Maude March on the Run! (17 page)

I
“ 'LL GET THE MAKINGS FOR A FIRE,” I SAID.

Winslow, the fainter, stayed flat to the ground beside Heck, the one with stitches in his ear.

The third fellow, the eagle eye, followed me as if there was a chance I might escape them. I broke dry grass and twisted it into cats. I tolerated his standing around doing nothing for about two minutes.

“If you want coffee, you'd better make yourself useful,” I said.

I didn't expect him to do anything, but he surprised me. He helped me pull grass until we had a good-sized pile. Enough to burn for a time, even considering how brown the grass was.

Maude had meanwhile dug a little pit for the fire and had it going well in no time. “Your horses need water,” I said to that fellow, and pointed out to him the bucket we used for the horses.

The pretender asked where were we folks traveling to, nice as you please. Like she had made up her mind to act like she'd forgotten why we were all gathered there.

“Fort Dodge,” Dr. Aldoradondo answered her. “We're well known in these parts.”

“And welcome, I reckon,” she said. “Doctors are scarce hereabouts.”

“And no wonder,” I muttered, listening in as I filled the coffee pot.

“We're a little peckish, if you have anything to eat,” said that eagle-eyed fellow who had been helping me as he took his place in the circle of his fellows and the doctor.

“There's a round metal box on a shelf,” Maude said to me. “There are lemon cookies to serve with the coffee.” She gave my foot a little kick as she turned to put the coffeepot on the fire. I took this as my go-ahead and hopped into the wagon just as Rebecca was coming out.

She had let down the shelf and made ready the coffee ingredients. Along with her good china cups, she'd set out my tin cup and the blue bowls. Also, sugar lumps. Of greatest interest to me was that mysterious medicine the doctor guarded so closely. It stood apart from the other things, but it was there on the shelf.

No one was looking right at me. Like I was doing something ordinary, and with not a tremble, I uncorked the bottle and squirted a dropperful into each of Rebecca's four china cups.

If someone had said to me, How much is too much, my answer to them would have been, We are about to find out. I reached for the tin box with the cookies.

I walked the cookies around like I was waiting on tables. Heck looked a sight. His ear had swelled up like a bladder. His shirt was still bright with his blood, but then so was nearly
everyone else's. The ear, with its dark stitching, was more troublesome to look at.

The pretender told him to put his hat on over the injured part so the rest of us wouldn't have to think on it. Not knowing he was about to receive strong medication, she gave him a flask of something that made him cough so hard some of it shot out through his nose. He complained with a wordless groan, but she just clapped him on the back in a friendly fashion.

I didn't blink when she took a fistful of the cookies. “Will we have read of your exploits in the paper?” I asked her. I made it sound like she ought to be proud to tell.

“Possible,” she said to me in a coy fashion.

“Personally, I don't take the word of newspapers for much,” I said. “They have reported you in three districts at once, just lately.”

Maude said, “The coffee's ready,” and I set the cookies down, in a hurry to make sure these rowdies got the cups.

Rebecca was already doing that. Maude stood ready to give them sugar. Both of them acted as if they tended to invited guests in their parlor.

The pretender said she could do with more sweetening, and Maude gave it to her without a word. “Good coffee,” she said on her first sip. She was a polite one, she was.

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.

W
E 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 with 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.”