Maude March on the Run! by Audrey Couloumbis Page A

like a sponge.
    We woke late the next morning to find the leaky bucket still dripped but nowhere nearly as fast. Maude decided she could have a tepid bath if she heated enough water to mix with cold.
    This turned out to be a slow process, but we had all day to wait for nightfall. Before we threw away the water, I combed in the hair color for Maude. She didn't look happy about putting dark color in. For that matter, it didn't look awful different than the boot black to me, but I didn't say so. There weren't many ways to change the look of her.
    Maude had to wait for a time for the color to set. She stared out a back window, biting her thumbnail until it bled. She wrapped her shirttail around it.
    “Maude.”
    “It helps me think. I have to plan.”
    “Plan what?”
    “I need a rifle,” she said. “We can't get by with only a shotgun and Marion's pistol.”
    “Are we going to have a fire?” I said. “If we can't have a fire, we might could stop worrying about a rifle.”
    “Birds aren't the only critters we might need to pop,” she said.
    “Are we planning now for what we don't want?” I said to her.
    She dropped the matter as she rinsed out a little bit of the color to see the results. I saw her hair had taken the color real well.
    She looked into the mirror fragment with a doubtful expression. In the next moment, Maude cried out, ran to the tub, and dunked her whole head, shaking it to loosen the color.
    “Maude,” I said in surprise.
    Then the water turned pure dark. It did give me pause.
    “You'd better come up for air,” I said.
    She reared up with a sploosh. “I might just as well have used the boot polish,” she said tearfully, and dunked her head again.
    I started thinking up things to say right off. “It's supposed to be darker,” I said when she came up for air again.
    “Not black,” she said.
    “It's just wet.”
    Maude grabbed the soap and lathered up and rinsed. I handed her the shirt we were using for a towel. She rough-dried her hair, or as near as she could come, considering the shirt was already quite damp.
    She held up the piece of mirror. She was wearing the look of a tantrum. “It'll dry lighter,” I said in some desperation.
    “Sallie, why don't you go on outside for a while?”
    “They only had brown, Maude. She didn't tell me—”
    “I just need to get used to it,” Maude said. “Alone.”
    “It ain't that bad,” I said. “Besides which, if it don't wash out, it'll grow out.”
    “Just go on outside.”
    “You ain't going to cry, I hope.”
    “If you say ‚ain't' to me once more in the next hour, I'm going to slather
you
with boot black.”
    I went out to where Marion was sitting on the front step. “How'd it go?”
    “Her hair's dark,” I said in the tone of dire news being given.
    “What she needed,” Marion said, as if that had anything to do with it.
    “She ain't exactly happy about it.”
    “Well, it's just temporary,” he said.
    I decided not to go over that territory again.
    The horses had eaten everything they liked out of the fenced-in place. Marion had picketed them outside the fencing to graze. He was reading the slice of a dimer I had left on the floor. That is, he held it upside down.
    This surprised me. “Why, you never said you couldn't read.” Though now I thought about it, he'd several times done a fair job of getting me and Maude to read for him.
    He went pink. “I don't care to let on to Maude,” he said. “Your aunt having been a teacher and all, Maude thinks everybody reads.”
    “She shoots better than me,” I said, “but she doesn't look down on me for it.”
    He looked away.
    “How'd you read the map last night?” I said. “How did you do the lettering?”
    “For the letters, I followed the lines,” he said. “I don't have to read letters to read a map.”
    “Here, if you're going to make a secret of it,” I said, turning the dimer right-side, “you have to know the top from the bottom. See this letter like a pointed