The Misadventures of Maude March (27 page)

Mrs. Newcomb had the good sense to retire to the bed while this was going on. I was tempted to remind her who had spent the night there, but figured if she picked up some lice, it would serve her right.

When it was done, the boy said, “I'm going home, and I'm never going to stray to the wrong side of the law again. I'm not cut out for it.”

Ben Chaplin was not in a forgiving mood. He said, “That's as may be, but there is a dead body on my floor that somebody will have to account for.”

“I didn't do it,” he said. “That girl is the one you ought to be jawing at.”

“You and this other fellow held us at gunpoint, in case you forgot,” Ben Chaplin said, “and you will have to answer for that.” And once more I had to be grateful that Ben Chaplin was a clear thinker, if nothing else.

“I didn't plan to shoot nobody,” the boy said, and I knew how he felt. I didn't plan either, it just happened, and now my hands were shaking so hard I had to keep them pressed flat between my knees. I had not yet stood up. I was not at all sure I could.

“I'll tell you what else,” Ben Chaplin said, “and this goes for everybody but Mack and Joe. I want you all out of here before nightfall. You girls pick yourself a horse, the rest of you take your own, and get on your way.”

I
WAS HURT BY THE CHANGE IN BEN CHAPLIN'S MANNER,
but Maude didn't appear to be. When Willie's boys had departed, it was our turn. Maude said, “What will the horse cost us?”

“Nothing,” Ben Chaplin said, “if you will just be on your way.”

If he thought he'd get an argument from Maude, he had another think coming. She said, “I want you to throw in a saddle.”

“Done.”

But Maude was not satisfied. “You'll get the mule back to Cleomie?”

“I will,” Ben Chaplin said. “And I'll put a flea in her ear when I see her too, sending me such as you to sleep under my roof.”

“You've got a deal,” Maude said, still unaffected by his rough attitude. I wished I could say the same. “Roll those blankets up tight, Sallie,” she said, making it necessary for me to test my legs. “I will get our horse.”

“I'll go with you,” Marion said.

“Sallie and I can get along on our own, thank you very much,” Maude said, and shut the door behind her. Marion stood helpless.

At this moment Joe chose to rise from the dead. He stood in an unsteady fashion and looked around the room. Mrs. Newcomb shrieked as if she'd seen a ghost. Ben Chaplin lost his temper entirely and shouted, “Good grief, woman, will you shut up!”

At this she went into her same loud crying act that we were all greatly tired of. Her husband hustled her out the door without so much as a thank-you to Ben Chaplin for the use of his floor or the barn for their wagon and horses.

“Good riddance,” Ben Chaplin said.

“You may say good riddance to us,” I said shakily, “but I thank you for your hospitality. It's not your fault things went so wrong. Of course, it was not our fault either.”

He said nothing to me, but I found I didn't mind, knowing I had said the things I should. Marion said nothing too, but he could see how it was with me. He rolled up the blankets and made our things ready by the door. He made us a meal out of the bits and pieces left from breakfast and wrapped it in a napkin. I watched to see that he chose Maude's napkin, which I had not shared when setting food down for the boys.

Maude did not waste time. She was back shortly with the saddled horse. It was not built for speed. But it was a sizable creature, much younger than Flora, and more than enough horse to carry the two of us with all our belongings.

Marion carried everything out to the porch, but Maude would not accept his help in loading the horse. He asked, “You girls have supplies enough to take you the distance?”

“We will shoot something if we run short of all else,” Maude said in a cool tone. “It is only a few days away now.”

“That's true,” Marion said. “But the weather could go bad on you again, anything could…”

If he meant to say, anything could happen, he thought better of it. So far there wasn't much that hadn't happened, and still Maude and I trudged on. We must have been something of a surprise to him. We were a surprise to me.

He gave up trying to talk to Maude. To me, he said, “That was good shooting, Sallie.”

“It was pure accident,” I told him. “I'm lucky it was Willie I hit and not somebody I'd feel more sorry about.”

“You don't need to feel sorry, accident or no. That boy would've killed somebody before the week was out.”

“You didn't look eager to kill him when Mr. Newcomb suggested it,” I said, feeling a little put out about this myself. “You said he was only a boy and a rowdy.”

“He was just a boy. I was wrong about the rowdy part,” Marion said. “I saw that this morning. I can be wrong, now and again. Especially when the suggestion to be some other way is coming from somebody who doesn't care to bite the bullet his ownself.”

“Enough talk,” Maude said, and threw a leg over the horse. “Give her a hand up so we can get out of where we aren't wanted.”

“I wish I was riding out with you,” Marion said.

Maude did not reply to this. She gigged the horse and we were off.

“We are getting a late start on the day,” Maude said. “I plan to ride till dark.”

“You won't get any argument from me,” I said.

“We have only a little cheese and ham left,” Maude said, “and the last of the corn bread is dry and hard. But I didn't care to take anything more from Ben, even if he had offered.”

“If you shoot something, I'll skin it,” I promised, thinking the time was not right to mention that Marion had seen to this. Maude would be more reasonable when her belly was empty.

My belly was already thinking ahead, though. When the necessity came to hunt something up, I was hoping for a rabbit. If Maude shot it, it would be my job to clean it, and chicken feathers could be hard work.

This is how we began what we hoped would be the last leg of our journey. We enjoyed the unusual warmth of the day, and when it passed into a chilly evening, we had a fire. “Someone might notice the fire,” I said, even as I sidled up to warm my hands.

“Let them notice,” she said. Something in Maude had shifted; she was no longer on the run. I thought maybe I should be; I had killed a man, however accidentally, and I was made a little nervous by this change in Maude.

“We'll tell them where we're headed, and let them know we're willing to sleep in their barn if they'd rather,” she added in a tone to bolster me.

This new boldness suited Maude very well, and I decided not to argue against it. No one noticed our fire, in any case, and it did us good to have it. Given the choice between going cold and going hungry, I would choose to go hungry every time.

As things turned out, and some would call it very good
luck, our greatest adventure during the next several days was eating a prairie dog for the first time. I suppose with the right kind of cooking, a prairie dog could make a good meal. For roasting them over an open fire until they are half charred, I cannot speak enthusiastically.

A
WEEK LATER, WE WERE TIRED OF THE ENDLESSNESS OF
the prairie. From all the accounts I'd ever read, we were traveling only the edge of a broad grassland more persistent than Iowa and even Missouri for grass. One that had no trees at all and took weeks to cross. I could not stomach the idea. Missouri had more than enough grass for me.

“Doesn't it seem funny to you that we never see anything but grass and sky?” I complained to Maude. “Don't you wish we would see a homestead? Don't you wish we might come across a wagon train and join up with some other travelers? Don't you wish—”

“Oh, be quiet,” Maude scolded. “Isn't it enough for you that nobody is bothering us? That we're making steady progress toward Independence?”

Maybe we were making steady progress, but it didn't feel like it. It seemed we were forever wading through a sea of grass that might just about be forded when the wind would change direction and another sea would wash in.

Trees came few and far between out here. To find a stand of three to five of them was so rare as to make me want to set
up camp, no matter the time of day. It was nearly as good as coming across a dressed bird.

And yet it became so much what we expected to see that when we saw something different the very next day, it was a little alarming. It didn't help that it was a cemetery of some size. Many a row of wooden markers, some crosses, and a few stones of a golden color that felt restful to the eyes. It was civilization.

But still, it didn't feel like much of a welcome.

“What do you think it means?” I asked Maude.

“Independence can't be far away,” she said. But I could see the sight had unsettled her too. I wished we had come upon something else as our first sign of civilization, that was all.

“I hope there are a few people left standing,” I replied as we passed the cemetery.

There were more than a few. We came upon a well-traveled road and followed it. Over an hour's time, a good many people passed us riding out.

Each time someone got a good look at us, I worried they would recognize Maude. What good were a few layers of dirt when your face had been splashed across the front page? When you were known far and wide as Mad Maude? But no one did any other than raise a hand in greeting, and some did not go that far.

When we could see the town in the distance, a pale cloud of dust seemed to hover over it. It spread out a good deal more than Cedar Rapids or even Des Moines. Its color seemed from a distance to be a fairly uniform gray. People out here did not take great care to whitewash, it looked to me.

We rode into town at about two o'clock, with Maude
congratulating herself on having a couple of hours of bright daylight left in which to find Uncle Arlen.

“Maybe we ought to find a place to stay first,” I said.

“If we find Uncle Arlen, we'll have a place to stay,” she said.

Her confidence had returned but mine had found a hole somewhere to hide in. Partly it was the memory of Des Moines that bothered me. But the other worry was simply the size of Independence.

I didn't like the look of it from the get-go. The streets were wide but still so busy with carriages, coaches, and riders moving much too fast, it didn't look safe to enter into the rush of it all. If we got brushed off our horse, we would be trampled or run over in a moment.

“It's just such a change from seeing nobody,” Maude said when I stood reluctant. “You'll get used to it in a few minutes, you'll see.”

We had to shoulder our way into the flow of horses and riders. The boardwalk looked worse to me. Crowded, and people acted like they didn't even see each other, just used their elbows to hurry on past. It made me glad I was on a horse, more polite.

I had never seen so many people together in one place before, not even in church on Christmas morning. We hadn't gone far before I was ready to turn and hightail it out of there. “Let's come back later,” I said to Maude. “We can use the breather to get used to the idea of it all.”

“Settle down, Sallie,” Maude told me. “You are evermore the kind of person who strives for something and once it is
within reach, changes her mind. But I am not changing mine, and you are stuck behind me on this horse.”

The buildings were, for the most part, the unrelenting gray color they had looked to be from the distance. But every so often we saw a fancy hotel that, while it was largely still gray, sported red or orange trim about the doors and windows.

There were saloons aplenty, and these were by far the most appealing buildings, some of them dressed up like doll-houses, the likes of which could only come from a girl's imagination. The wood trim was sometimes carved in curlicues and the painted words were drawn very prettily. Occasionally the doors were painted in bright colors.

The best of these dollhouses caused us to stop and look for a time. It was a place dressed up in shades of lavender and made the mouth water for wanting to sleep there. But when I said so, Maude only made a snorting noise much like the horse was given to.

Here and there about the town were men, and even a couple of women, standing bravely in the crush of the streets, selling things to eat. We stopped beside these people pretty often, tasting their wares. When it was bread stuff, we bought only one and shared. When it was a piece of meat or potatoes, Maude said we should each have one of our own.