The Misadventures of Maude March (24 page)

Maude still sat on the floor and watched all that went on with narrowed eyes. She was not too badly hurt, so far as I could tell, but her face was held stiff as a clean sheet. She looked as little like a girl as I could hope.

Mack yanked Joe's boot off, which caused Joe to yell all the more. “Oh, my,” Mack shouted in an aggrieved fashion. “You've shotten his little toe off.”

This announcement did Joe no good at all. He nearly fell off the chair. But Ben Chaplin acted quickly, tying a string tightly around the stump and wrapping the foot in a linen towel, which began immediately to turn red. He raised Joe's foot to rest on the table.

What followed was all confusion.

B
EN CHAPLIN ORDERED MACK TO GET A NEEDLE AND
thread. The shivering boy who seemed most in charge of things put up some argument over this and told another of the boys to follow Mack around to be sure a needle and thread was all he got.

There were accusations thrown around by all three boys. Even the one following Mack to watch him take a box from a shelf had something to say. All of the accusations concerned who did the shooting and whether any shooting ought to have been done. I did not get clear on who had done the shooting.

But then I wasn't really looking at them, or listening too closely. Because the fourth man, the one who'd helped to carry in Joe, was none other than Marion Hardly. He was looking at me with the same kind of surprise that I could feel on my own face. And when I opened my mouth to say I don't even know what, he shook his head, and gave me to know I was to say nothing.

This offended me. Didn't he think I knew better than to say his name? If I
had
said his name, I doubted anyone would have heard it, anyway.

I glanced at Maude. She had seen Marion too. Pale or not, her eyes looked ready to bite him. I couldn't really say I blamed her. She had narrowly accepted his apologies for Aunt Ruthie's death, she had not yet entirely forgiven him for the bank robbery, and here he was shooting up Ben Chaplin's ranch.

But there was already a fight in every corner, and Maude was the sort who liked to have the floor when she was making her complaints known. I had no doubt she was waiting for her chance.

It was soon to come.

The argument had not entirely died down when the boy I had guessed to be the leader decided to end it by simply moving on. “Dusty, stay here and keep an eye on them while we put the horses up,” he said, loudly enough to be heard over the other two arguing with him, and over Joe's howling and Mrs. Newcomb's loud sobs. All was pandemonium.

Dusty.

Dusty looked likely enough to keep an eye on us. The others exited with a great noise of hard-heeled boots, the very kind Maude despised. But once the door slammed shut behind them, the cabin went strangely quiet.

Mrs. Newcomb fell back to loud, hiccupy breathing and a lot of sniffling. Joe dropped from a howl to merely whining. It relieved the tension in the room the minute those others had stepped out, even if they were sure to come back.

“I'm sorry about this,” Marion said to us all when they had gone.

An apology was so unexpected that Joe forgot to whimper, even at the sight of Ben Chaplin threading a needle. Mrs.
Newcomb's hankie was already to the wringing-out stage, so Mr. Newcomb stepped forward to get a table napkin for her.

It had been used earlier, refolded, and put back down at the same place. I believed it to be my napkin, and as she blew her nose in it, I intended not to need it again.

“Willie is not always so short-tempered,” Marion went on to say in the near quiet. He threw off his jacket, but his shirt was wet beneath it. “We were bedded down for the night not far from here when a gullywasher swept over us and drowned two of his men. It's put him in a poor frame of mind.”

Everyone in the room, save Maude and me, breathed a sigh of relief. It could be seen that Marion was not trigger-happy; at least one of these men was not someone to be quite so afraid of.

“You say 'his men' like you are not one of them,” Ben Chaplin said.

“I'm riding with them for a time, it's true,” Marion said. “I fell in with bad company, that was plain to me right away, and I was resolved to sneak off while they slept that night. I fell asleep myself, sad to say. Then the weather hit, and I saw they were just boys who weren't going to make it if I left them on their own.”

He had no sooner made this explanation than Maude said, “Dusty Har de Har Har to the rescue.”

“Stop that,” Marion said.

“Yes, stop it,” Ben echoed. He looked at her like she was crazy.

“We know this man,” Maude said. “He is a fool, but he is not much like these men he is traveling with.”

Ben looked back to Marion for the proof of this statement.

“Were they following us?” I asked, figuring there were no secrets to keep.

“They were riding down on us,” Marion said, “but they did not mean to follow us. When I saw the kind they were, I took advantage of some tracks I'd seen and concocted a story to lead them off in another direction. I told them I'd seen a wagonload of whiskey going westward. That was all it took.”

“I might owe you thanks,” Maude said, “but I hardly know whether to trust someone who takes his names from dime novels. You also said you don't ride so rough and here you are, riding as rough as I've ever seen.”

“All right, but you and Sallie keep quiet, or we may all be sorry,” Marion said.

“Sallie?” Ben said, and looked back at us.

I was some bothered. This was the first person who believed us to be boys for more than a minute or so, and now Marion was about to ruin it for us.

“They are girls,” Mrs. Newcomb cried. “Wild girls, who've been making a lot of trouble!”

“Now that's not true,” Marion said, coming to our defense, even over Maude's cry of protest. Maude stepped toward Mrs. Newcomb like she might do the woman some damage, but even this was forestalled by Marion when he snatched Maude back by the collar of her shirt. “They are girls, but not wild ones. They didn't rob that bank. I did.”

Mrs. Newcomb greeted this report with a loud shriek.

“Stop that foolishness,” Marion said, losing his patience.

“She didn't know about the bank,” I said.

Marion turned wide eyes on me. “Then what did she mean about making trouble?”

I shrugged. “Maybe we look like trouble to her,” I said, seeing Mrs. Newcomb was sobbing like a child.

Marion banged his gun on the table like a judge. “Can we have some quiet here? We have only a minute before they get back.”

Ben Chaplin said, “What do you mean to tell us?”

“Only that Willie has never killed anyone,” Marion said. “He wants to, but he can't bring himself to do it. Now he may be satisfied with shooting off your toe, young feller, that he's made a manly appearance. Or his boys may make him feel it's a poor job he did. There's no telling.”

Mr. Newcomb said, “You and that girl, she looks ready enough, could take up your guns and shoot them as they come back in. Then we would be shed of them.”

“I'm not in favor of that plan,” Marion said. “We would kill three young men for no greater sin than rowdy behavior at the cost of one toe. All you need to do to get shed of them is do exactly what they tell you. Don't bother them with risky business like trying to shoot them. They'll be out of here tomorrow. Maybe with a change of horses, if you can stand it.” This last was said to Ben Chaplin.

“They can have any horse on the place,” Ben Chaplin said, “and it will be a bargain all around, just to be rid of them.” He turned back to the business of Joe's foot, telling Mack to pinch off the flow of blood as soon as the towel was removed.

“That's it then. Just lay low and don't trouble them,” Marion said. “And don't do any more talking about these girls,” he said to Mrs. Newcomb in particular. “Or bank robbing, nothing. Got that?”

When she didn't answer, but looked offended herself, he added, “Or I may be tempted to do some shooting after all.”

This brought forth another shriek, and she fell against her husband. He did not look all that welcoming, but at least things were in the right state when Willie and his boys clomped up the steps and came back into the cabin.

T
HEY WENT STRAIGHT FOR THE STOVE TO WARM
themselves. The one called Willie looked around the room at all of our frightened faces and said, “Good boy, Dusty,” as if he was patting a dog.

Ben Chaplin set to stitching while Mack held Joe's heel to the table, and Joe himself began to wriggle around on his chair and howl some more. I suppose the missing toe must have caused him some pain because I've had stitches taken myself, and it didn't hurt all that much.

Then again, the spirits that Ben Chaplin claimed would help with the pain did seem to annoy Joe when poured over his toe. He wasn't much helped by drinking the stuff either.

Some people are squeamish about that sort of thing. Maude, for instance, got more bleached-looking each time that bloody towel flashed where she could see it. She had gone so pale she by this time looked a little green, something I would not have thought possible if I wasn't looking right at her.

Willie said he was hungry. The bloody towel didn't bother him one bit. Mrs. Newcomb wasn't so much bothered by the
towel but looked likely to faint when Willie suggested she ought to be laying out some food.

I said, “I'm in charge of the kitchen, me and my brother, Johnnie. We have some cold pork chops and some biscuits with jelly. Will that do you?”

“That will do us just fine,” Willie said. From the looks of things, he was just as happy to get a little cooperation as he was to shoot off people's toes.

I put four tin plates on the table and a platter in the middle, and put the jelly out so they could help themselves. We had cold coffee left from supper, but I had more than once noticed that coffee tended to liven people up. We didn't want these fellows livened up one bit. I dipped some cold water into mugs and set those out.

I'd have offered clean napkins if we had them, but it didn't seem we did. They would have to make do. The three of them spent these few minutes poking around the room, nosing into stuff that didn't belong to them. The saddlebags were still more covered by my blanket than not, and did not come to their notice.

They mostly talked about how good it would be to sleep in a bed. Marion, or Dusty, as I had to remember to call him, sat down at the table rather politely for a range rider.

Ben Chaplin finished up the job of sewing and, having heard the talk of the beds, made up a pallet for Joe on one side of the wood burner. He gave him a pill that looked like a nugget of dried meat.

“Here, what's that you're giving him?” Willie said like a child jealous of the Christmas candy.

Ben Chaplin held the jar up and said, “It'll help him sleep,
even though he has pain. I give it to my animals, should they need it.”

This caused Willie to lose interest, or maybe the food was just more of an attraction. I was chiding myself, and Ben Chaplin too. Me, for not wondering harder about that pill, which any range rider ought to do when something new turns up. And Ben Chaplin, for not thinking to pass me some of those pills. I could have put several of them into the coffee and served it without a qualm. We could have snuffed them boys out like candles.

However, having learned my lesson, I watched to see where Ben put the bottle. There might yet come a time when I could use it. I also watched Joe, wondering how long it would take those pills to put him out.

Meanwhile, a kind of unsteady peace settled over the room as the boys sat down to eat. The shortage of chairs caused the Newcombs to claim a corner on the other side of the wood burner. At first Mrs. Newcomb perched on a stack of wood like a nervous hen. She acted like she had forgotten how to sit anywhere but on a chair, or maybe she objected to the generally dirty state of the floor.

Mr. Newcomb sat with his back to the wood, resting easy with his choice. His wife could have had a cleaner corner, but it wouldn't have been nearly so warm come the middle of the night. Floor space was being treated like good bottomland, all of us staking our claim.