I didn't dare look back over my shoulder. What I did was ride to the smithy, got down slow and easy, and went inside. From the darkness of the interior, I made sure I was no longer being watched.
“Help ya?” someone said from behind me.
“I need oats, five pounds,” I said. This was true enough. We needed to be able to hobble these horses too. “I need a length of rope. Two lengths would be better.”
He added them to the bill, pretty much finishing off my little wad of cash. “Fill your canteen?” he asked, pointing. One hung next to the saddlebags, half hidden by the saddle blanket.
I hefted the canteen, trying to look like I was familiar with it. Filled up, it had to be. “Thanks anyway,” I said. I looked down the street again and couldn't see the lawman anywhere. I rode out of town, moving at a leisurely pace.
I didn't tell Maude about the lawman. I figured it was enough one of us was as nervous and jerky as a turkey two days before Thanksgiving. “Let's get moving,” I said as I rode up to her. I passed her the hat I'd gotten for her.
“What did you get us to eat?”
“Sausage, cheese, corn bread, and crackers. Tinned things, but no fish.” Maude and I were not fond of tinned fish. “I bought a knife. I was supposed to look like I was picking up odds and ends. I couldn't very well start buying pots and pans and platters. We'll pick up the other things piecemeal.”
“Give me some of that corn bread, will you?”
“I wish we could have taken the ferry,” I said, because the river looked cold. It looked fast too, although the surface was smooth enough. But that only meant it was deep enough to drown in.
I was thinking I wished we'd taken the ferry before I ran into that lawman. But when Maude looked back, I added, “This way is best; no one will have any stories to tell the newspaper about Maude March paying to use the ferry.”
WE FOLLOWED THE RIVER FOR A MILE, THEN MADE OUR preparations to cross it. I wanted to go on a little ways, following the river, but Maude was determined to cross sooner than later. We cinched up the saddles and took off our heavy pants, to be hung around our necks with our boots stuffed in them.
Remembering a lesson learned from reading Lamar Lafayette, River Rat, I divvied up the matches, and we put them in our shirt pockets. If one of us fell into the water, we might still save some.
Maybe we were lucky to hit the river where we did because I had been right; it ran fast as well as cold. We were lucky not to be riding old Flora or that buggy pony too. Mr. Fielding's horses were strong swimmers, and still the river carried us more than a mile before we got to the other side.
I couldn't feel it when my feet came out of the water. We let the horses walk in wide circles till the water stopped running off them, and we took this opportunity to unburden ourselves, dropping boots and sacks to the ground. I barely felt my feet touch the ground when I got off the horse.
“Sallie,” Maude said when she came over to me a minute later, “are you all right?”
“Just like you,” I said, because her teeth were chattering as hard as mine. She had put her pants and boots back on, though.
“Why are you sitting here?”
“My feet,” I said. They were real white. Maude rubbed them dry with the horse's rag till tears poured from my eyes. The warmer my feet got, the more they hurt. They were at their worst when she made me put my socks and boots back on. “Now walk,” she said, “real easy.”
“Should have been going barefoot like you were there for a while,” I said, blubbering. “I'd've toughened up some.”
“You don't need to be tough,” she said. “You're only a little girl.”
“I remember I used to be.”
While I walked in circles, she wiped her horse dry. The pain in my feet subsided after a few minutes, leaving only the dark echo of an ache as I rubbed down my horse. Maude put a wet feed sack on the ground and gave the horses some oats.
I'd hoped to hang on to that feed sack for a while, but when the horses had finished with it, it was too full of horse slobber even to fold it up, let alone fill it up again. Maude picked it up by one corner and threw it into the river.
We had to walk for a time to warm ourselves through and through, the way we'd learned from Marion. We were lucky Maude thought to put the corn bread and crackers in her shirt and had told me to do the same with anything else that would be killed by the wet. As it was, the labels came off the cans when they got wet, so we couldn't tell the peaches from the beans.
I dug out the sack with the oatmeal cookies. Maude's eyes lit up. They were some broken up, being mashed under my shirt, but the crumbs tasted just as good to us as a whole cookie.
We rode past sundown and forded another river. This one was not fast, but it was mighty cold. Because the night was chill, we weren't going to dry out so well either. I missed the change of clothes we didn't have anymore.
Maude complained about the mean pace, but I didn't let up. I was worried that lawman would get wind of Mr. Fielding's stolen horses and come looking for us. We needed to put in more miles than anyone would believe we could.
Maude didn't complain so much once we were over the second river. Of course, she was cold, and that took some of the bite out of her. We walked fast for some time.
Twice we rode past homesteads where dogs barked. Where light shone from the windows. The smell of wood smoke brought self-pitying tears to our eyes. We had no blankets; I'd been afraid to buy them.
“We must've made thirty miles today,” I said. I hoped. “I'd feel a lot warmer all over about that if we did it headed in the right direction,” Maude said.
“This is the right direction,” I said, stung to the marrow. “I'm not lost.”
“Never mind,” Maude said. “I'm just feeling moody.”
“Speaking of warm,” I said, “let's find some place and build a fire.”
“No fire.”
“Maude.”
“No fire. Too many farms around here. We don't want people coming out to see who's camped on their land.”
I slid off my horse to warm myself again, walking. But I was tired, and warmth was something that took a lot of energy. Maude was shortly walking beside me and set a pace that did, in a while, warm us.
“I'm sorry, Sallie,” she said. “For what?” I said, already knowing what the answer would be.
“For getting you into this.”
“You didn't—”
“I should have just married Mr. Wilburn and thought myself lucky.”
“You should have married him so I could feel lucky,” I said. “Think how many dimers he would have brought me between now and the wedding.” Maude reached over and swatted me, then laughed. The moment passed, and things were all right again.
When finally we did pick a place to spend the night, we thought of turning one of the saddlebags into a trough for the horses. We still needed that last feed sack. Maude hobbled both horses.
Emptying the saddlebags from my horse, I found a currycomb, and a rough cloth, some carrots. Mr. Fielding, whoever he was, took good care of his horse. Further down, I found a tin spoon, a real pottery cup, and a few other items that would come in real handy. Fish hooks and a reel of line. A saw-toothed knife to gut the fish. Some cartridges for a gun we didn't have. Just as well, since the cartridges got wet.
“It feels strange to be going through somebody's belongings,” Maude said, refusing for the time being to look through the bags on her horse.
“Someone's going through ours,” I said, like it didn't bother me. But it did. It felt wrong. I told myself this kind of wrong was just being practical. I told myself we couldn't afford to worry about right and wrong just this minute, but I knew that wasn't true either. This was the time to abide by right and wrong, when we were being tested.
Then I found something else in the bottom of the bag. A dimer! I lit a match to get a look at the damp cover. I figured, with my luck, it would be something I'd already read. But in fact it was something I'd never seen before: Gallop G
arrity, the Gritty Cowpoke.
Maude had pulled the scraps of dress fabric out of her pocket. She spread them over her leg and smoothed out the wrinkles. She looked almost happy.
I blew out the match with a lighter heart than I'd had moments before.
We ate potted meat from the tins—it went well enough with the last of the corn bread—and peaches. We were glad to have the spoon. We were glad to have the saddle blankets too. We slept on one and covered ourselves with the other, lying back to back.
“Sallie? There's something been bothering me all day.”
“What's that?”
“Marion's horse. It wasn't tied to the hitching post. Do you remember?”
I knew she didn't want to admit she was worried about Marion. “I remember. I pointed it out to you before we went into the bank.”
Maude said, “The gunshots didn't scare it away, did they? It was used to gunshots.”
“I didn't see any horses on the way out,” I said, and we laughed again. It was that terrible laughter that, I knew now, came from surviving something that could've killed you.
WE STARTED OUT BEFORE LIGHT THE NEXT MORNING. We couldn't have started a fire even if we thought it was a good idea; the ground was wet with a heavy dew. We woke up cold and miserable.
We walked, passing a tin of beans and the spoon back and forth to each other. I had hoped for peaches, but when the can was opened, it was beans. “You should have put the beans in one sack and the peaches in the other,” Maude complained. “You knew we had to cross that river.” She had the sniffles.
“Don't go getting sick now,” I said.
“Why not?” she said in her most sullen tone. She wasn't awful fond of beans, and we hadn't saved one crumb of the corn bread or the cookies for the morning. She didn't want the crackers either; it would have ruined her mad if something suited her.
“It'll be a terrible embarrassment if we can't ride the range for a few weeks without catching our death,” I said. “Wild Woolly has been lost in the Yukon for longer than that, and he didn't even get sniffles.”
“Guess you better ride with him next time,” she muttered.
The sun finally came up high enough to warm us. But it didn't do enough to keep Maude from working up to a cough, a hard, choking cough that made her face turn dark before it would let up.
We stopped talking, since that could bring it on. The peppermints staved it off, so Maude took one peppermint after another all the livelong day. I was glad we had a plentiful supply.
That night we slept in an abandoned log cabin. It was breezy; a lot of the mud chinking in the walls had dried up and crumbled away. But the chimney was in good working order.
The furniture had been broken up some. There was nothing about the place that looked like anyone had even come there to get out of the rain lately. There were no footprints, and a thick layer of dust had settled over everything. We burned the square bench seats, the table legs, and the smaller pieces of the bed frame.
We had the warmth of the fire, that was something, but we didn't have it to ourselves for long. Maude insisted that we bring the horses indoors too. “I don't want to be cleaning up horse plop in the middle of the night,” I said.
“I'm willing to take my chances with horse plop,” Maude said. “I just don't care to let my horse out of my sight.”
The horses proved well behaved, and we slept without disturbance. Even Maude's cough seemed to leave her alone. We woke to broad daylight and an unfamiliar sound. “Maaaa-aa, maa-aa-aa.”
Maude sat up, shivering. “What's that?”
“A baby?”
“Maa-aa-aa.”
“Sheep,” she said, her voice filled with dread. Sheep meant people. Sheep most likely meant somebody did live here after all.
I looked out the cutout that served as a window, squinting into the bright sunlight. Even once my eyes were used to it, I didn't see anyone on horseback; I didn't see anyone at all.
“Maa-aa-aa.”
I went to the door and pulled it open. There was a goat right outside and a snake nearer yet.
I stood stock-still. The snake was coiled and had turned my way. The rattle alerted Maude.
“Don't move,” she said, reaching for her rifle. “The important thing is, don't move. They don't like it if you move.”
I didn't move.
“Maa-aa-aa.” The snake swerved back to threaten the goat.
Maude moved gingerly in her bare feet, but still that snake took notice. The rattle sounded again, and one of the horses blew air out of its nostrils. The snake's tongue flickered, tasting the air, as its rattle kept up a steady beat.
One shot rang out, and the snake's head disappeared entirely.
The goat took off, lickety-split. The snake's body darted out in little searching motions, then settled back into a coil, the rattles still going. That made the hair on my arms dance. I did a little hop-step to shake off the willies. This excited the snake into making a strike.
“Maude!”
She had turned away to sit down. “I feel sore all over,” she said, resting her head against her hand.
When Maude's rifle butt knocked on the floor, that snake body struck at the door with a thump. I saw it. I heard it, even though my ears still rang from the gunshot. I thought it must be a trick of my mind. I stared at the hole in the floorboards, that was real enough, and so was the spatter of blood. The snake's head was gone; any fool could see that.
The horses had startled at the rifle shot but were much more disturbed at the rattle of the snake's tail. They shuffled around, ears laid back tight, which was not a good sign. We had not bothered to hobble them since they were indoors, but we did put rope loops around their necks once we removed their headgear. I reached for the nearest horse, but it shied away from me, eyes wild.
I was afraid one or both of them would bolt, making this cabin a new back doorway. I got a bed slat that was propped against the wall and went back to move the snake's body out of the doorway. I'd no sooner touched it than it struck at the stick.
I yelped and jumped back.
“What?” Maude said, looking up.
I touched the snake and again it struck, not once, but three times, in a maddened way. This so unnerved me that I dropped the stick.
Maude made a sound like a cat mewing.
The headless body threw itself at the only victim it could find—the stick. In all its writhing, the snake fell across the doorsill and coiled for another strike. The horses showed cracked yellow teeth as they clomped around.
“Shoot it again,” I cried. I did get hold of both horses and wrapped one dangling lead rope a few times around a hook on the wall, knowing that wouldn't hold the horse long. I led the other horse to the opposite side of the room and hoped for the best.
“I think I'm going to be sick to my stomach,” Maude said.
The snake had begun to make little jabbing motions into the air, like it was searching for us. The rattle never stopped. “I don't think I can hit it again,” Maude said. “But if I do, what will we do if that doesn't kill it?”
“I don't know,” I said. “Just shoot it before we lose these horses.”
She took up my rifle with shaking hands, and the snake did indeed turn toward her and make several more frenzied strikes, driving Maude to the other side of the room. “Shoot, Maude!”
She did, with both eyes closed, it looked like to me. So it was largely a matter of good luck that she hit that thing and cut it in three pieces, all of which wriggled wildly on the floor, the rattle making a constant racket.
Maude dropped a saddle blanket over the whole mess and shoved it outside. The place went amazingly dark and quiet when she shut the door. She sighed and set to picking up our stuff, and packing everything she possibly could into the saddlebags.
One of the horses had knocked the sack of oats on its side, spilling them across the floor. I got a splinter scraping them up. “If this isn't a fine start to the day,” I said.
“It's the star
t we've got,” Maude said, sounding an awful lot like Aunt Ruthie. “Let's make the most of it.”
She went out for the other saddle blanket and brought it back, saying, “It knows it's dead now.” She slapped the saddle blankets over the horses' backs, and we saddled them up. That was Maude's way, and Aunt Ruthie's too. They could neither one of them be called a whiner.
Once we were outside on the horses, things settled into the pace we had grown used to. Almost familiar enough to call it home, although not that comfortable. I began to think about how well Maude handled herself, considering she didn't like snakes worse than me. “That was fine shooting,” I said, thanking her for saving my life.
“I should never have neglected your shooting lessons,” she said. “If it was the other way around, I'd be dying now, and you'd be alone in the world.”
“It's never too late to start.”
“We'll buy ammunition today,” she said, “should we come across a town. We'll get blankets for ourselves too. We may not always be lucky enough to have a fire.”
“I don't know that I can learn to shoot the head off a snake,” I said. But Maude didn't want to talk about it.
WE CAME ACROSS THE GOAT AFTER ABOUT HALF AN hour's ride. She was crying again, and the reason was easy to see. She needed milking. She acted like she remembered us as I put a tether rope around her neck. She let me fill our pottery cup over and over. After Maude and I drank our fill, I stripped the rest of her milk into the dirt.
“Who do you figure she belongs to?” I asked.
“Nobody, judging from the filthy state she's in,” Maude said. She seemed to consider the animal's other state, that of sheer misery. “Maybe she had a kid and something carried it off. A bobcat or something.”
“I'm taking her with us,” I said.
“How are we going to travel with a nanny goat tagging along?”
“Since we aren't moving so fast as it is, she's not going to hold us up all that much,” I argued. “We're bound to pass a farm soon. We'll set her loose near enough that someone will find her.”
“Someone will find her anyway. We did.”
The Misadventures of Maude March Page 10
