The Misadventures of Maude March (8 page)

I was struggling to get the rope off my ankle, and telling her to do the same, when an old dog wandered into view. I stood and quieted the horses as the dog made one trip all around us. “It's afraid we'll throw rocks or something,” I said to Maude.

“Maybe it's wild,” she said. “Maybe it's wondering if it ought to attack.”

“If that were so, it would snarl,” I said, making a guess. Aunt Ruthie had never allowed us to have a dog, so the truth of the matter was, we were neither one real sure of how a dog would act. “Give me a piece of cheese.”

Maude rummaged in the bag, cut a piece, and tossed it to me. The dog watched this with interest but didn't come any closer. I held out the cheese, and still he wouldn't come.

I walked out nearly to him and set it on the ground. When I walked away, he took it. “Give me another piece,” I said.

“That cheese is to fill our bellies,” Maude said. “Let him go home and eat.”

She had the right of it, so I didn't bother her for more. But the dog slept in that spot where I laid down the cheese. The horses had calmed down enough that we could tie them to our ankles again.

This time when I laid my head down, I slept.

Maude woke at first light.

Those horses were better than roosters for waking a body up, yanking me this way and that. I'd been awake on and off for better than an hour but reluctant to leave the blankets. In between the awake moments, I'd had bad dreams.

“Get up, lazybones.”

“I'm awake,” I said, still not making a move to get up. The morning was chill. Heavy dew had dripped off the leaves of the trees and wetted down the blankets. My stomach felt like it hung in my middle like an empty sack. I was in no mood for roughing it. I wanted the smell of biscuits to be on the air and the sweet taste of bacon in my mouth, and I didn't want to rustle up a fire to get it.

Maude gave me a smart kick to my rump.

I put one arm out to test the weather and found it every bit as unpleasant as I expected. “Here,” Maude said, putting a fork in my hand. “I thought we might as well finish off this cheese today. But then I found pie. You crazy girl, you brought pie?”

“Doesn't seem so crazy at just this minute.” I sat up, still rolled in my blanket.

“It's broken up some, but the forks don't care,” she said.
“Eat up.” We ate mostly pie, saving the rest of the cheese and one pie for later.

But we felt rich enough to give the dog another piece of cheese, and he followed us for about half an hour. Maybe by then we were taking him too far from home, for I looked back once to see he'd gone. I was sorry to see him go.

I felt the lack of company, although Maude rode alongside me. Even days spent in only Aunt Ruthie's company had been more filled with the doings of the world around us. Out here, it was hard to be sure that somewhere else people were working together, sitting down together, someone was probably getting a tooth pulled. I decided I was lucky not to be that one. For her part, Maude could tolerate going for hours without saying a word.

At first I worried that she was let down by the letters, which we'd read through once more before starting out. We had no idea where Uncle Arlen might be found; we had only the strongest feeling that he'd already moved further west when he wrote the last letter. We had agreed not to worry about it till we got to Independence. “One worry at a time,” Maude said, echoing Aunt Ruthie's advice on meeting trouble.

We rode all day at the same good clip we'd done the day before. We moved north of any wagon tracks we came across. I didn't want to ride north. It made no sense to me, but Maude was of the firm opinion this was the same thing as moving to higher ground. Anyone could see the land was flat, but logic was not a partner to Maude's opinions.

I agreed to move a mile north, not because I believed we could see around us any better but I figured the further from
the wagon trail we got, the fewer people we'd meet. Then we traveled due west for a while. I turned us south again as soon as I could manage to do it gradual.

“We can't go around dressed like this and calling each other Maude and Sallie,” Maude said.

She had been quiet for so long, we both had, that her voice came as a surprise. “Why not?” I said, slowing up a little to make it easier to talk. “That's our names.”

“We might come up on some other people, and we do want them to believe we're boys,” she reminded me. “We ought to get used to calling each other something else.”

“What do you want to be called?” I asked.

“Something that starts with an
M
. Monty?” “Monty?” I didn't much care for the sound of it. “I think I'd get confused and call you Maude in a heated moment.”

“A heated moment?”

“Like if we were under attack or something.”

“I doubt it will matter if we're under attack,” she said in a tone that reminded me of Aunt Ruthie. A moment later, she asked, “What name do you suggest?”

“How about Pete?”

“Only if I get to call you Repeat,” she said.

“I like Johnnie. How does that hit you?” I said, thinking I would take that name.

“I'll be Johnnie, you be Pete,” she said.

I didn't want to be Pete, but I only frowned and said, “Let's think about it.”

I kept an eye on the sun, but I could only make the sorriest guess which direction we were going. Every so often I had to ride ahead a little to steal a look at the compass. “Why do
you keep doing that?” Maude complained after one of these forays. “It makes me nervous.”

“I'm learning to ride faster on bareback,” I said. It wasn't an out-and-out lie. “If we got chased by something, I'm not sure I could stay on. Why does it make you nervous? You can see me the whole time.”

“I don't know; it just does.”

“Well, get over it.”

We didn't stay mad at each other the way we once would have. We couldn't. We only had each other, and we knew it.

B
Y LATE IN THE DAY I HAD GROWN USED TO THE LONELY
feeling it gave me to never see another soul. We had been moving at a trot for some time. I didn't like bouncing around so much in a saddle, but it was some worse riding bareback.

I spotted a stand of trees maybe a mile or so away. “Let's head for those trees and set up camp.”

“I'm not so bone tired today as I was yesterday,” Maude said.

“I'm bone
sore
,” I said, and scootched around a little on the horse. We'd only recently nibbled at the last of the cheese as we rode. Now I wished I was hungry. When my belly was full and feeling good, I noticed my every other complaint all the more.

“We sound like Mrs. Golightly in the middle of winter,” Maude said to me, “nursing her achy bones.”

I reached into my pocket and brought out a peppermint candy. “Want one?”

“Oh,” Maude said in a little-girl voice. Tears stood on her eyelashes, but she didn't say anything about Aunt Ruthie's fondness for peppermints.

“We don't have many,” I said, reluctant to use them up too quickly. “Maybe we ought to save them for special occasions or something.”

“I will always buy peppermints,” Maude said fiercely. “No matter what. I would steal them, if need be.” I couldn't imagine Maude stealing anything but food and horses, and I had to bully her to get her to do that. But I decided to let the remark pass.

“I want to fry up those chickens,” Maude told me as we settled on a place to camp for the night. “Before they spoil.”

While the chicken sweetened the air, she got me to help her collect greens to boil up. They were not the sort of thing to grow on a person, even with the right gravy of bacon fat and onion, which Maude said she wouldn't waste on them even if she had the onion. She boiled some of the eggs over the same fire that fried the chicken.

“You'd make a decent range rider,” I told her.

“Don't look now,” she said, “but I
am
a range rider. And so are you.”

We ate those eggs while we rode the next couple of days, and eked the chicken out over the sit-down meals. We had agreed not to worry, but we read through Uncle Arlen's letters again and again, trying to make out the kind of man he was.

It was a mark in his favor that he made it to Independence in the first place, but less of one that he might have left it not long after. We were, needless to say, hopeful of him being a man who stayed in one spot.

“Do you think the Peasleys miss us?” I asked as we put the letters away.

Maude burst out laughing, and although I had not meant it to be a funny question, I very soon found it made me laugh too. Maude got the hiccups and began to say things between each one—“Ungrateful girls, hic… Didn't even make their beds, hic…before they left, hic…hic…”—till I worried I would get hiccups too.

For a farm horse, Flora was a strong swimmer. Maude quit wearing her boots with the pointy toes after taking them off to ford a river. She'd held them over her head as she let Flora make her way across the river, but then made room for them in one of Flora's bags. “They make my feet go numb,” she complained.

“Then maybe they don't fit after all,” I said, growing hopeful that they might fit me.

“They do,” she said. “But my own toes make as good a horse prod as the boot tips. If I wear those things very long, I'm going to walk like a real cowboy. I'll never find a husband that way.”

“I didn't know you were so goldanged interested in finding a husband,” I said. My seat wouldn't have been so sore if she hadn't been so picky about the two husbands she'd already turned down.

Maude sighed. “I'm not looking for him today. But I have to think ahead. And don't swear, Sallie, it's not becoming.”

Of all the unbecoming things we had done, swearing appeared to me to be the least. “Maude, do you think we're going to find Uncle Arlen?” I asked her as we rode on.

“Yes, I do,” she answered.

“It doesn't seem likely, though, does it?” I said. “Even if
he was the type to live through getting there, he could be anywhere.”

“Shut up, Sallie.”

We'd been making our way mainly west, by my best reckoning, and I made up my mind to work us further south, and not only because Independence lay to the south. We could feel the cold at night and rode away from it by day.

By what I figured to be Wednesday, I had seen enough of grass and sky. To make matters worse, a chill wind blew in. It was cold work, sitting a horse in the wind. Maude layered socks on her feet. We pulled those pieces of dishtowel up to cover our noses and wore folded blankets like shawls.

Riding face into the wind was hard on the horses too. They were willing to run, but then tired quickly. So we let them strike their own pace. When the wind blew up their noses, it was a trot, jouncing us around too much, so it wasn't long before we slowed them to a walk. I began to doubt we'd cover ten miles the whole livelong day.

I was ready to set camp by the middle of the afternoon. “This seems like a waste,” I told Maude once. “We might just as well see what we have left to eat.”

“A little further,” she said, and so we went on.

“I'm just sick of it,” I said a few miles later. “I wish Uncle Arlen had gone back east. Then we could go by train. We could have sold off all the furniture to make our fare, if we'd had more than one night to do it. I wish we were on our way to Philadelphia.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” Maude told me.

“What was the last thing you wished for?” I asked her.

“To be my own boss,” she said sadly.

I didn't ask her when that was.

We had been lucky so far, finding water every day. Sometimes it was green and scummy, but we could let the horses fill up. When we came to clear water, we drank till we sloshed when we walked. After we'd made some room in the potato sacks, by virtue of eating much of what they held, we were able to put an assortment of the household items in them. Once the bucket was emptied of these things, we were able to carry some water.

“Look at that,” Maude said.

I pushed my hat up. “Look at what?”

“The grass there.” Maude pointed. “See how it's been stomped down?”

There was, in fact, a trampled path. Looking more closely, I couldn't decide what it might have been. The ground was too dry to take a print. Too narrow for a buckboard, I decided. Even a one-seat buggy left wheel marks on the grass. But there weren't any wheel marks.

“I think it's a single horse and rider,” Maude said. “That's the same kind of trail we leave behind us.”

“When did you look at the kind of trail we leave behind us?” I asked, immediately looking behind to see we'd made two battened-down paths. I smarted a little to think Maude was going to turn out to be a better range rider than I was. I had a dozen dimers, or at least I once had, that went into some detail on the subject of trailing, and I considered myself well-informed. I didn't like making a poor showing of it right when we'd found our first trail to follow.

“I think we should follow this trail,” I said.

“I don't know, Sallie. Maybe it would be smarter just to ride a mile north and stay away from this fellow.”

“I don't want to catch up to him,” I said. “I just want to know where he is.”

“It's getting late. We'd have to go without a fire.”