Maude March on the Run! (10 page)

“Someone who is seeing double,” Marion said.

I looked over Maude's shoulder and finished the article:
—broke the now-flaming-haired female out of jail late in the same day. They were not satisfied with this feat but freed the Black Hankie Bandit, too.

I was right off glad I'd bought some hair color.

Maude had since begun to read again, and when she finished, I said, “Black Hankie's gang did all the waving guns around. Where's the story about them, anyway?”

Maude flipped the sheets over with a smart crackle of paper. “Here it is. Why didn't they put him on the front page? He's the one they meant to hang.”

“If the story won't make you cry,” Maude said, “the spelling will.”

I read the whole of it aloud and the spelling didn't hamper me. “What do you make of it, Marion?”

He was sitting near the fire, keeping an eye on the fatback so it wouldn't burn. “My guess is, the law is trying to make it sound like Maude's the reason they lost their grip on a fellow everybody was looking forward to hanging.”

“I can't believe he's dead,” Maude said, throwing the paper down. She was up and out of the house like something yanked her across the room.

I started up off the floor to follow her, but Marion said, “Let her go. She needs to take it in.”

“It's not like we knew him personal,” I said. I didn't need the look he gave me to know it was a matter of luck that Black Hankie wasn't sitting around reading about Maude.

“She's just thinking,” Marion said. “She'll be in here again in a minute. Eat your supper.”

When Maude came inside, she said, “Maybe we should start out now. We would have the advantage of riding under cover of darkness.”

Marion said, “You're right about night-riding, but we should wait till tomorrow night to start out again. It will give those posses time enough to start wanting to quit and go home.”

“I'm anxious to reach Uncle Arlen,” Maude said.

“To be any help to him at all, we must keep you out of jail.” A quiet did stretch. Maude decided to eat. Marion went out to check on the horses. I took up the paper to read it for myself, but I watched Maude over the top of the damp pages.

She settled down to study the map, sucking noisily on a peppermint. The firelight was barely enough for me to read by; it wasn't sufficient for Maude, who couldn't see things close up so well. After a minute, she was only ignoring me.

“Don't be so hard on Marion,” I said. “He wants to get to Uncle Arlen as bad as we do.”

“Bad
ly.
”

I scanned the stories again, trying to figure in all those fellows they let loose and see if the numbers added up. Nothing about me, of course. I never got used to being ignored in these news reports.

“It's the unfairness of it all that gets to me,” I said.

“Well, you're lucky if that's all that does,” Maude said.

I looked my question at her.

“If they're not locking the door on you, you're fine,” she said.

M
ARION STAYED GONE LONG ENOUGH TO TAKE A
turn around the property. He found a garden claw we could use to poke the fire, and a glove. Only the one glove, big for Maude and small for him, but the leather was thick enough for handling a hot pot. He threw it on top of our sacks.

“All the comforts of home,” Marion said as he sat down with us. We were all sleeping in the front room around the fire.

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Maude said to him. A roof over her head and a fire to warm her feet, along with a surfeit of peppermints, had put her in a mellow frame of mind, considering her earlier mood.

Over our heads a butternut rolled across the floor. There was some scrabbling around up there that meant the current owners of this house had come home to dinner.

“Squirrels,” I said.

“All the comforts,” Marion said, and grinned.

“There are not enough marks on this map,” Maude complained.

“It looked fine to me,” I said.

“I believe I can add to it,” Marion said. He went at it with
a pencil, making Uncle Arlen's lines darker and the print a little larger. Before he was done, he was entirely back in her good graces.

She said, “How far do you think Uncle Arlen has gotten?”

“He's been gone four days,” Marion said. “He ought to be right about here if he's making a change of horses every so often.”

I watched and saw his pencil point did not come anywhere near halfway. “That's all?”

“The man has to sleep sometime,” Marion said, as if he himself stood accused of slowpoking. “He can't ride hard all the time, no matter how fresh his horse. His old bones won't like to take such a pounding.”

This was no doubt true. Uncle Arlen was a sturdy fellow, but he had passed the quarter-century mark last year.

We had dried out the horse blankets as best we could, and Maude folded that quilt for a pallet. She didn't offer to share it with me. We were no sooner settled and watching the fire die down than a bat glided over our heads, silent, and went on to the next room.

“Holy Mulroney,” Marion said, flattening himself to the floor as it swooped back toward us.

Maude's eyelids flickered, taking in the uninvited company. She wasn't in the least bothered by bats and could have taken care of it, but she didn't look inclined. Her eyes were half closed.

Bats bothered me only a little. I got up to open a window to get rid of it—that is, I hoped it would take the opportunity to leave. It made another pass just as I leaned out to throw the shutters wide open.

Marion yelled, “Get down, Sallie!”

More startled than frightened, I ducked, but the bat veered away from the open window and disappeared into the next room again. It could circle around all night, and I made up my mind to let it.

“Quick, run back here,” Marion said, still rather loudly.

Maude shushed him.

“Those things will suck your blood,” he told her.

“They do not,” Maude said.

“Then what do they eat exactly?” Marion said. “Just tell me that.”

She couldn't tell him, and neither could I. We only had Aunt Ruthie's word for it that they didn't suck blood. A creepy crawling feeling down my back chased me to my horse blanket.

“I think it's time we went to sleep,” Maude said.

“She's just eager to enjoy the extra padding that quilt puts between her old bones and the floor,” I said to cheer Marion.

Like she was the momma, we all got into our sleep positions and waited for it. Ten minutes later, only Maude was breathing in the way of someone sleeping.

Another butternut rolled, upstairs.

“Believe I can live with those,” Marion said. “Although they are some noisier.”

That was when the bat skimmed overhead again. Marion pulled his blanket over his head, then folded it down like he wouldn't be caught hiding.

“Give it some time,” I said, feeling confident a bat could find its way out.

Then another bat flitted across the room, and to state matters honestly, they flew quite a bit lower than before.
Marion drew in a breath so loudly Maude flipped over to give him a hard stare.

She noticed the one bat was now two and said, “Dang and blast! Sallie, get up and shut that window.” She was throwing her blanket off as she spoke.

I scurried over to shut the window, but wouldn't you know it, another one made it in before I yanked the shutters closed. Marion pulled his head down between his shoulders.

Maude rooted around in a potato sack for that glove, then stood and watched the bats circle. “Sit down, Sallie,” she said in the tone that said she didn't know what I was up and around for anyway.

I sat. Those bats went on circling the room for some time.

Then, like they'd all heard a whistle somewhere outside, they flew one by one to land on the shutters. They hooked their toes over a slat and hung upside down.

Maude didn't waste any time.

She pulled on the glove, walked over, and clapped her hand over one of those resting bats. It started in right away on that rusty-hinge screaming they make.

The other two bats spread their wings but didn't lift off, as Maude opened one shutter and let that first bat free. She closed the shutter gently before she laid her glove over the next bat.

Maude wasn't in the least bothered, but those critters were, shrieking in scratchy voices until she set them loose. A last slam of the shutters and we were bat-free.

With a glance at Marion, Maude said, “I hope nobody is afraid of squirrels. They're a whole lot harder to catch.”

She came back to her pallet, dropped the glove on the floor, and covered herself again.

M
AUDE FELL ASLEEP LIKE SHE WAS A CANDLE DOUSED.
Marion was still staring into the firelight. “She's afraid the sheriff of Cedar Rapids threw our letter away,” I said in a low voice.

“This has been a niggling worry to me all along,” he said. “She hasn't mentioned the money, exactly, but I expect she has her doubts about it getting all the way back to Des Moines.”

“Now that was the chance we were taking,” Marion said.“Wearing a badge hasn't never been a guarantee of an honorable man. Honesty is more of a personal decision.”

I said, “What about Uncle Arlen? Independence is his home. Me and Maude lived there for five months and he didn't turn her in.”

He met this question in silence. Marion didn't come to a speedy judgment of someone or something newly met. Which is not to say his conclusion was usually right, only reasonably well considered.

“It has me worried,” I said. How could Uncle Arlen go back to the little house he'd built and his business? Besides
that, I couldn't imagine where me and Maude would end up if we couldn't go back there with him.

Oh, I could see us landing somewhere and taking jobs, but it could be nothing like the same as we had just left behind. We had come to be part of a home again. Part of a family.

Marion commenced to deep breathing like he might be gone to sleep. In the stillness of the room, another bat swooped overhead. I watched Marion, but he didn't move a muscle.

I turned over on my side to watch the fire die. Times like this changed a man, and I figured I was in the midst of such a change. I reckoned it didn't come without wringing the heart like a sponge.

We woke late the next morning to find the leaky bucket still dripped but nowhere nearly as fast. Maude decided she could have a tepid bath if she heated enough water to mix with cold.

This turned out to be a slow process, but we had all day to wait for nightfall. Before we threw away the water, I combed in the hair color for Maude. She didn't look happy about putting dark color in. For that matter, it didn't look awful different than the boot black to me, but I didn't say so. There weren't many ways to change the look of her.

Maude had to wait for a time for the color to set. She stared out a back window, biting her thumbnail until it bled. She wrapped her shirttail around it.

“Maude.”

“It helps me think. I have to plan.”

“Plan what?”

“I need a rifle,” she said. “We can't get by with only a shotgun and Marion's pistol.”

“Are we going to have a fire?” I said. “If we can't have a fire, we might could stop worrying about a rifle.”

“Birds aren't the only critters we might need to pop,” she said.

“Are we planning now for what we don't want?” I said to her.

She dropped the matter as she rinsed out a little bit of the color to see the results. I saw her hair had taken the color real well.

She looked into the mirror fragment with a doubtful expression. In the next moment, Maude cried out, ran to the tub, and dunked her whole head, shaking it to loosen the color.