Read Online The Misadventures of Maude March by Audrey Couloumbis - Free Book Online

you?” I said, thinking I would take that name.
    “I'll be Johnnie, you be Pete,” she said.
    I didn't want to be Pete, but I only frowned and said, “Let's think about it.”
    I kept an eye on the sun, but I could only make the sorriest guess which direction we were going. Every so often I had to ride ahead a little to steal a look at the compass. “Why doyou keep doing that?” Maude complained after one of these forays. “It makes me nervous.”
    “I'm learning to ride faster on bareback,” I said. It wasn't an out-and-out lie. “If we got chased by something, I'm not sure I could stay on. Why does it make you nervous? You can see me the whole time.”
    “I don't know; it just does.”
    “Well, get over it.”
    We didn't stay mad at each other the way we once would have. We couldn't. We only had each other, and we knew it.

B Y LATE IN THE DAY I HAD GROWN USED TO THE LONELY feeling it gave me to never see another soul. We had been moving at a trot for some time. I didn't like bouncing around so much in a saddle, but it was some worse riding bareback.
    I spotted a stand of trees maybe a mile or so away. “Let's head for those trees and set up camp.”
    “I'm not so bone tired today as I was yesterday,” Maude said.
    “I'm bone
sore
,” I said, and scootched around a little on the horse. We'd only recently nibbled at the last of the cheese as we rode. Now I wished I was hungry. When my belly was full and feeling good, I noticed my every other complaint all the more.
    “We sound like Mrs. Golightly in the middle of winter,” Maude said to me, “nursing her achy bones.”
    I reached into my pocket and brought out a peppermint candy. “Want one?”
    “Oh,” Maude said in a little-girl voice. Tears stood on her eyelashes, but she didn't say anything about Aunt Ruthie's fondness for peppermints.
    “We don't have many,” I said, reluctant to use them up too quickly. “Maybe we ought to save them for special occasions or something.”
    “I will always buy peppermints,” Maude said fiercely. “No matter what. I would steal them, if need be.” I couldn't imagine Maude stealing anything but food and horses, and I had to bully her to get her to do that. But I decided to let the remark pass.
    “I want to fry up those chickens,” Maude told me as we settled on a place to camp for the night. “Before they spoil.”
    While the chicken sweetened the air, she got me to help her collect greens to boil up. They were not the sort of thing to grow on a person, even with the right gravy of bacon fat and onion, which Maude said she wouldn't waste on them even if she had the onion. She boiled some of the eggs over the same fire that fried the chicken.
    “You'd make a decent range rider,” I told her.
    “Don't look now,” she said, “but I
am
a range rider. And so are you.”
    We ate those eggs while we rode the next couple of days, and eked the chicken out over the sit-down meals. We had agreed not to worry, but we read through Uncle Arlen's letters again and again, trying to make out the kind of man he was.
    It was a mark in his favor that he made it to Independence in the first place, but less of one that he might have left it not long after. We were, needless to say, hopeful of him being a man who stayed in one spot.
    “Do you think the Peasleys miss us?” I asked as we put the letters away.
    Maude burst out laughing, and although I had not meant it to be a funny question, I very soon found it made me laugh too. Maude got the hiccups and began to say things between each one—“Ungrateful girls, hic… Didn't even make their beds, hic…before they left, hic…hic…”—till I worried I would get hiccups too.
    For a farm horse, Flora was a strong swimmer. Maude quit wearing her boots with the pointy toes after taking them off to ford a river. She'd held them over her head as she let Flora make her way across the river, but then made room for them in one of Flora's bags. “They make my feet go numb,”