The Misadventures of Maude March (17 page)

Marion was right about one thing. The turpentine did stink.

D
ID YOU THINK UP ANOTHER NAME?” I ASKED MARION AS
we saddled up the next morning.

“I'm thinking Dusty,” he said. “I don't know the second part yet.”

“Dusty Har de Har Har,” Maude said in a mean tone as she came out from behind a bush. Her cough was gone and so was the sniffle. She claimed not to have a trace of sore throat left, but she had not thanked Marion for his trouble.

She'd been sharp with him once or twice already, and the sun hadn't yet burned all the pink off the horizon. I worried he would leave us flat, the way he did after the boot shop. I planned to speak with her about it as soon as we got a minute alone. But Marion decided to have it out with her right then.

“I have explained myself more than I had to, Miss Maude. I won't explain myself anymore. If you don't care to ride with me, you and Sallie here can pick your direction, and I'll ride in another.”

Maude shot him one of those narrow-eyed looks that should've sent him packing right then, but range riders are made of stern stuff. We all got on our horses and rode off
in the general direction of Missouri, which is to say, mostly south but some west too. I had not had a chance to check my compass.

After a time, even Maude's kinks worked themselves out, more or less. She didn't talk much, but she wasn't mean either. Marion and I talked a good deal. “How come you're sleeping on shop floors if you have all that money from robbing banks?” I asked him, which was a mistake.

“For the first thing, I never robbed a bank before,” Marion said as if I'd hurt his feelings some. “I said that, didn't I?”

“Sorry.”

“The other thing,” Marion said, “you can get yourself shot up in them hotels easier than you think. It happens all the time. A little brawl starts up in the bar and next thing you know, a bullet comes up through the floor. That's all she wrote.”

Talking to Marion was an education.

We rode without coming across a sign of another human being until late in the day, when we stopped in a pasture to milk a cow. We drank most of what we got, but Marion caught more in a pot and carefully held it before him as we rode the horses at a walk.

“What do you plan to do with that?” Maude asked him after a time. Slow riding did breed talk.

“I feel like having a real dinner,” Marion said. “It'll take some doing. When we make camp, I'll go off and do some hunting.”

“Maude can shoot real well,” I said. “Maybe she can pop a rabbit or two before we even find a place to camp.”

“That so?” Marion said, and turned a curious eye on Maude. She turned red up to her hairline. She busied herself with readying her rifle, and by the time she finished, had recovered her businesslike manner.

We came upon a rabbit not a hundred yards further on. Maude snapped her rifle up, stood in her saddle, and aimed. Some rabbits will sit still as a stone. Not this one. It zigzagged across the field and leaped over a bush. When the bullet hit, the rabbit dropped out of the air. Dropped straight down.

Some horses will tolerate gunshot, and some will not. Maude's did well enough, especially considering Maude was doing the shooting. Mine startled and ran with me to a point long past the rabbit before I could settle him down.

Having impressed Marion with her rabbit-popping skills, Maude shot one more, and got a prairie chicken as well. We made camp by another river. Iowa was full of rivers. Marion skinned the dinner and had me walk the fur and feathers out of sight and then some. Meanwhile, he cooked the pieces slow, cooked them in the chicken's own fat, cooked them fit to feed a king. I followed my nose back to camp.

Maude had done her part, tending to the horses. While I gathered more kindling for the next morning's fire, Marion made milk gravy to pour over the meat. Maude smiled the first smile I'd seen in some time as we sat down to eat.

“I still have that man's six-shooter,” she said when we had begun to fill our bellies.

“You don't say,” Marion said, showing some interest. “You let me have a look at it later, and I'll see if we can't find some cartridges for it.”

“Out here?” Maude said.

“You have to know where to look,” Marion said.

We didn't talk much more than that. Marion was a restful kind of man to be with. Not at all what the dime novels would lead a person to believe a frontier fighter would be. Especially a frontier fighter turned bank robber.

After supper, he looked through the saddlebags from Maude's horse and found a box of cartridges, about half full. He held them up like he'd found a pouch of gold nuggets. Maude made a face at him, but she looked willing enough to give the six-shooter a try.

I spread the horse blankets in the spot I figured would do for a bed. The food made me sleepy. So did the air. The cooler it got, the more the air made me want to sleep. But I watched the shooting lesson for a time, resting my head on the saddlebags.

“It's some different than shooting a rifle,” Marion said. He stood behind Maude and helped her set up for a shot. “You can sight along your arm, if that's the only way you feel sure. But you might try just looking at what you want to shoot and expecting your bullet to go there. It works just as well, if not better, for someone who can shoot like you do.”

“What should I try to hit?” Maude asked him as he stepped away from her. For a fact, there wasn't much to look at but grass and more grass.

“Don't try to hit anything,” Marion said, coming back to the fire. Shooting lessons had come to an end without anyone firing a shot. “Don't waste what cartridges you've got. When you have cause to shoot, try it.”

“I hope I don't have cause,” Maude said, and threw our blanket over me.

As I drifted between the sweetness of wanting to sleep and the good taste hot gravy left in my mouth, I heard Maude say to Marion, “Tell me the truth about how you got your name.”

“I told you. I made it up.”

“You expect me to believe you have nothing to do with those dimers?”

Marion said, “I swear on my grave, I don't.”

“You can't swear on your grave,” Maude said. “You don't have one.”

“Men who ride rough don't always get graves,” Marion said.

Maude said, “I'm not in the mood to feel sorry for you.”

There was a silence that left me thinking Marion had lost patience with her entirely. “I know it's hard to believe,” he said with an air of starting over. “But the first one I saw was in your sister's hand.”

“Then how could this happen?”

“What I know is this. I ran into a newspaper fellow some years back. He was heading east. This was just after I started using the name Joe Harden. I think maybe he's been writing those stories.”

“How come?”

“I was riding shotgun on a stagecoach then, and when some fellers tried to hold us up, well, the newspaper fellow was pretty impressed with my shooting. The way he hung around after we got to the end of the run, always scribbling in that little notebook he had, made me curious at the time. I wondered why he didn't just get on eastward if that was where he was going.”

“I don't know that that's enough proof for me,” Maude said.

“Me either,” Marion said. “But one of those stories Sally recited came too close for comfort. Some things we really said were in that story. So now I'm just putting two and two together, and I believe it's coming up four.”

“I don't want you to tell Sallie,” Maude said. “She sets too much store by dimers as it is.”

“All right.”

Maude said, “We can't go on riding with you.”

“Why not?” “Because of the bank. I can't be sure what else you'll do.”

Marion said, “We all do things we regret. I didn't think it out. I'm sorrier than you may believe.”

“Even if I believe it, I have Sallie to think of. She has no one to look up to. She can't remember our folks, and now Aunt Ruthie's gone.”

“She could look up to you,” Marion suggested.

Maude said, “She looks up to you, sad to say, and you forget she's only a little girl. You ride too rough for a little girl. I can't let her ride so rough. She's young yet, and she'll forget how things ought to be.”

“I don't intend to rob another bank.”

“I can't change my mind, Marion. The next time we come to a town, you will go your way, and we will go anywhere else that looks likely.”

W
E DIDN'T COME ACROSS ANOTHER TOWN IN THE NEXT
eight days. We did cross three more rivers. One of them we crossed by ferry, which is a grand word to describe a water-logged raft. A rope lay in the water, pulled into a narrow letter
C
as the current dragged at it. We got on the raft in a gingerly fashion. Water washed across our feet. Maude and I looked at each other doubtfully. Even Marion seemed to have his doubts.

We stood silent as two boys Maude's age pulled on a tighter second rope to take us across. The current did most of the work, it looked like. On the other side, where our feet touched dirt again, we became very cheerful. It was a mood that lasted for some time.

Later in the same day, we met up with an oxen train carrying some fellows who were headed out to work on the railroad in Kansas or Nebraska. Marion paid out some of the bank money to buy the necessaries we'd otherwise be doing without once we went our own way. Not that Maude or Marion, either one, made mention of this fact as he tied a
sack full of flour and lard and such to the pommel of her horse.

He hung the fry pan and the Dutch oven from my horse. He couldn't get the right supplies for Maude's rifle, but he got pellets for my shotgun. While Marion did his trading, the railroad workers stood around the wagons, joshing the cook about bugs in his flour and such. It was easy to see they didn't mean anything by it. Then one fairly high-spirited sort said, “That older boy is almost pretty enough to be a girl.”

“
Almost
makes all the difference,” Marion said in a voice to dampen spirits. “He'll grow out of it.”

“No offense,” the man said.

“None taken,” Marion said back. But he finished his business in a crisp way that settled everyone down.

I knew how Maude felt, that Marion wasn't a man to look up to, that he wasn't Joe Harden's kind of man anymore. I agreed with her, it wasn't right to rob banks or to go around shooting people. But it wasn't right to steal horses either, and sometimes people did what they knew wasn't right.

Reading those dime novels, I had always figured there was something different in people who did wrong. That they had changed somehow, along the way, and it didn't hurt them to do wrong. Now I saw it did hurt them. But it didn't change something deep inside them, necessarily.

The best part of Marion had not been changed; he was still a man to look up to. I only wished Maude could see that too. I wished she could see that before we went our separate ways.

I knew Marion was figuring on leaving us pretty soon. All
day he kept telling us the things he thought we might need to know. He told us we'd gone west far enough, so what we needed to do was head south.

A river ran along our left side, and he said we ought to follow that for a while. “But when it takes on an easterly direction,” he said, “you keep going south. If the land continues dry, don't go looking for water, just keep moving south. Either you'll find it, or the rain will come.”

This could have been taken for thinking out loud, for planning ahead. Then his thoughts moved in another direction, and he told us what to do if we got caught in a blizzard.

“It's early for a blizzard,” Maude said.

“Stranger things have happened in these parts. Dry weather like this, and then a flood. Early snows. Late snows. Ice storms. You have to know how to manage, that's all. The almanac predicts a big snow.”

“You a big reader of the almanac?” Maude asked him with a faint challenge in her voice.

“People pass that kind of information along,” he said easily enough, but I could see they were going to get into it again. They were getting as testy as the Peasley children.

But then Maude's mood changed. “So tell us about snow,” she said.

“Find shelter and build a fire, of course,” Marion said. “But if that isn't possible, let yourselves be covered with snow. Keep pushing it away to make a little air space, and shove an arm through to the outside every so often to make a kind of chimney so fresh air can come in. Don't go to sleep.”