Maude March on the Run! (27 page)

From here, the conversation took a surprising turn, the
women asking each other whether those visitors looked repentant enough to suit all.

“If it's a good man you girls are looking for, I'm a good man,” the leg-shot fellow said. “Don't judge me by the company I'm keeping just now.”

“It's not your company but your actions I question,” Young Etta said.

“You look to be of doubtful quality,” Lucy said. “But we have a ways to go. You might could ride alongside the wagon, offering your protection.”

“What about her?” one of the women said, pointing to the other Maude. That creature stuck her tongue out at us.

“She's more doubtful yet,” Lucy said. “We don't even know what her true name is.”

“Mary Rose,” I said. I did find in myself a soft spot for her. Not a very large spot, however.

Betsy was much of the same mind. She said, “If the others agree, we could try and see if these ruffians can be turned out good. As for her, I would keep her tied a while longer.”

The weak-chinned fellow Betsy had felled with her rifle butt listened more especially to this conversation. “I can be turned out,” he said. “I used to be a fine fellow and could be again.”

I'd by this time scraped my plate clean and washed it. The Maude question wasn't yet decided, but the men's likely fates interested them all. I heard one woman mention another of them as someone who could straighten a fellow out in no time. It was said she had buried three husbands already, of overwork.

Betsy said, “Don't give her the best one if she's going to run him out that fast anyway.”

I suspected they were biting off more than they could chew. I went over to the boat rat. He had a plate on his lap and one hand freed to eat from it. “Where are your other fellows?”

“Scattered, now that Hankie's dead.”

“We heard he was shot in the sheriff's office and then read in the paper he was shot off his horse.”

“That's right, he was killed twice,” he said.

“Maybe the time has come to change your ways,” I said, and left him to think on it.

I settled myself near Marion. “What do you make of this?” I asked him. “They're taking these characters to their bosom.”

“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.

A
FTER 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 case 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.