The Misadventures of Maude March by Audrey Couloumbis Page A

watch the whole business vomited in the street directly after, and that's the main thing I remember about it, that smell.
    I decided to let the matter drop, for the time being. There would be plenty of opportunities to question the finer points of Maude's thinking on forgiveness, I figured, and better times to do it.
    “What were you doing in Cedar Rapids?” I asked Marion.
    “Just passing through,” he said. “I was running short of funds, and I thought a card game would put a little change in my pocket. But as I said, things went wrong. It didn't look like such a temperamental little town as it turned out to be.”
    Maude gave him a hard look.
    “I mean the card players,” Marion said. “About your aunt Ruthie, well, the sheriff was doing his job, of course.”
    I found I didn't want to hear any more about Aunt Ruthie's misfortune. It made me feel a little low. So I was just as happy when Marion turned the conversation in another direction. “If you don't mind me asking, what made you girls settle on Independence? It's a long, rough ride through Missouri.”
    “You have a better suggestion?” Maude asked him.
    She sounded rude to me, but Marion took it in stride. “You might have gone back east.”
    “We don't have any people back east,” I told him. “We might be able to find our uncle Arlen in Independence.”
    “Well, now, there's some good news,” Marion said, almost heartily. If he was taking comfort from the notion that we weren't orphans after all, Maude wasn't about to let him have it for long.
    “We don't know if he's dead or alive,” she said. “Even if he is alive, we don't have any idea where to look for him once we get there. We have a letter that stated he was leaving for parts unknown. If we find him, we don't know that he'll want to take us in. If we make it that far ourselves, which we might not.”
    She settled his hash.
    We rode without another word said for nearly half an hour before Marion came up with a less touchy subject. He instructed us on the wisdom of pacing horses in the rain. Warm them up by starting out with a longish walk, shift to a brisk trot, offer them a little gallop to get their blood running, but then let them slow down again.
    “Prairie dog burrows cave in and become hidden mud holes,” Marion said. “You don't want a running horse to step down in one of those holes. Less'n you want to fly to Independence.”
    Maude didn't have anything to say to this, but I sensed he'd softened her up a little. I didn't know what more there was to say about horses, so after we had our little gallop, I asked him again if he was the Joe Harden in the book, even if he was really Marion Hardly.
    “What book would that be?” he asked me.
    “
Joe Harden, Frontier Fighter.
Those books.”
    “I imagine it's purely coincidence,” Marion said. “I can't believe anyone is writing about me.”
    I told him the one Joe Harden story I could just about recite word for word. And I gave him the gist of the other stories I'd read. I finished by saying, “I'm sorry to say I haven't been able to get even half of them.”
    “Who wrote these stories?” Marion asked.
    I had to think for a minute. “J. H. somebody,” I said. “I always thought it was you, because of the initials. I thought maybe the last name was just for show, so you could tell the stories without embarrassment.”
    Marion gave me an odd look. “You mean you thought it made it easier for me to brag?” He sounded half mad.
    “I don't think it's bragging to tell how things were,” I said. “You'll see. You can have a look at one of them later.”
    Marion made grateful noises, to be polite, I guess, but I gathered he didn't have a good opinion of dime novels. “I read one once,” he said, “and I had to put it down. The hero made such poor decisions, I just knew it for a story written by someone who had never come as far west as the Mississippi. But I allow John Henry might have learned a few things since