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.
FORTY-THREE
WE 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.
A
s 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.
Sitting down to the conversation, I heard Maude admire the chicken crates. “We can't let the chickens run loose,” Betsy said. “They don't keep up.”
Maude said, “But your pigs are safe?”
“Their momma died after they were born, so I had to feed them milk from Lucy's cow,” she said. Telling us this brought a smile to her face. “They think I'm their momma, and they don't stray ten feet away.”
“How are you going to be able to bring yourself to eat them?” Maude asked her.
“Posie and Petunia?” She laughed. “I could never eat them. I'm going to have to marry up with somebody has a boar hog, that's all.”
We were served plates of eggs fried to perfection, with a tasty brown crust on the outside and a tender yolk on the inside. We didn't waste time on polite reluctance. We ate with our fingers, although we were given forks.
Betsy did the talking, telling us they were twenty-eight women from back east hoping to find husbands out west.
“Expecting to find husbands,” Lucy said.
“Although we aren't yet promised,” another of them said.
“Where you coming from?” Betsy asked us.
“We came from the old Fort Zarah site most recently,” I said. “We're headed for Liberty in the Colorado Territory.”
“That doesn't sound like a bad place,” another woman, name of Miriam, said. “We're going into C.T. ourselves, but I still think we ought to try for Wyoming, where they're giving women the vote.”
Betsy said, “I told Miriam it's too far north. The winters are bound to be hard, and there she is, a sparrow of a woman.”
Lucy said, “Besides that, it's a territory settled on trying to live with new ideas. I read that someplace.”
Maude didn't enter into this conversation. I believe they thought her to be too hungry for talk, and didn't judge her rude. Marion had kept his head down mostly, like a shy fellow.
“New ideas, and a great many men to choose from,” another woman said. “How could we go wrong?”
At this, Marion stood to excuse himself. “Think I'll just mosey on over there and sit with those fellows.”
Betsy said, “They're friendlies. Just introduce yourself.”
“Thanks for the eats,” Marion said. “Give a holler if I can do anything for you.”
This seemed to kill the mood. Everyone got up, remembering a chore they had to finish. Making good on my word, I took up the bucket of potatoes and started peeling.
Betsy was right, those pigs followed her like dogs. And they had a taste for buttermilk. They stood watching each swallow we took and, when we finished, nuzzled out the bowls.
Having done with the buttermilk, one of the pigs leaned over the cookfire to check what was in the pot. One of the women spotted this and whacked it on the nose with the wooden spoon. The pig set up a noisy squealing and ran to Betsy, who soothed it like a child.
“What made you decide to come west, Betsy?” Maude asked her as she sat beside us at supper.
“Men,” Betsy said. “Not the finding of one so much as getting away from a certain kind.”
“What kind is that?” I asked her.
Betsy said, “The kind who don't know that being little and delicate isn't the making of a woman. It will be the icing on the cake to find a man who already knows a woman with grit and substance is the equal of any pretty sparrow who graces a ballroom.”
“There must be a lot of men who know that,” I said.
“I believe there are,” Betsy said. “If I find one who loves me for my grit and substance, I'll have my cake and eat it both.”
“Yes, but what made you want to go west to find it?” Maude asked her. “Are there more of those men out there?”
Betsy shrugged. “Maybe it's that there are so many men who know what it takes to get there at all. They're sure to appreciate a woman who can do it. Don't you agree?”
“I do,” Maude said. “It doesn't take but a few days of riding the trail out here to appreciate it's another thing entirely from a wagon trip to visit with relatives, back east.”
A small child kept crawling in our direction, a toothless grin of welcome on his face, or hers, I couldn't tell.
A girl of maybe four years doggedly brought him back to their momma's side over and over again. After one of these efforts, she came back over to tell us, “He's a lot of trouble. I don't know why we had to have him.”
I didn't know how to reply to this, but Maude said, “He'll be more useful later. He'll play tea party with you.”
The girl gave Maude a look that suggested she'd heard this empty promise before. “Whenever you break something,” I said, “you can say he did it.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“If he leaves his jelly and biscuit lying around, you can eat it and know it for a good joke on him,” Maude said, and this made the little girl grin.
FORTY-FOUR
THE FULL MOON HAD RISEN PALE THAT NIGHT, FAINTLY blue, like milk once the cream is skimmed off. I expected everyone to sit down around the campfire once the supper things were put away.
But there was butter to be churned and cheese to be hung in the pantry wagon. The moon had hit its peak and was headed west before that camp settled down for the night.
“You and Sallie could ride on with us if you care to, Maude,” Betsy said from the opening at the end of her wagon. She was pretty, in the most billowing nightgown I'd ever seen. “Your friend, too. There's safety in numbers, most times.”
Miriam said, “We have several women who are good shots.”
“Maude once shot the eye out of a panther,” I said, jumping in where I could.
This raised some oohs and aahs. Lucy said admiringly, “You have the makings of a gunslinger.”
At this, me and Maude fell silent. We didn't mean to draw attention to ourselves in this way, but we did. These women were ever faithful conversationalists, and falling silent was foreign to them.
It broke up the party, with them wondering who we might be they were laughing with around their fire. But if they were a more solemn group as they turned in for the night, they didn't refuse us the warmth of their circle to sleep in.
Maude soon lay sound asleep, with her hair spread over the saddlebags she used for a pillow. She fought to stay awake, but once she lay down, sleep had been the winner of that battle.
The woman called Young Etta—for they had started out with an older one as well—came to sit with me. She brought two onion crates to sit upon, which did improve the accommodations. I thanked her and went on watching the stars come out.
“You aren't much for talk,” she said. “What do you like to talk about?” I asked her. “Home,” she said.
The very word brought a funny ache to my chest. I'd begun to think of home as the piece of ground I was going to lay on during the night, and just now it already looked familiar to me. I was resigned each morning to leaving it behind.
I didn't ask her why she left home, if she was so happy there. People have their reasons, I had learned that. Reluctant as I was to start out before Maude could travel as a free woman, I didn't regret it now.
I'd had that time with Rebecca, and I'd sold more than a hundred bottles from my basket. We'd never have found John Henry in any other way, and perhaps, in the end, he would be the saving of Maude.
Young Etta said to me, “What about you?”
“I'm right fond of home,” I said, “but it isn't so much a place with me. It's Maude. Our uncle Arlen. Marion.”
“So you are always on the move? Don't you get tir
ed of that?”
“We stopped for a time in Independence,” I said, “and we'll stop again in C.T. Meanwhile, there's something fine about living each day different than the last.”
I saw the first sign—the pigs woke and started running among the horses and cow—and I should have known it for trouble.
Minutes later, Maude's horse took to blowing through his nose. Horses don't like having pigs run under their bellies, so I ignored the blowing, and still ignored it when I saw him pointing his ears off into the darkness. That was the second sign, the horse's ears, and I missed it.
The third sign came from the pigs again. They ran out into the darkness, and we could hear the speedy patter of their hooves as they skittered about out there.
Betsy looked out from her wagon and sniffed the air like a dog. She said, “Something's out there,” and ducked back inside.
One of the pigs came running back into the circle of fire-light squealing to high heaven, cutting up the last vestige of peace. Some of the other women tumbled out of their wagons.
Maude sat up, her quilt still around her.
After a moment, the second pig came through, complaining as loudly as the first. The noise a pig could make was amazing to me.
They raced about the camp. We had just begun to talk loudly of wrestling them to the ground—because talking loudly was the only way to be heard over the racket they were making—when a gnarly crew of troublemakers ran into our midst, yowling and shrieking and shooting in all directions.
They weren't cautious about their firearms and might well have killed someone, but they only killed a chicken in its crate. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw its feathers puff and float to the ground. The pigs ran off to the horses and cow.
The leader of this band was a woman. And she had with her six men who had pulled their kerchiefs up over their noses. Six men, and one of them had a gun in each hand. They stirred up a ruckus worse than the pigs.
“Everybody with your hands in the air,” the woman yelled. Her hair was ash gray and her face as weathered as an old board fence.
Everyone's hands went straight up, including mine. And Maude's. Old she may have been, but the gal had a knack for this kind of work.
Maude March on the Run! Page 17