,” he said. “Glad you're back to lend a hand. We've gotten eight more horses in here in the last hour. Some folks're coming in for a big trial.”
“A lot of them are lawmen,” I said, wanting to sound knowledgeable.
“That's true,” he said. “But we were expecting it, your uncle and me. Quit worrying. Maude looks different now.”
Well, there was no one left for me to tell about these lawmen but the chipmunk that lived in the back room, and likely it had already heard all about them from the horses. “What do you need me to do?”
“I'll toss some hay into a couple more stalls,” Marion said, reaching for the currycomb. He waved it to include the boarded horse with ours, saying, “Make them all look like going-to-church-on-Sunday,” and held it out to me.
“I'll take the stalls,” I said, feeling some contrary.
“Suit yourself,” he said with the air of a man who has made the better end of a trade.
I got the pitchfork. “Where is Uncle Arlen?” I said to Marion before I started tossing hay, for the place was quiet when I came in, no sound of metal ringing.
“He got a piece of mail,” Marion said. “Came from somewhere out west, I believe.”
“You don't know where Uncle Arlen went?” For there was nothing coming from out west that he considered to be good news.
“B'lieve he went over to the telegraph office.”
I readied the next two stalls. Tossing hay is not careful work and doesn't take it out of you in that way, but it's enough labor to empty the mind entire. I didn't give the matter any more thought.
When Uncle Arlen did come back, he brought with him an astonishingly large man who wore pants that were held up by a piece of rope pulled over one shoulder. “Beef here is going to do the smithing for a time,” Uncle Arlen said to Marion, pretty much ignoring me.
Uncle Arlen thought nothing of letting me go around dressed as a boy, but he hated letting the schoolteacher think I really was one. I won my point by telling him so long as he encouraged Maude in her disguise he had to let me have one.
It looked to me like he hadn't yet decided what to tell Beef.
Beef didn't ignore me. “And this young'un?” he said, and put out a huge paw in greeting. We shook, and before an awkward silence could fall, he said, “I see you like to dress in boy clothes. My sister used to do the same.”
Uncle Arlen looked more surprised than me. “Sallie's the name,” I said, putting my fists on my hips the way even boys are told not to do. “How did you know so quick?”
“I cain't rightly say. I reckon I'd've taken you for a boy, if not for all those years with my sister.”
“All right, then.” I was fooling everybody else I cared to fool.
But I still didn't know why Uncle Arlen wanted him. “How is it Beef will be doing your job?” I said to Uncle Arlen, then looked at Beef and said, “No offense intended.”
“None taken.”
“A friend needs me out in Colorado Territory,” Uncle Arlen said. My sister came into the livery just in time to hear this, carrying a covered basket over her arm.
“You can't go west,” she said to him.
I agreed. “You don't run into nothing out there but trouble.”
He said, “That's exactly what I expect to find.”
Maude's mouth drew into a firm straight line. She had never, to my mind, looked more like our aunt Ruthie. People say pioneers are the ones with the unmarked graves, and Uncle Arlen had come close to proving the rule more than once.
Uncle Arlen introduced Maude to Beef, who turned pink and called Maude “Miss” and wiped his paw on the bib of his pants before shaking hands with her. He didn't see right through her disguise.
Uncle Arlen and Marion walked with Beef to the back of the livery.
“He knew me for a girl right off,” I said. I lifted the cover and peeked into the basket. Pie.
“Dried cherry,” she said, of the kind. “Uncle Arlen's favorite.”
My sister's hand with baked goods had come to George Ray's attention when he could not get a cake to rise but in a lopsided way. He thought to make her the baker, but she would only consent to do it a time or two each week. Until this week, when so many lawmen had ridden into town, and she took to baking every day.
“George Ray must think he's died and gone to heaven,” I said.
“George Ray has a whole congregation who act like they feel the same way,” Maude said. “I hope I haven't roped and forever tied myself to that bake oven. There's a hot summer coming on.”
I said, “What do you make of this? Uncle Arlen surely won't ride alone.”
“He doesn't sound like he's taking anybody along, Sallie.”
She was right. As I listened to him telling Beef who needed a plow blade repaired or a length of chain forged, which horse needed shoeing, Uncle Arlen kept saying I could help with one thing and another.
After a time, Uncle Arlen turned the livery over to Beef. We went back to the house some earlier than usual, and Marion came with us.
Uncle Arlen had built the place himself, two rooms up and two rooms down, and he was proud of it. Me and Maude had called it home for five months, starting last December.
Maude took up peeling potatoes for supper. There was hardly any talk, except her saying we ought to put eggs to boil with them. Marion hauled fresh
water, and Uncle Arlen stirred the fire.
He was particular about the stove, using birch to get the heat up quickly and a piece of oak to make it last late into the night. Seeing him fuss with it, I said, “Aunt Ruthie missed you worst in winter.”
“I doubt she claimed to miss me,” he said.
He had me there. Truly, when she missed him, it was more in the nature of a complaint. He thought Aunt Ruthie never forgave him for coming along and robbing her of her place as baby of the family before she had tired of it.
I said, “I think she liked you better than she would admit.”
“I'm sure of it,” Maude said. “It's just younger brothers are a trial to their big sisters, as Sallie is to me.”
I didn't feel I was enough of a trial, for she kept me busy, doing one thing and another. Wrap up a wedge of cheese, chop up the last of the ham with some pickle.
These were things we did every day, more or less, and I didn't mind it. This time I knew Maude was making things ready for a journey we weren't a part of, and it bothered me awful.
Once Uncle Arlen had gone upstairs to pack a bag, I said to Maude, “You don't need to make yourself so agreeable.”
“I'm not agreeable. I'm cooperative. Look it up if you don't know the difference.” She had bought me a dictionary for my birthday and didn't lose an opportunity to tell me to look something up.
Uncle Arlen came back down, and Maude asked if there was anything special he liked to have to eat on the trail. He asked for corn bread sweetened with molasses and went down cellar, where he kept a wad of money hidden in a jar.
“You don't need to cooperate before you've lost the argument.”
Maude splashed water, tossing a naked potato into the pot, and said, “We haven't got an argument.”
Marion glanced at us. He sat with a burlap sack half filled with walnuts, cracking them into a wooden bowl. As if to no one in particular, he said, “There are things between men you can't interfere with, and debts is one of them. Debts are binding.”
Maude said, “You see? Girls don't have an argument.”
I said, “Then I think you should go back to your boy clothes.”
I was glad to have the distraction when a boat rat scampered away from the heat of the stove, its tail scraping snakily over the boards of the floor.
Maude, quick as lightning, snatched her rifle from up top of the flour cupboard and shot it dead. She was careful to do this only when Uncle Arlen was at home, letting him take the credit with the neighbors.
I picked it up by its tail. “You ain't going to be able to shoot a one of these all the time Uncle Arlen is gone, or it will make the neighbors think,” I said, and carried it out to the alley.
I did like to have the last word on a matter.
FIVE
GATHERED AROUND THE TABLE FOR SUPPER, WHEN WE ordinarily gave an account of our day, Uncle Arlen spoke first. “You've heard mention of my friend Macdougal.”
Marion looked up from his plate. “The one who found a camel on the Texas plains?”
I said, “Does it need shoes?” And under the table, Maude kicked me in the shins. I wouldn't be run off. “Camels are said to carry men like horses do.”
Uncle Arlen ignored this. “Macdougal started a cattle ranch a few years back. I may have told you.”
“No, you didn't,” Maude said. For someone who'd only this afternoon been talking about going west, she was spider-quiet. I figured her for biding her time.
Myself, I thought of that dream of train tickets and oatmeal cookies. “I believe you could make your distance by train now,” I said, “and no danger of Indian attack.”
“There's an idea,” Marion said. “Been a while since you rode like you were shot out of a cannon.”
“I'd never sit down,” Uncle Arlen said. “I'd pace the whole distance. Might as well ride easy.”
Maude had stopped eating and was biting her nails. She said to him, “What kind of trouble is he in?”
“I'm not real sure.”
Our uncle had somewhere picked up a way of talking that told the high points but didn't fill in a lot of detail. This was fine if the person talking to him was in a great hurry. Otherwise, getting the whole story out of him was like picking buckshot.
I said, “What's it likely to be?”
With a little shake of his head, he told us, “Macdougal sat it out through drought and windstorms and Indian uprisings, and never called them trouble.”
“Sounds like he might should've called the cavalry,” Marion said, and was rewarded with a hard look from Uncle Arlen.
“You said you would never go west again,” I reminded him. “You said it didn't agree with you.”
“Let's don't get alarmed,” Uncle Arlen said. “A turned ankle can be an emergency when you got a place to take care of.”
Me and Maude and Marion glanced at each other around the table, all of us sure it was worse than a turned ankle.
Maude said, “When are you going?”
“Before first light,” he said, and this confirmed our worst fears. He was in an awful hurry to get to the man if he wasn't in any real trouble.
“I'll ride with you,” Marion said.
“Me too,” Maude said at the same time I did.
“I can't take you girls,” Uncle Arlen said. “George Ray counts on Maude. Beef needs you, Sallie, and Marion, both. He won't know which customers are paid up and which ones to collect from.”
“You must have someone along to watch your back,” I said.
“Not necessary,” Uncle Arlen said. “If things are awful bad there in Colorado, maybe I'll just bring Macdougal back with me.”
I pulled out my big guns. “He must be a special friend, if you leave your family behind to visit with him.”
“Once a man saves your life,” Uncle Arlen said, “he's family.”
I opened my mouth to ask about Macdougal saving Uncle Arlen's life, but Marion said, “How long you figure to be gone?” Maude had gotten up to cut the dried-cherry pie, but she stilled, waiting for Uncle Arlen's answer.
“It's about three weeks' travel as the crow flies,” he said. “But I'm no crow, and I intend to travel good roads, so we'll see.”
So it would be three weeks on the back of a horse getting there, and three weeks back again, and however long the trouble held him up. Two months maybe.
“The town is called Liberty,” he said, reaching into his shirt pocket. “I've mapped it, if you want to have a look.”
From this point, we were silently agreed to act like this was no different than when Uncle Arlen rode out to somebody's place to buy a horse. Like he'd be gone for the day.
I made up my mind to look at the right side of this. Uncle Arlen had said to me more than once it was a necessary part of living with other people to get used to the fact girls weren't always their own bosses. He'd said it a time or two to Maude as well. When I asked her how did she tolerate it, she said she had a place in her mind to go to.
I did not have such a place.
I looked over the map, drawn in Uncle Arlen's own hand on a piece of brown paper, and unfolded it, flattening it on the tabletop. He'd drawn a right fine map, marking the creeks and forts along the way.
I took out my pencil and made a copy.
SIX
ME AND MAUDE AND UNCLE ARLEN SAT AT THE table again the next morning, in the half-light of daybreak. We ate soft-fried eggs and yeast-raised biscuits made the night before, Uncle Arlen's favorite breakfast.
“I want to go with you,” Maude said to him, and I perked up. “I don't feel safe here since Sallie came across that poster.”
Uncle Arlen said, “Are you talking about staying out west?” He glanced up as he scraped the last bit of egg yolk onto a piece of biscuit. “You are.”
“I should find out if I could get along there.”
“You can't want to lead Sallie out of safety,” Uncle Arlen said, “any more than I can take you into unknown danger. Can we talk about this when I get back from L
iberty?”
I knew when a horse was dead and so did Maude. She sat at the table, worrying her thumb, while I smoothed my socks and pulled on my boots.
Marion had opened the livery by the time we got there, and he had a horse ready for Uncle Arlen. Me and Maude tied the bedroll and the sack of foodstuffs onto his saddle.
Beef was stoking the fire for a day of bending iron, and Uncle Arlen went back there for a word with him.
“I do hope you girls aren't prone to tearful good-byes,” Marion said to us as we worked, “because I'm not much good at back-patting.”
“Don't you worry about it,” Maude said. “We'll pat each other's backs, and we'll pass you a hankie.”
They went back and forth like this until Uncle Arlen got on his horse. “I don't like leaving you girls alone,” he said.
Maude's chin firmed up. “Sallie and I can take care of ourselves. We've done it before.”
Uncle Arlen looked like he might argue this but thought better of it.
We had no sooner seen Uncle Arlen out the livery door than those boat rats I had seen over at George Ray's came through it, quarrelsome as ever. They wanted to put their horses up with us, reminding us there was a little excitement in town—the trial of the Black Hankie Bandit.
They were only the first of the day. Independence was a busy place, with wagons backed up waiting to turn a corner. But the trial made things worse than any day I'd seen so far. I had to skip school to lend a hand; not a sacrifice. I hoped for a long trial, although many others said they expected to see a hanging that day.
Black Hankie had murdered someone, but the fish were biting and the judge wanted to see it done right soon. A sign had gone up in the window of the courthouse:
HANGMAN WANTED
This made for a general feeling of justice having triumphed, but when those three fellows came for their horses, their spirits were clearly flattened.
Marion was called out to collect a horse, and during this time Beef showed a horse to a sharp-looking fellow, but didn't sell it. I listened in and was convinced Beef knew horseflesh as well as how to bend metal.
Maude March on the Run! Page 2