Maude March on the Run!

by Audrey Couloumbis

  “Those fellows are just down on their luck,” he said. “She's another story, she has a rackety temperament. Won't know from one minute to the next what her mood will be.”

  “Some men like that,” our Maude said, overhearing. She crossed her feet and dropped to the ground in one quick motion.

  “Maybe,” Marion said. “Not me. Me and rackety temperaments just don't mix.”

  Maude laughed, which struck me odd. But I couldn't question it, for Young Etta made a beeline for me.

  “Give me your opinion,” she said.

  “The boat rat is smart,” I said, nodding to show her which of them I meant. “He's a thinker.”

  This earned me a long look from Maude and Marion both. But Young Etta turned on her heel and whirled back into the fray.

  “How's your arm feeling?” Maude wanted to know.

  “Like I got a nasty scratch,” I said. “I've gotten worse from wood splinters.”

  Me and Maude were anxious to get a move on, to be safely across the border for one thing, and to see our uncle for another. It was only this last reason we mentioned to Betsy.

  Maude said, “When are you starting out again?”

  “Not tomorrow,” Betsy said. “Probably not the day after. But soon. I know we are out in the wilderness here, but we won't camp for long at Fort Dodge. The chickens are at risk in such places. Too many empty stewpots.”

  Maude told them we were sorry for riding on and leaving them, but we had to get to our uncle Arlen, who was in some trouble.

  Betsy didn't mind these fellows, now she knew her pigs were all right. They hadn't decided just what they might do about that Maude, but there was an amazing air of forgive and forget throughout the camp.

  With the wagon drivers listening in, Marion said, “These fellows aren't the worst they could be, but that don't make them marriage material.” He told Betsy to keep the whole pack of them tied up till they got to the fort and then leave them off there. I believe he could see as well as me this advice was falling on deaf ears.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  AFTER SEVERAL HOURS OF LOOKING AT THE UN-changing line of the horizon, I began to look for ways to amuse myself.

  I looked at Uncle Arlen's map, now quite soft and faded from so much handling. I took comfort in seeing we were past the halfway point.

  We figured him for having arrived, but that only meant he faced the dangers we meant to share in. So far he faced them one man short.

  I rode ahead for a time, riding a little one way and then a little the other. Testing my compass. Somewhere along the line it had acquired a dent in the back, and I was worried it might not work aright.

  In fact, it did appear to work just fine. I rode back and took up a position between Maude and Marion. My eyes had begun to ache again.

  “I have an idea knocking around in my head,” I said.

  Maude said, “What is it?”

  “I think we ought to complain of these Maudes we keep running into,” I said. “When we get to Fort Dodge, I think we should tell what a pestilence they've become.”

  “Have you lost your mind out here?” Maude said.

  “It happens there are quite a few of them running around. It will be like the newspaper reports,” I said. “Enough complaints, and you could walk right up and turn yourself in, Maude, and they would turn you away as a pretender.”

  “The girl has something there,” Marion said.

  We rode for a time without speaking further of it. I figured them for mulling it over. Myself, I was entertained by thinking of it, enough that I didn't notice the endless sky for some time.

  Maude said, “Who would make this complaint?”

  “I can do it,” Marion said.

  “Better yet, we'll do it together,” I said.

  “I don't care for it,” Maude said.

  Marion glanced over at me and winked.

  We made Fort Dodge two days later.

  The fort stood on a slight rise in the land, so we could study up on it before we arrived. Built of mud and stone, it was some larger and more sturdy-looking than Zarah.

  Coming in as we did from the quiet of open country— mostly quiet—the hillside looked to be a noisy beehive of activity. Wagons were clustered at one corner, and a few board shanties leaned toward another, looking somehow less permanent than the wagons did.

  Tents stood everywhere else, children and dogs ran loose, and cookfires burned between them. The air smelled more of beans than of sweet dry grass—this wasn't a complaint.

  We made a stop to let Maude change into her work dress. I gave her my bonnet, which didn't look quite so white and pretty as it had at the start, to cover her hair.

  It was for the best, on the whole, for Maude's work dress was dark and plain. It made perfect sense that a woman might try to relieve the dreary look of it with something that didn't seem right at all. She didn't look awful much like any poster we had seen, having neither a man's hat nor broomtails.

  As we rode in, I figured the whole cavalry was out there on the prairie, except for the few that stood in the guardhouses up top. The soldiers were marching in lines, the barrels of their rifles gleaming in the midday sun.

  Then we rode through the gates, and I saw soldiers were as thick as termites on the inside. They'd squeezed a small city inside the walls.

  This was due to Fort Dodge being a road station for mail coaches, freight wagons, homesteaders, and buffalo hunters to lay over before they headed into Indian Territory.

  Marion wanted to put a feed bag on the horses first thing. Maude said to me, “Here is the last of my money. Go find us something to eat while I check whether a telegram has arrived for Sam Waters.”

  “I'll go to the telegraph office,” I said, thinking of all those wanted posters.

  “Leave me be, Sallie,” Maude said. “If I can't walk around without getting arrested in this bonnet, I might just as well turn myself in.”

  I couldn't think of what to say to her.

  It can happen that you only want to do the right thing, that you try your best, and still nothing works out the way you hoped. I sent up a short prayer this wasn't one of those times.

  I pocketed the money and went looking for supplies. On the porch of the general store, I stopped and watched for Maude. She wasn't hard to spot, thanks to that bonnet.

  Just because Fort Dodge was a military supply base for an Indian-fighting army didn't mean there were no Indians about. I saw quite a few in the crush of people. Nothing I'd seen of them in Independence had made me ready for the fact of their greatly dour expressions now we were further west.

  I felt I'd oftentimes worn a similar expression when I tried to match myself to the person somebody else wanted me to be. This thought made me feel sorry for them.

  Then again, there were no really happy faces in sight. All over the outlying camp, people were shouting, children were screaming or crying.

  Not that I was expecting to see great joy in the people wearily arriving or impatiently getting on their way, but in this atmosphere they seemed particularly lacking in fortitude. In many cases, badly broken in wasn't an exaggeration.

  The noise was overwhelming. The soldiers' voices were steady in the background, singing something to count time. Horses were whinnying. One plunged about as if trying to throw off its saddle. And in all the din, I heard a goat calling, maa-a-aah.

  Maude didn't look confused by any of it but headed straight for the building marked Telegraph Office and went inside. I couldn't follow her progress from there, for the windows were small and dark.

  The general store stood at my back. I went inside, thinking to finish up quick. This was more likely than I'd hoped. All I had to choose from was salted beef and potatoes that had been boiled so long they were all watery and broken up, or a thin soup with unidentifiable pieces floating in it, or cheese and crackers.

  I took the last. The crackers were good and crisp, and we hadn't been disappointed by cheese yet. We'd rely on canned beans and canned peaches in ca
se it continued to be true we couldn't hunt.

  With a jingle in my pocket, I wasn't in the mood to rough it more than I had to. Maude got a hoard of peppermints. She always spared the candy out as best she could, but still we'd gone through her peppermints at a good rate.

  Never forget some woody carrots and sweet feed for the horses, and I dropped them into my potato sack on top of the cans. I asked for another sack for the cheese and crackers.

  While I waited, a woman came from the back and put a sign up on the counter. It read:

  HELEN DAVIDSON'S MOLASSES COOKIES

  They were set out in a hot pan, straight from the oven.

  “Pick quick,” she said. “They don't last five minutes.” They didn't last two. I bought the whole pan.

  She put them into a box, they were so hot; a sack would have broken them to pieces. Outside, I tied my sacks to the saddle. I looked around but didn't see Maude.

  I did see Marion. He'd found a soldier of some rank, an officer, and was telling our story of being bothered by rowdies who claimed to be Mad Maude.

  Carrying the box that was warm to the touch, I went to listen in.

  The conversation was going pretty well, in that Marion's side of the story wasn't being questioned hard. I went over to add my weight to Marion's account of events.

  Someone gave a shout, something like “Ho there,” and we all looked around.

  “There are days it doesn't pay to put on my boots,” Marion said.

  Which words struck me somehow as a sign something had just gone wrong. If the words hadn't convinced me, there was the look on Marion's face.

  There were three men bearing down on us. They weren't soldiers. They didn't look like lawmen. One of them was the clear leader, even though he didn't look a likely choice, being more ragged than the buffalo hunters, and I suspected he wouldn't smell as good.

  “Who is he?” I said to Marion. “A bounty hunter,” he said. “The other two I don't know.” By then, they were in front of us.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  “JOE HARDEN, YOU ARE UNDER ARREST,” THE BOUNTY hunter said, loud enough to turn heads. I was right about the smell.

  “He's not Joe Harden,” I said. “What makes you think so?”

  We were drawing a crowd. It didn't help that more than a few soldiers was part of it.

  Two of them put hands on Marion, twisting his arms behind his back, and the officer Marion had been talking to was taking his pistol. This unkindly treatment didn't sit well with me.

  I was betwixt and between, wanting to stand up with Marion and knowing this would make Maude the last card up our sleeve. She was an excellent card, but it was a weight to carry, I knew.

  I said, “Who is this Joe Harden?”

  “A wanted man,” a fellow in the crowd said. “I seen his name on a poster last week.”

  “It takes only a touch of bad luck,” I said, “and yours could be on one next week.”

  “What about this one?” the bounty hunter said, meaning me. He had written all over him the likelihood that he was going to set us back some in our hurry to get to Uncle Arlen. Even without that, I disliked the fellow entire.

  “A boy,” the officer said, and I didn't care for him, either. Boys could be more trouble than he was willing to credit them. “You can't expect me to arrest a boy.”

  “You can't arrest anyone on the say so of this smelly mongrel,” I said.

  The bounty hunter said, “Shut it, brat.”

  I kicked him in the shins.

  Somebody grabbed me from behind and knocked the box from my grasp. The cookies fell into the dirt. “Hey,” I said, twisting around inside my shirt. I connected with another kick.

  I was taken along right behind Marion.

  I looked back to see two dogs come from nowhere and start to gobble up those cookies.

  The bounty hunters followed, arguing for collecting their money. The officer wouldn't part with a penny until he knew Marion had a price on his head. In this, I could admire him.

  We were walked over to a few horse sheds in a far corner of the fort—that is, these were places only a horse could love. Up above, at the top of the fort walls, a guardhouse overlooked the prairie. If the soldiers looked down, they overlooked the sheds.

  A foot soldier sat at a small table, his chair leaning back against a wall, pretty much doing nothing until he saw the captain coming. Then he jumped up, saluting and saying, “Sir! Captain, sir!”

  One of those bullying Marion along said, “Two prisoners for you.”

  The foot soldier said, “You can't put a boy in together with these men. Two of them is murderers.”

  “We can't put him with that fellow who cut three fingers off that little squirt who moved his boots while he was sleeping, either,” the captain said irritably.

  With the air of a man who was ready for anything, the foot soldier went over and drew the bar from the door on one of the sheds. We were let into the shed, where there were three other men already.

  There were pallets strewn about on the dirt floor, so I knew these men did sleep there. Two were standing, and one sat in the corner. I was hard put to figure out which of them were murderers. They none of them looked quite right to me.

  One of them had a bad shape to his jaw, part of it missing and scarred over. He didn't look at us as we came in, and it struck me the reason for this was so he wouldn't have to see us looking curiously at him. I made my gaze travel on.

  The next one was dressed fancy, but was dirty to a turn, like he had been dragged through mud flats by a horse. Only, if he'd been dragged, the coat he wore would have sustained some damage, so he was just dirty, really.

  He looked at us as if we were going to be some personal trouble to him. He'd likely make us sorry for it if we were. I didn't say a word of hello, and neither did Marion.

  I looked at the last one.

  He was old and dressed oddly. It was going some to stand out as odd in these parts, but he had pulled together a queer kind of riding pants, I thought they were, and a moth-eaten jacket that might have dated from the Revolutionary War.

  He was talking to himself there in the corner. He looked at us, but we might have been sparrows or wood blocks for all the difference we made to him.

  I'd already made up my mind not to move anybody's belongings.

  When the shed door was shut, there came a small scuffle between the scarred fellow and the dirty one. There was no real start to it, more like we had interrupted a dispute. They just fell to the ground in a tussle.

  At first this was alarming. I thought it the beginning of something I didn't understand. When it came clear there was some personal difference being worked out, I said to Marion in a low voice, “What's wrong with that one's face?”

  “Looks like part of it was shot away,” he said. “Most likely the war.”

  The shed door swung back suddenly, and the foot soldier rushed back in to settle the argument by kicking both men soundly in their midsections. Marion pulled me behind him. The soldier left with a glare at us, as if we might have caused him this extra effort.

  We sat in silence for maybe half an hour. Those two didn't look at each other. Only the third fellow whispered into his cupped hands.

  In this time I went from being glad to be at Marion's side to being grateful he was at mine. I remembered Maude's words: “If they're not locking the door on you, you're fine.”

  If Marion felt the same way, he didn't show it through fidgets or sighing.

  “How will Maude find out about this?” I said to Marion in a low voice. “She's going to expect us to show up pretty soon.”

  “I don't know, Sallie. Maybe there'll be talk around the fort, and the word will trickle back to her.”

  “Word?”

  “That Joe Harden has been arrested.”

  This didn't have a pleasant ring to it.

  When my belly began to want the lost cookies, I set my mind to knowing every inch of this prison. No mud or stone, they used half-rotten wood to build
it. I suspected it was meant to be a horse shed. Likely the horses had refused it.

  We had a pitcher and bowl set on a wooden crate. We also had a slop bucket I couldn't use, with a cloud of flies hovering over it. All the comforts.

  “I'm sorry,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “This was my idea.”

  “The bounty hunters were no part of your idea.”

  Outside, there was only the muffled sound of life going on without us. Overhead, the shuffle of boots on the catwalk couldn't be separated into a pattern of guard duty.

  The door opened again, and that soldier came in, carrying small buckets of boiled potato and a chicken joint. I hoped it was chicken; I was hungry enough to eat prairie dog, but I didn't want to know it. We no sooner began to eat than some manner of biting green midge began to bother us.

  It's strange the way the mind works, that being hungry would seem to be more tragic than being jailed, and to forget all in the irritation of bugs.

  We were given a lantern at nightfall, which was a comfort of sorts. It didn't discourage the flies, but if there was a rustling noise, we knew it was one of us made it and not a rat or a snake.

  “What did you have to say to John Henry about writing your story into those Joe Harden dimers?” I asked Marion. This question had been darting about in my mind since learning John Henry was none other than John Henry Kirby.

  I hadn't wanted to bring the matter up where Maude might overhear. The whole matter could lead to her wondering why Marion had never noticed those dimers and finding out he couldn't read.

  “I told him my continuing adventures must happen in Texas or Mexico,” Marion said, “but I had other bones to pick with him.”

  “Like what?” “I didn't make any money off these stories he was writing, don't forget. The least he could do is make me out to be a good guy.”

  “You are a good guy.”

  Marion ducked his head. “I didn't want him to make mention of your aunt Ruthie again.”

  I said, “Did he agree?”

  “He did. He offered to write more honest accounts if I would write him a letter now and again. He said he would pay for the right sort of letter.”