Maude March on the Run!

by Audrey Couloumbis

  I said, “It must have been an old one,” for we had been living a quiet life at Uncle Arlen's. Maude hadn't shown up at the scene of anything more serious than the killing of a chicken.

  “They had a paper, two weeks old,” Maude said. “I might have been all right if I had ignored the fellow who called out my name.”

  “Maude Waters?” For she'd been answering to Uncle Arlen's and Aunt Ruthie's last name for some time.

  “Maude March. I turned around, Sallie, and gave myself away.”

  “Anybody else would've done the same,” I said.

  “Not true.” Her shoulders slumped with those words. “Or there would be more outlaws in the jails.”

  “Why would you be mentioned in the papers now?” I asked her.

  “I don't know. They wouldn't give me time to read it.” She brushed the cookie crumbs off her skirt in a ladylike way that didn't take into account she was sitting astraddle her horse. “This is my own fault. I used to be more watchful of the papers we were laying down.”

  “You can't kick yourself over this,” I said. “You don't do nothing but wait on tables and go home and to church on Sundays. You are as proper as they come. Besides, you aren't the only person who papers the tables.”

  “I should have laid low,” Maude said. “Uncle Arlen told me, and I didn't listen.” She gigged her horse and trotted ahead.

  “You couldn't have laid any lower if you had set up housekeeping in a rabbit burrow,” I said, following her. For good measure, I added the argument she'd made to Uncle Arlen: “Somebody around us would've gotten curious about you if you didn't show your face.”

  Maude sat a little straighter. “That's true.”

  I kept watch for Marion, but we rode around anything that looked like a settlement and took no more apparent interest in other riders than to nod as we passed them.

  As the hours crept by, we saw fewer riders.

  Cloud cover rolled in somewheres after midnight, but even with the moon in hiding, we had the benefit of some kind of reflected light. I thought it a strange thing that in full moonless dark, the earth could be read as light and dark shadows, the stomped-down trail being lightest and the shapes of bush and tree being darkest.

  Some time later, Maude woke me.

  THIRTEEN

  I“CAN'T LET YOU SLEEP ON YOUR HORSE,” SHE SAID. “I'M afraid you'll fall off.”

  She'd already struck out across the grassland, where we shortly came upon a dry creek bed deep enough to provide cover for the horses.

  Coming off the horses, we stood a minute on sore feet, getting used to the idea of walking. I wondered sometimes why no one mentioned in dimers how long hours in the saddle made the feet swell.

  We clambered down the bank by moonlight and by touch, where the horses might graze the greener grass. At least I suspected it was greener. It was silkier to my fingertips, and so I figured more tender fodder.

  We wiped the horses down, turned the blankets over, and saddled them up again in case we had to make an escape. Maude said, “Maybe Marion will catch up to us here.”

  I heard a kind of rumbling noise.

  I didn't pay attention to it right away. I was running a hand down my horse's leg, twisting a hobble to keep him from wandering off.

  “What is that?” Maude said.

  “Riders,” I hurried over to the bank of the creek and climbed halfway up. There in the darkness, I saw three or maybe four riders, but we were far enough off the trail they didn't see us. This was likely very good luck.

  “Posse?” she said.

  “I don't know.” I made my way back to where Maude stood soothing our horses. “It didn't look like enough men to be a posse.”

  Maude said, “I feel like we ought to hide, but then, we are. Hiding.”

  My stomach was churning, realizing we'd just had a close call. But then, maybe I was just hungry. I said, “I wish we had some cookies left.”

  “See, that's why you are convincing as a boy,” Maude said. “Your stomach runs your brain.”

  We stood at a kind of attention until the only sounds came from the horses, and from Maude biting her nails. She said, “How many men do they send out, do you think?”

  I tried to think of any chases I had ever read of in a dimer. “Eight or ten is likely,” I said. “So they can split up when half the gang goes one way and half the other.”

  “Why would the gang do that?”

  “So the posse will follow just the one set of tracks.”

  “You just said they take enough men to split up.”

  “It sounds pretty tricky when you read about it,” I said.

  Maude made a little “hmph” sound to herself. Probably she regretted asking me what I might have learned from a dimer. “They don't always have a dry creek bed to hide in,” I said to her.

  She said, “I'm getting worried about Marion.”

  “He knows how to shake off a posse.”

  “Are you sure he knew where to look for us?”

  “He has surprised us before,” I said, “passing us and waiting for us to catch up to him.”

  “Only once,” she said. “Not right after breaking me out of jail, either.”

  I didn't have a reply to this.

  The air had begun to look blue; morning wasn't far away. We settled ourselves in the knee-high grass, but I couldn't sleep. My mind was humming. I rolled over, hoping a view of the stars would quiet me.

  There were birds calling to each other in low, sleepy voices.

  “Are those wood doves?” Maude asked me.

  “Are you thinking of popping a few?” I said.

  “No.”

  I was glad to hear it. Maude's rifle was back there in the kitchen. Because Marion took my shotgun with him, we didn't have a weapon to our name.

  “Beans are fine for a day or two, if we can get hold of any,” she said. “I don't want to make a fire. Somebody might notice us. We aren't so well outfitted for this, are we?”

  “We have my compass and the copy of Uncle Arlen's map and a canteen,” I said. “We have horses and the fair chance of finding well water to put into the canteen sooner or later.”

  At this, Maude made a strange sound that might have been laughter. “You are a practical woman.”

  “At least it's not dead winter,” I said. “We ain't likely to freeze.”

  “Don't say ‚ain't' to me. It makes my teeth ache.”

  “They wouldn't do that if you wouldn't grind them together so.”

  “Are you asleep yet?” she said.

  I wasn't asleep, and didn't think I would sleep. I'd forgotten what a busy place the grass was, the wind rustling through, the cautious passing of any kind of bug or small creature you could name. It never failed to leave me with a fellow feeling, for when we slept in the grass, we were living by much the same laws as them, where every moment might be our last.

  “I'm an outlaw, Sallie,” my sister said. “That can't be changed now.”

  I wanted to argue this. Wanted at least to say it wasn't true until now. For she was more of one now than she had been when she got out of bed this morning.

  Me and Marion had acted to save her, never asking ourselves, was this what Maude would have chosen?

  Maude was speaking low when she added, “I have been an outlaw since the day we left Cedar Rapids. It's time to know things for what they are.”

  “Then we're both outlaws,” I said to her just as low. “We left Cedar Rapids together.”

  “No, Sallie,” she said. “I don't think you are.”

  “Why not?” I said, and I was thinking, I'm the one who killed a man.

  I didn't say it. Maude would rather I put it this way: “I was holding a gun that went off.”

  I didn't need to mince words with the truth. He was an awful black-hearted sort of man bent on killing someone else. He had in mind no one in particular, just someone who wasn't likely to kill him back.

  The long and short of it was, if I hadn't made the mistake of pulling on t
hat gun by its trigger, he'd probably have done in someone more innocent than me by now.

  I reminded myself of this every time I woke from a black dream of shooting him, feeling cold and damp. I thought about how, somewhere, someone would've been missing a loved one if he had his way.

  Maude said, “You don't watch for things to go wrong the way I do, Sallie. It would break my heart if you did, so don't feel bad that you're still a little girl at bottom.”

  I knew myself to be as much an outlaw as Maude believed herself to be. If she thought it was pure chance I noticed her picture on a poster and didn't know I regularly watched for a badge under a man's jacket, then that was fine.

  One thing Maude didn't need was a broken heart.

  FOURTEEN

  IT WASN'T WITH WHAT I'D CALL A COMPLAINT THAT I woke up an hour or so later to feel a tenderness where I'd slept hard against a pebble. I was grateful I wasn't waking up to being chased. I wasn't waking up to look into the dark eye of somebody's gun. But I did wish I had kept bedrolls in the loft.

  Maude had slept sitting up. I thought of a comb, first thing. Bad enough her hair was bright; she couldn't let it get into a worse snarl without drawing every eye to herself.

  The horses woke now and again for a few minutes of grazing, the way horses will. The moon had sunk low in the west, and in the east, clusters of deep purple and night-blue clouds were outlined in a fierce orange light.

  I sat in the center of a kind of silence, and yet there were small sounds all about me; something in me stretched to hear them. I missed this when sleeping in a bed.

  A mosquito whined in my ear, and I lost my friendly feeling toward waking in the grass. I swiped at the air, suddenly itching from bug bites up and down. I had to scratch so bad I wondered if I'd picked up fleas or chiggers.

  The creek bed was dry as powder, I already knew. There wasn't a smidgen of mud to spread on an itchy spot. I scratched quietly at each complaint. Yet I didn't fail to notice how green and clean the air smelled. It was a far cry from the way of people and horses living elbow to hock in the city.

  I watched all around us for lamplight that wouldn't have been on two hours before. There were no windows, but there was a lone slow-moving buggy in the distance, just a dark silhouette against a lavender stripe of sky.

  I saw when Maude came awake, not with a start but with a deeper breath. Like she'd never shut an eye, she said, “No sign of Marion.” She sounded like she was telling me, but she couldn't disguise the hope in her voice.

  “None.

  ” “Let me have a look at your map,” she said, and I handed it over.

  The last couple of years, '68 and '69, had been real bad for fighting Indians, was the talk I heard around the livery. Some said the Indians finally understood these white men weren't just a parade passing through, but a whole lot of trouble come to stay.

  Others said it had more to do with the railroads paying a bounty for buffalo skins—a mile-wide herd crossing the tracks in their own good time could put a nasty crimp in a train's schedule. Likely the Indians were angered at the sight of so much good meat going to waste.

  Uncle Arlen tended to agree with the camp that felt Custer kept stirring them up. “A man can get used to most anything if he's let to make peace with it,” Uncle Arlen said. “These people aren't being given anything but a hard time.”

  Plus there was Jesse James and Black Hankie and other fellows like them thick as fleas on a hound out there, according to the newspapers. To say nothing of the posse that was looking for us.

  It was pure craziness to head west of Independence without guns and a sackful of bullets. But Maude was only thinking about the map. “This trail is as crooked as a dog's leg.”

  When Maude looked away I judged her to be perplexed. “Uncle Arlen set out on the safest route he knew,” I said.

  “What's that?” Maude said, staring off toward that rig on the horizon.

  “Somebody riding through the night, like us,” I said. “No, I mean, behind him.”

  I looked, and after a minute or so I could see there was a big cloud of dust building behind the buggy.

  “That's a posse for sure,” I said. It could be nothing else, looking like a howler wind coming down the trail at daybreak.

  “Let's ride,” Maude said, starting up.

  I yanked her back. “Don't let's move or they'll be following our dust cloud.”

  The buggy appeared to have stopped. Or maybe the speed of the other riders made it look like they'd swallowed it up. I could feel the slightest shiver in the earth beneath me, the thunder of horses' hooves moving over it.

  There were more of them than eight or ten; there may have been twenty.

  The men on horseback swirled around the buggy for a minute or two—a nerve-grating, teeth-grinding minute or two—no doubt questioning that fellow about whether he'd seen anybody else on the trail.

  Then they rode on, still tight to the trail, still flogging their horses up to a dead run, leaving the buggy rider in peace. They also left him in a cloud of their dust. Then they passed by on the trail above us.

  “We still have to eat,” Maude said after a time.

  “Let's go, then,” I said.

  “What if the posse doubles back?”

  “We'll see them coming.”

  Maude gave me the look that's called skeptical in the dimers.

  “You will anyway,” I said, for she has eyesight like a hawk's.

  She said, “And then what?”

  “We'll get off the trail and make these horses play dead,” I said. “In the tall grass, all we'll have to do is lay still till they ride by us again.”

  “I'd like to see that,” she said.

  FIFTEEN

  I SAID, “IN A DIMER I READ, A POSSE DOESN'T GO BACK over the same trail, because it has looked there already. The men circle around another way to get back to town, covering fresh ground along the way.”

  “Let's hope these fellows read the same book.”

  For the hour it took to reach full daylight, the buggy was a near partner to us, sharing the trail. We rode just faster enough that, finally, it was a speck in the distance.

  According to Uncle Arlen's map, we were taking the Santa Fe Trail southwest to Fort Dodge, where we would follow the north fork into Colorado Territory. When we came to the river, I knew we were in Kansas. We left the main road to take a well-traveled but narrow path that followed the water.

  Now we had crossed the border, I hoped we could attend to other pressing matters. I said, “If a posse came riding up behind us, I wouldn't hear them over the rumble of my stomach.”

  “Don't think they won't come out this way,” she said.

  “I expect you're right,” I said. “It would only be our word against theirs, if they claimed to find us in Missouri. But you did say we have to eat.”

  “I see some buildings up ahead,” Maude said. “We might find something there.” I could see nothing up ahead and had to take her word for it.

  I told my stomach to be patient, and in a while I saw the buildings. Not much later, I could see there was a general store of some size, poised to take advantage of a crossroads.

  We came up to one of the buildings from behind and stopped at a well to fill our canteens. This made it easy to take note of the activity around the store. We saw nothing posse-like, no undue excitement.

  The smell of something cooking wafted on the air. Eggs, I thought, eyeing the chickens scratching in the next kitchen yard. We hadn't eaten but two cookies apiece since breakfast the day before.

  “Have you got any money?” Maude asked me.

  “Not much.”

  “Lucky I didn't keep this in my boots.” Maude dug a few dollars out from under her waistband.

  “Why's that?”

  “They checked my boots, looking for one of those little guns,” she said, counting over the bills.

  “Lucky for you they gave your boots back,” I said. “Some of those fellows to come out before you did were still
in their socks.”

  “I told the deputy it isn't proper for a lady to go barefoot,” Maude said, and handed the money to me. “I guess the main thing is to get something to eat right now, but whatever else you get, don't plan on a fire later.”

  “What about a rifle for you?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “If a posse stops us, I'm going to put my hands up. You do the same. You have to keep your shotgun in its boot.”

  “I don't have my shotgun,” I said, and ignored the question I saw in her eyes. I didn't want her getting mad at Marion all over again.

  I shoved the money deep into my pocket. I had my own ideas about what was needed. A comb and a hat for Maude, for starters. “Maude, can we wire Uncle Arlen?” I said.

  “He hasn't gotten to Liberty yet,” Maude said firmly. “We can worry about what to tell him later on.”

  “Ride on a little ways ahead, why don't you? People might wonder if they see you waiting around like you don't want to go in.” Her hair looked awful bright.

  “If someone takes an interest, I'll pretend I'm digging a stone out of the horse's shoe,” she said. “Just get going and get back.”

  Riding away, I knew what to do about hungry. As for worried, I wondered if that hair color Maude used didn't come in some other color but red so she might not be quite so much of a beacon in daylight.

  We were in a hurry, but I took time to breathe in the smell of that store, the inky cotton odor of bales of overalls, the fresh paint on farm tools, the dried-tobacco scent of new rope mixing together with kerosene and coffee and the tart stink of open pickle barrels.

  These same smells were so ordinary in a day-to-day life I didn't take notice of them. But on the trail again, they made my blood rush a little. I didn't know what to make of it.

  I spied a slate with a bill of fare written on it. Meat and gravy or greens with salt pork could be had for a high price. The greens were gray and coated with grease. The biscuits looked dried out. I passed them by.

  I knew stew meat could just as easy mean prairie dog as chicken. I didn't care if I couldn't tell them apart in gravy. Due to past experience, I wasn't partial to prairie dog and would not eat it.