Maude March on the Run! (2 page)

” “Who would carry a wanted poster around?” Maude said as if we didn't all know the answer to that: the law.

“Maybe some fellow who thinks you're pretty,” Marion said, and caught a swat for his trouble. Being he's some younger than Uncle Arlen, Maude didn't treat him with the same respect.

“I don't care to be made fun of,” she said.

I said, “He don't like it when anyone else makes fun of you.” But that poster lit a fire under her.

“I've thought it over,” she said. “I'd rather tell them my story and be thought a liar than too chicken-hearted to show my face.”

“You haven't thought it over long,” I said. “You've only had that poster in your hand for a minute.”

Only worry for Uncle Arlen kept her from walking into the nearest sheriff's office and telling her right side of the story.

Then, in one Sunday morning at the livery, I saw four separate men with badges on the vests they wore under their coats. Later in the same day, while I ate noon dinner over at George Ray's restaurant, I heard the name of Maude March come up in the conversation of three men who made me think of boat rats.

Boat rats being what a person living near the river took a broom to at least once a week. Now and again it happened a rat tried to run up the broomstick. These fellows were that feisty, and not more appealing, either.

They talked like they were friends of the Black Hankie Bandit, who had been jailed earlier in the week. Two of them didn't sound like they were in favor of this.

The one said, “Hankie done his share of wrong, but he don't deserve hanging,” and the other one agreed, saying, “That feller got shot twice before, and it didn't kill him.”

The third one wondered aloud where the James boys were these days. This I understood entirely, for the James boys did a fine job of taking the law's mind off other matters.

Then came the mention of Maude. “What do you hear a that one?” one of those two said. “Wa'nt she in Mississip last I heard a her? I ain't heard nuthin about her lately.”

“A flash in the pan,” the other one said.

I wasn't happy to hear my sister, Maude, made light of, and I was glad when the first one didn't care for it, either.

“How would you know?” he said. “You been out there in the middle a nowhere with me, and I didn't hear word one about her or anybody else. What I didn't hear, you didn't hear.”

“All I'm saying is, if she'd done anything of note, we would've.”

“She coulda peeled a strip a land off this continent to rival the Oregon Trail, and we wouldn't know.”

The argument was getting a little heated when the third fellow spoke up again. “She could be anywheres by now. I don't listen to them papers. Wouldn't surprise me one bit if she was sitting right in this here restaurant.”

While I was noticing this one was a thinker, the other two looked around the place. Some of the patrons were locals, more of them were dusty travelers, and a few of each of those were mighty suspicious-looking.

The most innocent face in the place was coming to their table carrying a tray full of eats. They didn't look at her.

Her name was Maude March.

It's hard for people to grasp the fact of Maude being a
young woman with a respectable demeanor. They think she must enter every door with teeth bared, guns drawn, and coattails flapping in an unnatural gust of wind.

They also don't think of a rough-and-ready outlaw combing her hair into a crown of bright curls. This was a great relief to Uncle Arlen, for he wasn't in favor of my sister working right out in the open. He fought her on this point, but her stubborn streak won out.

All unawares of the rats' conversation, Maude gave them their dinners. When she came over to me, I said, “Can you get out of here for a couple of hours?”

“As soon as these fellows eat up,” she said. They were scooping food into their mouths as regular as shoveling coal into a furnace.

Listening to those fellows talk, I'd learned a few more lawmen were coming to town to say their piece at Black Hankie's trial. I wanted to tell Maude of this.

I said, “Quarter of an hour?”

She said, “Saddle up our horses, why don't you?” Lately Maude liked to ride out to the edge of the prairie and stare across it like someone in love.

I first went on down the street to treat myself to a new dimer. I worried back and forth between Powder Keg McCarthy and Hardweather Hampton.

I didn't anymore read them as the innocent I once was. I could see through the adventure of them, oftentimes, to the wearing part. I knew the sick feeling that came with the danger. When everything came right in the end, I took particular satisfaction in it.

As I paid up, Mr. Palmer, at the counter, said to me his usual piece of advice: “Son, those things are a waste of your hard-earned pennies.”

I walked away from the counter a happy man. It had taken some doing to get to the point where people didn't see through my disguise and know me to be a girl right off.

Outside, a pack of boys were running behind a wagon of squealing piglets. I ran along with them as far as the livery. Maude hurried across the street ahead of us, the flurry of her new petticoat ruffling the edge of her skirt.

Maude had taken to riding sidesaddle, with one leg hooked over the saddle horn. I admired the look of this myself, and didn't worry about her taking a fall, for that sorrel she favored was not one for sudden starts.

Once the city was behind us, the sky made a great room all around and the prairie a thick carpet. Blocks of yellow lay over the grass like quilt patches. Maude had a weakness for flowers. Only when we rode among them did we see they were bright tiny flowers on a weedy stem. No good for picking.

I said, “There's a fresh mess of lawmen in town for a trial.” “I know it,” she said. “I stayed in the kitchen all morning to bake cookies. When that ran out, I told the other girls I didn't feel like taking orders but wanted only to carry the plates out to the tables.”

My eyebrows raised over this.

“Don't worry,” Maude said. “Not many people look at me when the food is being set before them.”

We didn't get off our horses until we had a grassy field all around. I couldn't see wasting free time by staring. While I
stomped down a cleared space and began to read, Maude stared westward.

The unbroken line of the horizon fooled the eye. Something seen clearly could turn out to be much further away than expected, or clouds seen at the distance could close over your head so quickly you had no chance to find shelter.

“
I
T'S LIKE AN OCEAN, THE WAY THE GRASS MOVES LIKE
water,” Maude said after a time.

“It's just an awful lot of grass,” I said back to her.

“An ocean is just an awful lot of water,” she said, “but it's special because of that.”

I didn't reply to this. Hardweather Hampton had just been charged by a buffalo and, of course, not a tree in sight.

Not knowing of his desperate situation, Maude said, “It still troubles me, Sallie, that we're running from the law.”

“We ain't running,” I said. “We're at Uncle Arlen's.

” “Hiding, then,” she said, and made the hard little sound of biting a fingernail. “Although there's little difference.”

“What choice do we have?”

“My stomach was knotted up all morning, Sallie, till I got over expecting to be noticed.”

I let Hardweather fend for himself for a minute. “Maude, we have to think of Uncle Arlen—”

“I am thinking of him,” she said, and made a series of little biting sounds.

She didn't used to bite her nails and would not have tolerated
such a habit from me. Myself, I wasn't picky about my nails. I wouldn't have been picky about my sister's, but for she had bitten them down to the quick. Her fingertips looked puffy and too new, like they hadn't grown used to the light of day.

“We're hiding under his roof, Sallie. If I'm found out, he's guilty, too. Marion said so.”

I pulled a handful of grass, not liking the sound of this. Maude tended to think quick. Maybe because of this, she didn't think long.

Our friend Marion tended in the other direction, and— he was fond of pointing this out—he was not dead yet. This was saying something, for Marion Hardly did used to go by the name of Joe Harden.

He was the actual hero of those Joe Harden stories that were so popular before the rumor of his death got around. I started this rumor deliberate.

“I wrote that letter to the sheriff, explaining everything,” I said. It was a long, long, long, long,
long
letter. It took me two months to write that letter, and near as much paper as a book. Some parts brought tears to my eyes.

The doubtiest part was telling how it happened that, at the bank robbery, me and Maude had simply shown up at the wrong time. As for Willie, it was the fullest truth that while Maude had grabbed her rifle when the shooting started, she didn't fire off a shot on the day he died.

We had yet to hear how our story was received.

Maude shrugged. “What if the sheriff didn't believe what you said in the letter?”

“We sent the money back,” I reminded her. “That ought to have swayed opinion somewhat.”

Besides which I told only two small lies: that we had no way of knowing whose shot killed Willie, and that Joe Harden had breathed his last. They were small lies, because “lies” is a strong word for a fib that was meant to put things right.

There was nothing to be gained by telling them I killed Willie by accident, so I did not tell them I shot him at all. Things happen in this world that cannot be properly understood unless you were there in the midst of them.

I doubted they'd believe Joe Harden had changed his ways for once and for all. I told the sheriff it was because Joe died that we came to have the money from a bank robbery in our possession. I said here it is, every dollar, would he please see to it that it got back to that bank in Des Moines?

Of course we couldn't tell the sheriff where he could write back to us. We had to keep our eyes open for a newspaper from Cedar Rapids, announcing Maude's innocence.

I went back to my book to find out if Hardweather could outrun a buffalo. Lucky for him, there was a prairie dog hole about to slow that big fellow up.

“I think we need more than a letter,” Maude said to me, turning away from the prairie. “More than giving them the money.”

“What could be more convincing than the money?”

“I don't know,” Maude said. “Something that doesn't make people feel like they're just taking our word for it.”

On the ride back to town, she said, “I hear people talking over at George Ray's. They talk of Independence as the far edge of the East, rather than the near edge of the West.”

I could not disagree.

“I'm thinking we ought to move further west, Sallie.”

This was the last thing I expected to hear my sister say.

Only a year ago, it would've been me, dreaming about driving cattle to someplace woolly wild, like Abilene. Now I had every hope of clearing my sister's name. I wasn't anxious to go further west just yet.

“I'm surprised at you,” Maude said. “I thought you'd like this idea.”

“I like it just fine.” Though I didn't feel quite as eager to leave Independence as Maude did. I had not had my fill of being part of a family again. “I'll ride with you when the time comes. But right now we have to find out how our letter was received.”

She swept this idea away with a motion of her hand. “The trouble is, newspapers from Cedar Rapids don't often make it to Independence.”

“Let's don't rush into anything,” I said, sounding very like Marion.

“There must be a place where we could live without worry once more,” Maude said.

M
AUDE WENT BACK TO GEORGE RAY'S, AND I TOOK
our horses back to the livery. Marion stood in the arch of the barn door, selling some fellow a horse.

Three good ones were standing there for a look-over. I brought our horses to a stop nearby. One of the finer things of working in a livery is the horse trading.

As I pulled the saddles off my horse and Maude's, Marion named the buyer a fair price. He said he would do some more looking around.