Maude March on the Run!

by Audrey Couloumbis

  The shaky Winslow held his cup carefully, keeping his pinky finger crooked. Heck wasn't so dainty and sloshed his first coffee about. Rebecca poured him some more. She gave him another two lumps of sugar. He downed it in one swallow. He made a face like he found it bitter.

  “You think that's bad,” the pretender said, “wait till you can feel the stitches in your ear.”

  Rebecca poured a swallow of coffee to the doctor and to me and to Maude, each of us drinking from a bowl. We weren't offered sugar. I did reach for it but was met with a sharp look from Rebecca and changed my mind.

  She poured a little more coffee in their cups and offered around the sugar. The pretender and her fellows helped themselves to the bottom of the bowl. Heck just popped his sugar lump into his mouth. I had no idea what the medicine tasted like, but I had no doubt that much sugar could cover it.

  Heck said he was feeling a little poorly, he thought he'd lie down for a minute. The pretender and her crew didn't think a thing of it.

  Winslow said in a faintly slurred voice he wondered if he was truly cut out for this kind of work himself. Stand-and-deliver sneered at him.

  This caused the pretender to send a slap in his direction, but it never got that far. Her hand fell into her lap as if it was too heavy to hold up. Stand-and-deliver fell into her lap, too. It dawned on her then something was wrong.

  Maybe it occurred to that eagle-eyed fellow as well, but they both of them at the same time let their eyeballs roll up, and passed out.

  Rebecca and Maude were quick, reaching for the cups before they hit the ground. Winslow looked at all of them in confusion and then fell over on his side.

  “It worked faster than I'd hoped,” Rebecca said, looking a little a-wonder about it. “I do think sugar speeds it up somehow.”

  I said, “You put it in the sugar?”

  “I was afraid I couldn't give them enough without melting the sugar lumps,” she said.

  “I put it in the cups.”

  The doctor said, “How much?”

  I shrugged. “A dropperful.”

  Rebecca gave a little laugh. “I guess I needn't have worried.”

  Maude said, “Could it kill them?”

  The doctor said, “It could.”

  I looked down at them, and just as I wondered if I'd killed another man, Winslow began to snore. The pretender followed suit a moment later.

  “Then again,” the doctor said, “they're likely to sleep it off.”

  I picked up the cups and bowls and washed them out. There was a little discussion over what to do with them. We couldn't leave their guns. We didn't want to make it easy for them to catch up to us, either.

  “In a dimer I read, some fellows left Hardweather his horse but dropped his saddle a ways off. They dropped the other gear further off, to slow him down.”

  It didn't take long to agree to this course of action. We took the saddles off the horses but left them hobbled so they couldn't wander away.

  Maude pinned a note to the other one's chest. It read: This is not Maude March.

  THIRTY-TWO

  WE RODE ON TO THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE NEXT TOWN, which was Diamond Springs, and camped for the night. The place had a fast, rough way about it that wore on the nerves.

  Partly I didn't like to hear the cattle bawling. They didn't get quiet as the sun went down but sounded ever more mournful. Partly it was the traffic on the road, which got worse, even as the night wore on.

  With so many wagons trundling past, sleep was a fitful thing. In waking moments, I wondered if Marion was here in town or if he had pulled much further ahead of us.

  Things could have gone badly with the pretender and left him with a good deal of explaining to do when finally he reached Uncle Arlen.

  Unless something befell Marion along the way.

  A person could disappear out here entire and no one ever know what happened to them. I didn't know what Uncle Arlen would make of it if something happened that the three of us never turned up.

  That led to wondering what accidents of fate Marion might have. It bothered me more to think of getting to C.T. and finding he hadn't made it. For that matter, we didn't know how Uncle Arlen fared, making the entire journey alone.

  “Stop rolling around so much,” Maude whispered to me.

  “I can't settle.”

  “Then don't,” she said. “But be still.”

  “When did I become such a worrier?” “You're not a worrier,” Maude said. “You aren't stupid, either. There are times when things are more left to chance than we like to think about.”

  I turned my thoughts to guessing where on his map Uncle Arlen was by now. We were about a week and a half on the trail. So he ought to be halfway.

  We were up and about uncommon early the next day. No one had troubled us, however. It might have been due to the fact that with so many people around, trouble couldn't go unseen.

  What finally came to mind were the words I'd read in many a dimer, Wild West, and hadn't always felt it to be so hard upon me in Independence. It was some tamed by the time me and Maude arrived.

  But once through the wide border state of Kansas, we would be outside the bounds of the law as we knew it. It did appear to me such bounds had some frayed edges.

  As I tied Maude's horse and mine to the wagon rail, I heard a gunshot from town. Together with the feel of the place, this decided me to keep the horses close to hand.

  It didn't bother me to wear the dress with my brown boots, for I'd worn something like them most of my life. Aunt Ruthie thought the expense of shoe buttons was a waste on children. But Rebecca couldn't abide it.

  First thing, when she judged the stores would be open for business, she took me out to find the button-top shoes. I wore my new bonnet.

  Maude came with us and busied herself with looking at ribbons and enameled hand mirrors and padded silk boxes. It appeared the people who came to Diamond Springs were uncommon fond of expensive trinkets.

  “Now I have a use for that boot black,” I said to Maude of my new shoes.

  “You have a lot of Aunt Ruthie in you.”

  “I have no quarrel with that.”

  We bought the shoes, and then Rebecca had some business at the bank. While she was there, Maude and me were on our own. “There's a newspaper office,” Maude said, after a look up and down the street.

  The newspaper office was strangely dark. Maude opened the door and stuck her head inside, as if she had doubts about the place.

  “Have you come about the job?” a man said to her. He sat at a desk just inside the doorway.

  “I came looking for a paper,” she said, stepping inside.

  The man wore a visor that jutted over his face like a porch roof and a cloth vest of dark gray that didn't hide the ink smudges on it. He was narrow through the shoulders and hunched over the lettering of an envelope.

  Perhaps because I had grown accustomed to the exceeding clean hands of the doctor, I was struck by the black line under his fingernails. I remembered seeing this before.

  However, that fellow had been some dapper sort, was my impression. He'd looked sharp. This clerk looked like he couldn't pay for a meal, let alone rent a horse and rig.

  “People want to write letters,” he said. “But it's more than knowing how to write a good hand.”

  His glasses sat on the tip of his nose. They were the kind of half-circle glasses that Maude had worn until she broke enough pairs that Aunt Ruthie wouldn't buy her another.

  “They don't know what to say,” he went on. “They want you to know what to say. Can you do that?”

  “She knows what to say,” I told him, “but she isn't looking for a job.”

  He finished the ia of Pennsylvania before he looked over the top of his glasses. I saw then his eyes were blue. Not cool and watery, but a deep blue that could speak right to you.

  I wondered if I wouldn't remember seeing those eyes before. For I didn't think I could be sure of him by his fingernails. I let it go. There were men wit
h ink under their nails wherever there was a newspaper to be run, after all.

  He ran a blotter over the envelope and set it aside. “Twenty-five cents for two pages,” he said. “Ten cents is yours.”

  Maude said, “That's a high price.”

  He said, “It's cheap, if it buys them a story as well.”

  Maude said, “What kind of story?”

  We stood in a building that was something larger than a shed but not much better outfitted. There was a cot on one side of the room, neatly made up. A table held a bowl and jug and several other items to suggest someone lived there.

  The back of the place was taken up with a jumble of wooden pieces, as if something had come off the wagon but had never been put back together. These reminded me of a loom but were just different enough to interest me in putting them together in my mind.

  “Any story must be somehow true to them,” he was saying. “Do you have the truth in you?”

  “I'm living a long way from the truth lately,” Maude said.

  I didn't think Maude needed to start thinking about this. I said, “Is that a printing press back there?”

  “It is,” he answered. “People hereabouts aren't steady readers. They have other things on their minds. Business and cattle, among them.”

  “Why are you here if there are no readers?” I asked him.

  “I'll move further west when the time is right,” he said. “When I know of a place that is hungry for the truth.”

  “That's a far thing from the stories I have seen in the papers.”

  He pushed his visor back. “She likes to read,” Maude said, as if she were apologizing for me. “But she's always looking for true stories.”

  “What true story would you have me tell?” he said, still looking at me.

  “There are stories all around,” I said. “It's only the lack of recognizing them that keeps them a secret from you.”

  There was a silence while he digested the fact he didn't get the whole of what there was to know, but he didn't get a lie, either.

  “That's the right spirit,” he said finally. “Out here, a man with the right spirit is his own boss. He only needs a printing press.”

  “He needs more than that,” I said. “He needs readers.”

  This got a short laugh. “My name is John Kirby,” he said. “I'm easy to work for.”

  “Why is that?” Maude said.

  “Because I'm a poor man of business.”

  For reasons I can't explain, this made Maude smile. “It's too bad, then, that we aren't looking for a job. Only a newspaper.”

  I saw Rebecca outside and nudged Maude. We said a speedy good-bye that brought John Kirby to the door to see us off.

  “You haven't told me your name,” he said to Maude, holding out his hand to be shaken.

  “Maude Waters,” she said, after a moment. “This is my sister, Sallie.”

  I didn't care for the sudden light in his eyes.

  We went with Rebecca to the store. Standing by the window, I saw John Kirby didn't make a hurried trip to any other office, such as the sheriff 's. In fact, I could see him at his window, bent over pen and paper.

  Rebecca bought ham and potatoes and stewed dried corn, ready to eat, and some greens that hadn't been boiled quite gray. I couldn't fault her choices, though I couldn't cheer the last.

  But then she turned to me and said, “Greens are not my preference, but the doctor insists on them.” We smiled in the way of having a secret to share.

  She asked then for a dried apple pie. I had already seen she hardly considered the price of a thing. She considered first the wanting of it, which was a thing I wasn't used to but was most prepared to admire.

  Me and Maude carried the purchases on the way back to the wagon. We trailed behind Rebecca like ducklings on the busy boardwalk.

  We were coming up on a glass-fronted barbershop. Maude pulled at my sleeve and whispered, “Sallie. If there's a newspaper to be found, it'll be in there.”

  “It would've been easier to get in there whilst I was dressed like a boy,” I said. We had come to a stop, and so did Rebecca, although I didn't think she could hear much of what we said.

  “Just dawdle past,” Maude said.

  I would, of course, but I couldn't resist saying, “That isn't much of a plan.” Maude pinched me, though Rebecca was looking on. The terrible thing about being orphaned is big sisters do not have to worry about being caught at picking on the younger.

  I slowed as I passed a fellow sitting outside, waiting on a haircut. He was cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife. At the back side of him, in the shop, another fellow held a St. Louis paper. I was able to read it through the thinly soaped window.

  The article interested me.

  I read as fast as I could, stepping to one side where the window was too cloudy to see through. Then his turn came up, and he folded the paper away.

  Maude and Rebecca were some three or four shops distant, waiting to go inside. Rebecca went inside when I looked that way.

  I hurried over to Maude. “They've shot her,” I whispered.

  “Who?” But I could see on her face she did know.

  I said, “They tried to arrest her, but then she was killed in the shootout.” By my lights, this was cause for dancing.

  Maude looked confused. “There, where we left them?”

  “Not that one,” I said. “There's another. This one was over St. Louis way.”

  Maude didn't look overjoyed. “That's awful.”

  “It's awful for her,” I said. “But it's fine by us.” “Sallie, I don't like it you're so cavalier about that girl's death.”

  “Cavalier?” I said. I could see Maude was not in her dancing mood. Maybe I ought to care about that other girl; I could see Maude's point of view. But I didn't know that girl. She wasn't my sister. And she may not have been a nice person, either.

  “I don't want to see that article,” Maude said. “It's up to you what you read, but I don't want to read of my death.”

  I had not thought of it in this light.

  THIRTY-THREE

  WE STUCK CLOSE TO THE ALDORADONDOS THE REST of that day. I looked over my shoulder once or twice, worried about the light John Kirby had in his eyes.

  “Sallie.” Maude called me away from Digger McGee, Gold Miner, Forty-niner. I snatched up my basket and stopped at the doorway as I threw the strap over. I caught a glimpse of John Kirby, standing on the boardwalk. He was watching Maude.

  “Come on, Sallie,” she called, and I climbed down.

  I had lost interest in the selling of tobacco. I may have given a packet or two away without collecting the funds. Each time I looked again, I couldn't see him, but I didn't doubt he was there in the shadows.

  I hoped Marion was somewhere about as well.

  My fingers trembled over taking money, and I chided myself for the nerves. I rode on the wagon seat as we left town and glared into every dark corner. I kept my shotgun beside me as I slept, but it was no help with the bad dreams.

  I rolled the gun up in my bedroll the next morning, ready to hand, as I stared out the back door of the wagon. I didn't see a telltale billow of dust following us, and I was glad of it. I didn't mention the matter to Maude.

  I had this to say for the doctor, he made good time. This was as much due to the horses' strength and willingness to move that wagon as it was to grease on the wheels, but I credited the man.

  Still, I had a place I needed to be. To Maude, I said, “Have you seen Marion and forgot to mention it?”

  “No.”

  “When do you expect him to show himself ?” I said.

  Maude said, “It won't be much longer.”

  “Does that mean tomorrow? The next day?” I said this because I had grown fond of Rebecca. “Maybe we should tell them they have to look for another helper.”

  “Don't pester me,” Maude said.

  From this I knew she was troubled about it.

  We made a stop at midday. Wandering Creek loo
ked much the same as any other town, except smaller than most we had stopped in so far. “It looks too small a place to bother with,” I said.

  “No stop is too short to make a dollar,” Dr. Aldoradondo said.

  I shrugged, putting my basket together. I tended to pick from the bottles I liked best. I went outside to stand near Maude, who was in her dress with the spangles. Her hair was mostly hidden by the daytime bonnet Rebecca gave to her.

  Dr. Aldoradondo threw open the side of the wagon and started talking. “Ladies, I bring you sure relief from all your ills and a rapid recovery!”

  For a town so minor, we drew quite a crowd over the course of the afternoon. Once finished, we turned right around and began the evening business.

  For such a small place, Wandering Creek was lively after dark. It had only the one saloon proper. On the other hand, any number of establishments stayed open after regular business hours, pouring from gallon jugs. I had a clear view from where I stood.

  I had only to see the grimace on the face of a man who swallowed it down, and see how he shook his head, to know how fierce was the stuff he was drinking. I figured he was soon to be a customer.

  At the boot maker's place, they had a piano, and a woman with a loose gray bun of hair on the top of her head bounced around on the piano seat rather vigorously as she played. Despite the odor of glue and boot polish, they had a fair turnout.

  We worked late into the evening and then readied ourselves to go. I'd just brought my horse away from the water trough when we heard a commotion coming from the end of the street.

  The flickering torchlight showed us there was a tight group of people coming our way.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THINGS COULD LOOK STRANGE IN THAT LIGHT. SHAD ows could turn the kindest face into a fearful mask, but even weighing that in, these didn't look like a friendly bunch.

  To Maude, I said, “We can ride away from this whole mess,” but I wasn't surprised to read in the look she gave me that this trouble was our trouble. “Get in the wagon,” I said. “I'll ride my horse till we're out of here.”