I bought canned peaches and beans for the trail. A purchase of ten cans got us the can opener for free. A huge slab of corn bread and a mound of soft cheese could be eaten right away. I got hard cheese and crackers. Spoons came tied together, six in a bunch for the penny.
Next to the spoons were bright blue bowls speckled with white. They looked cheerful, and I was ever a fool for what looked cheerful, so I picked up three. The third bowl would feed Marion; that was how I planned for it.
I thought long and hard on the subject of coffee, which would need a pot and a cup, and for that matter, a fire. I had the pot and the cup, but I wasn't sure we were going to have a fire. Coffee didn't make a wise choice.
I chose a metal comb, feeling for the one with the smoothest teeth. Standing in front of the shelves, I couldn't find hair color. I settled for boot black. The stuff was cheap; worth the try.
Hats were pricey. I picked up a neck kerchief to be tied over Maude's hair like the day cook at George Ray's wore. I didn't know if Maude would consent to looking like the day cook, but our bellies were worse off than our heads, was how I looked at it.
During this time, I'd kept my ears open to the talk going on around me.
“Long time since we've had a rain,” a farmer said.
“We're overdue for one,” the man behind the counter said, as dry as sand. Likely this was the main conversation he had over the course of a day and it got old.
“I don't believe my crops are going to hang on long enough to collect what's due,” the farmer said on his way out the door.
A fellow mentioned an empty house in the neighborhood, abandoned since the war. It was up for sale.
Last, not least, the jailbreak was mentioned.
“Some fellows rode through last night, told me three gangs got together and took a whole passel a bad guys outta jail in Independence. The one they were going to hang today was one of them, and that gal that causes so much trouble.”
The storekeeper gave me my change. “What gal is that?”
I waited just as interestedly for the reply.
“Mad Martha.”
“Don't say,” the storekeeper said. “Big gunfight?”
The bell rang over the door, and a man came in, holding the door for a woman behind him.
“Heard there was. But then I also heard tell those fellows rassled them lawmen down to their skins so they couldn't give chase.”
I could see the facts of this story were already being twisted every which way.
“I expect we'll see a newspaper delivery today, then.”
“What's happened?” the newly arrived man wanted to know. “Mad Martha and that crowd is raising a ruckus,” the storekeeper answered.
I took my purchases outside and struggled to tie a sack of cans to the saddle horn. Mad Martha, I thought, and laughed.
SIXTEEN
I WAS JUST FINISHING WITH THE TYING UP OF SACKS when I heard the jolly tinkling of piano notes playing over the air. It struck me as something unusual to hear music at such an early hour, especially such a lively tune. I looked at the two buildings across the street. One advertised itself as an inn, and as I watched, an elderly couple came out, headed for a waiting buggy.
The other called itself the Prairie Queen Restaurant. It looked out over the plains through two wide glass windows at the front. I could smell eggs on the fry.
A young woman came out on the upstairs porch while I was looking that way and leaned against the wall as if to take the sun. Something about this struck me as odd—most females were busy in the kitchen at this hour.
This one in particular was sort of fluffy-looking to my eye. Her hair was loose, her dress was light-colored and had ruffles at the wrists.
A man came out the front door as I was heading for the building. He hurried down the steps, and as he did, his coat flapped open and I saw the flash of a badge on his chest. I didn't stare. He climbed on his horse and rode off.
I went around to the back door of the restaurant and knocked. The piano music was coming from inside. The smell of eggs wasn't.
After a good deal of knocking, the door was answered by a fellow who wasn't in the least fluffy. He looked like he'd been sleeping; his face still held creases from the pillow.
“Wot's witchu?” he said.
I stared. He said, “Whaddya want?”
“Hair color,” I said. “My ma doesn't want the church ladies to know she's coloring it, so she sent me.”
“Waytcheer,” he said, and I waited.
He went into the house, where I heard him call somebody, and then the papery slap of their leather slippers as they came downstairs. He said something more, and then a small, pretty woman came to the door, not the same one I'd seen on the upstairs porch.
“Neville says you want some henna. We only have brown.” “Can you sell me just a little of it?” I said. “I don't have but a dime.”
“Come on inside.” When I hesitated, she said, “Come on, I'm not going to bite you.”
I stepped inside and followed her to a tiny room with a washstand and a good-sized tub, heavyweight, the very sort Aunt Ruthie was always saving up for. Unlike most tubs that had to be lugged outside to dump the dirty water, this one drained out the bottom. More, they'd fixed it to drain out through a hole in the floor.
While I was looking at this wonder and then admiring the yellow wallpaper with small red dots, she put some of that coloring powder in a small jar with a lid. I thought this a good idea, as it would keep the stuff dry. She said, “Ten cents' worth or thereabouts.”
“Thank you,” I said, making the trade.
“You've made yourself into a nice-looking boy,” she said, “but you're going to be a pretty girl someday.”
There was no accounting for the bleak feeling this gave me. I said to her, “I didn't understand that fellow. What's your name?”
“He's talking the King's English. Nobody can understand a word he says,” she said with a grin. She put out a hand. “Geranium, that's me. What's yours?”
“Sallie.” I shook her hand.
SEVENTEEN
I DIDN'T SPEND ANOTHER MINUTE IN TOWN, BUT RODE right back to Maude.
She took the potato sack, saying, “Any news?”
“They know about the jailbreak,” I said as I slid off my horse. “Not much more than that.”
“There's talk?” She began to go through the sack.
“Some,” I said. “Mad Martha is a whole lot more interesting than the lack of rain. Less worrying, too.”
“Mad Martha?” She grinned as I sat down. I reached for the corn bread packet, which was some flattened.
Maude held up the boot black. “What's this for?”
“Your hair.”
Maude sat back from rummaging around in the sack. “I would sooner cut it off again.”
“Never mind, I found the right stuff. Brown. I got a kerchief so you can cover up meantime.”
“Oh! Peppermints.” Maude set the packet aside. “You're forgiven for the boot black.”
“Let's eat and talk later,” I said.
We first tried to spread the cheese, then tried spooning it onto the crumbling corn bread. Finally we ate the cheese with spoons and followed it up with a bite of corn bread.
As my belly filled, I began to think. “You're going to need pants.”
Maude hadn't turned away from the problem of her hair. “I guess you're right about the color,” she said. “Only I've come to like it as it is.”
I glanced at her and saw she'd licked her spoon clean and was using it for a mirror. “There's the kerchief.”
“A kerchief is never a waste of a penny,” she said. “I'll tie it around my neck and pull it up if things get dusty.”
“I can still get you a hat,” I said, “if you give me another two dollar.”
“I can't spare it,” she said in a way that got my back up.
“There's a new wrinkle on penny wise and pound foolish.”
She put the spoon down, but not to
argue with me.
Four riders on the trail had caught her eye—they weren't riding all in a bunch, but they could be a posse. I sat still, figuring we looked less interesting just sitting there than getting up and riding off in a hurry. One of those riders looked our way.
“I think we might have company.” The words were no sooner out of my mouth than that rider slowed.
Maude looked up. “Just sit quiet,” she said. “I'm not up to shooting him.”
From this I knew she didn't see anything to worry about, but it wasn't until he turned his horse toward us that I recognized him. It's a funny thing to know someone by the way they sit their horse.
It was only the relief of a moment, for in the back of my mind was the worry over Uncle Arlen. But for that moment, I could breathe deep and easy.
“If you girls ain't a sight for sore eyes,” Marion said as he drew near.
“We heard shots as we rode off,” I said as he swung down from his horse. He had my shotgun and I was glad of it.
“Things got a mite excitable,” he said mildly.
“Tell us what happened,” Maude said.
“You were barely out the door and Black Hankie was on his way down the stairs. The sheriff took on with one of those fellows,” he said in that tone he uses for a good story. “Things went wild. I scooted out the back door, laid in with a heel and rid this reluctant son of a mule—” He stopped, fixed in Maude's stare.
She can be daunting in a way Aunt Ruthie had been, and his reaction wasn't surprising. “They got out,” he said. “That's the long and the short of it.”
His gaze shifted to look meaningfully at the corn bread and cheese. I pushed Marion's bowl over to Maude, for she was sitting closer to the cheese.
“What did the others do?” I asked him.
“Aw, they knew enough to scatter,” he said. “‘Course, the bullet hole in Black Hankie slowed them up some.”
“Bullet hole?” Maude said. She stopped with the cheese poised in midair. “You thought that wasn't important enough to mention earlier?”
“I did tell you,” Marion said. “One of those fellows went for a gun, and when the sheriff jumped him, it went off.”
“Was he killed?” I asked.
“I don't believe so,” Marion said.
Maude set a piece of corn bread on top of the cheese and passed it over to Marion with a spoon. “Lucky thing I spotted you,” he said around his first mouthful.
“Two posses passed us by while we sat it out here,” I said. “I saw a badge passing through whilst I was over there to the store.”
I got up to pull the saddlebags off his horse.
“Find some pants in there for your sister,” he said. “One of those deputies was a smallish fellow.”
I let out a whoop of laughter loud enough to startle his horse. “You kept their pants?”
“I had them as an armful when the shooting started,” Marion said. His tone was grave, but there was a glint in his eye. “I didn't take time to lay them down anywheres.”
Maude gave us both the benefit of her Aunt Ruthie look.
However, she stretched the four pairs of pants out on the ground to see the size of them while I wiped down Marion's horse. It didn't look overtired, but the saddle blanket was damp, so I knew it had done some running.
“What about this shirt?” Maude said.
“I took it off a clothesline,” Marion said. “I pinned a two-dollar bill in its place.”
“It has a hole in one sleeve.”
“You telling me I paid too much for it?” Marion said, and winked at me.
“It'll do,” she said.
Marion said, “We ought to find a place to dig in for a piece, let them run themselves ragged. They'll give up soon enough.”
Maude said, “We have to get to Uncle Arlen.”
“Getting arrested again will slow us down a whole sight more,” Marion argued. “By tomorrow they'll have a handful of false leads to follow.”
“I heard there's an empty house near here,” I said, “when I was in the store buying supplies.”
Marion scraped up a final spoonful of cheese with corn bread crumbled over it. “I'll go on in there and ask after it like I'm in the market.”
He got up slowly, looking a little the worse for wear.
I figured he didn't get as much rest as we had during the night. I said, “Which way did you light out after you left the jail?”
“The wrong way, son. The wrong way.”
“Take my horse,” I said. “Give yours a little more graze.”
The corner of his mouth twitched in half a smile. “You are all heart.”
Maude made use of the time he was gone, and the far side of the horses, to change into a pair of those pants. “I never thought I would change my clothes out in full view of a mercantile like this.”
“Nobody looking over this way can tell what you're doing. Not unless their eyesight is a match for yours.”
Maude came out from behind the horse.
The pants weren't snug on her, but there was no danger of them falling off. Marion was right to find her a loose shirt to wear with them, but she wouldn't easily pass for a boy again.
A few minutes later, Marion came back with another bulging potato sack. “I've got the whereabouts of that place,” he said.
It was nearly an hour's ride from where we sat. The good thing was, we were mostly still headed in the right direction.
EIGHTEEN
THE WAGON RUTS LEADING UP TO THE HOUSE HAD been washed smooth. We walked alongside the horses, taking care not to leave stones or fresh chunks of overturned earth. Marion swept a leafy branch behind us to erase any tracks in the loose dirt.
The house, built of weathered gray stone and half hidden by a mass of fir trees, had a general unlived-in air about it. The barn behind the house had been burned. Only part of one wall still stood.
“Here's a lamp with oil left in it,” Marion told us after he'd walked through. That made us all feel welcome somehow.
A fenced-in area at the back had once been the vegetable garden, from the looks of things, but nothing worthwhile to anyone but a horse grew there presently. We set them loose to graze.
The well water was clear, and cold enough to make our teeth hurt. Marion hung a leaky bucket down in the well, hoping the wood might swell and seal the leak.
Maude came up with an old cook pot the horses might drink from, though the bottom was more rounded than not.
Marion set chunks of stone on all sides of the pot so it wouldn't roll; horses could get right picky over such things. Once we filled it with water, it all depended on if the mood was right.
Maude's horse stepped right up for a drink. The others crowded in to get the next turn at it.
Inside, the place had been stripped nearly bare. But there was a bathtub under a curtained shelf, and the enamel was chipped only a little bit.
Me and Maude walked around in the house for a time. She came across a worn quilt in a window box. Once the mouse droppings were shaken out, she pronounced it good enough to sleep on.
I found half a dimer. I'd seen it before, but Aunt Ruthie would have said to me, don't look a gift horse in the mouth. It might could be said I was lucky I had seen it before, since some of the pages were missing.
Maude put a toe into some mattress stuffing piled in the corner of a wardrobe, where it might once have served as a nest.
We used a worn-down broom to scrape a piece of floor clear of dried leaves and such. This uncovered a broken mirror.
Small piles of butternuts littered the corners of the rooms, but we left them untouched. We couldn't get into them anyway, butternuts being hard enough to bust a nutcracker.
It was an old house, comfortable with the company of mice and squirrels and with the smell of damp. And yet it lent itself to the notion of someone living there again.
Late in the afternoon, Maude went through Marion's sack. It yielded eggs and fatback, some of those dried-out biscuits, and some coffe
e and sugar. I did like that he remembered sugar.
“No matches,” Maude said in a despairing tone.
I said, “In my sack.” This gave me a feeling of uncommon good cheer, to offer up something I'd kept stashed in the loft.
Marion made a fire. The chimney was good; it didn't smoke. “Here,” he said, “I'll cook up that fatback, then we can fry some eggs in the fat.” I carved off some thin chunks while the pot heated. The first meat to hit the pot gave off a sweet smell that made my stomach growl.
At the bottom of Marion's sack, Maude found a newspaper. The light from the windows was fading, but standing right next to them, we could read. Right off, I saw the picture they drew of Maude came not even close. The headline read:
MAD MAUDE APPREHENDED AND ON THE LOOSE AGAIN
“Read it to me, why don't you?” Marion said.
Maude read, “‚After laying low in an undiscovered hideout, Maude March was apprehended while serving soup and spuds in a lowly dining room.'—Oh, George Ray is going to appreciate that—‚Her rough-and-ready gang of eleven men'”— Maude bristled at the mention of eleven men. “Who is writing these accounts, anyway?”
“Someone who is seeing double,” Marion said.
I looked over Maude's shoulder and finished the article: —broke the now-flaming-haired female out of jail late in the same day. They were not satisfied with this feat but freed the Black Hankie Bandit, too.
I was right off glad I'd bought some hair color.
Maude had since begun to read again, and when she finished, I said, “Black Hankie's gang did all the waving guns around. Where's the story about them, anyway?”
Maude flipped the sheets over with a smart crackle of paper. “Here it is. Why didn't they put him on the front page? He's the one they meant to hang.”
BLACK HANKIE CHEATS THE HANGMAN
Those folks who look on a hanging as the next best thing to a barn dance were sorley disappointed today. The Black Hankie Bandit, who was shot off his horse while attempting to escape the jailhouse the night before he was to die, expired of his wounds while resting in a bed with a fether mattress and a goose down pilloe. It is for the reader to decide if justice was done.
Maude March on the Run! Page 6
