The Misadventures of Maude March by Audrey Couloumbis

Author:Audrey Couloumbis [Couloumbis, Audrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48829-9
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2005-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

WE DIDN'T COME ACROSS ANOTHER TOWN IN THE NEXT eight days. We did cross three more rivers. One of them we crossed by ferry, which is a grand word to describe a water-logged raft. A rope lay in the water, pulled into a narrow letter C as the current dragged at it. We got on the raft in a gingerly fashion. Water washed across our feet. Maude and I looked at each other doubtfully. Even Marion seemed to have his doubts.

We stood silent as two boys Maude's age pulled on a tighter second rope to take us across. The current did most of the work, it looked like. On the other side, where our feet touched dirt again, we became very cheerful. It was a mood that lasted for some time.

Later in the same day, we met up with an oxen train carrying some fellows who were headed out to work on the railroad in Kansas or Nebraska. Marion paid out some of the bank money to buy the necessaries we'd otherwise be doing without once we went our own way. Not that Maude or Marion, either one, made mention of this fact as he tied a sack full of flour and lard and such to the pommel of her horse.

He hung the fry pan and the Dutch oven from my horse. He couldn't get the right supplies for Maude's rifle, but he got pellets for my shotgun. While Marion did his trading, the railroad workers stood around the wagons, joshing the cook about bugs in his flour and such. It was easy to see they didn't mean anything by it. Then one fairly high-spirited sort said, “That older boy is almost pretty enough to be a girl.”

“Almost makes all the difference,” Marion said in a voice to dampen spirits. “He'll grow out of it.”

“No offense,” the man said.

“None taken,” Marion said back. But he finished his business in a crisp way that settled everyone down.

I knew how Maude felt, that Marion wasn't a man to look up to, that he wasn't Joe Harden's kind of man anymore. I agreed with her, it wasn't right to rob banks or to go around shooting people. But it wasn't right to steal horses either, and sometimes people did what they knew wasn't right.

Reading those dime novels, I had always figured there was something different in people who did wrong. That they had changed somehow, along the way, and it didn't hurt them to do wrong. Now I saw it did hurt them. But it didn't change something deep inside them, necessarily.

The best part of Marion had not been changed; he was still a man to look up to. I only wished Maude could see that too. I wished she could see that before we went our separate ways.

I knew Marion was figuring on leaving us pretty soon. All day he kept telling us the things he thought we might need to know. He told us we'd gone west far enough, so what we needed to do was head south.

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