Free Maude March on the Run! by Audrey Couloumbis

“We have to get to Uncle Arlen.”
    “Getting arrested again will slow us down a whole sight more,” Marion argued. “By tomorrow they'll have a handful of false leads to follow.”
    “I heard there's an empty house near here,” I said, “when I was in the store buying supplies.”
    Marion scraped up a final spoonful of cheese with corn bread crumbled over it. “I'll go on in there and ask after it like I'm in the market.”
    He got up slowly, looking a little the worse for wear.
    I figured he didn't get as much rest as we had during the night. I said, “Which way did you light out after you left the jail?”
    “The wrong way, son. The wrong way.”
    “Take my horse,” I said. “Give yours a little more graze.”
    The corner of his mouth twitched in half a smile. “You are all heart.”
    Maude made use of the time he was gone, and the far side of the horses, to change into a pair of those pants. “I never thought I would change my clothes out in full view of a mercantile like this.”
    “Nobody looking over this way can tell what you're doing. Not unless their eyesight is a match for yours.”
    Maude came out from behind the horse.
    The pants weren't snug on her, but there was no danger of them falling off. Marion was right to find her a loose shirt to wear with them, but she wouldn't easily pass for a boy again.
    A few minutes later, Marion came back with another bulging potato sack. “I've got the whereabouts of that place,” he said.
    It was nearly an hour's ride from where we sat. The good thing was, we were mostly still headed in the right direction.

EIGHTEEN

    T HE WAGON RUTS LEADING UP TO THE HOUSE HAD been washed smooth. We walked alongside the horses, taking care not to leave stones or fresh chunks of overturned earth. Marion swept a leafy branch behind us to erase any tracks in the loose dirt.
    The house, built of weathered gray stone and half hidden by a mass of fir trees, had a general unlived-in air about it. The barn behind the house had been burned. Only part of one wall still stood.
    “Here's a lamp with oil left in it,” Marion told us after he'd walked through. That made us all feel welcome somehow.
    A fenced-in area at the back had once been the vegetable garden, from the looks of things, but nothing worthwhile to anyone but a horse grew there presently. We set them loose to graze.
    The well water was clear, and cold enough to make our teeth hurt. Marion hung a leaky bucket down in the well, hoping the wood might swell and seal the leak.
    Maude came up with an old cook pot the horses might drink from, though the bottom was more rounded than not.
    Marion set chunks of stone on all sides of the pot so it wouldn't roll; horses could get right picky over such things. Once we filled it with water, it all depended on if the mood was right.
    Maude's horse stepped right up for a drink. The others crowded in to get the next turn at it.
    Inside, the place had been stripped nearly bare. But there was a bathtub under a curtained shelf, and the enamel was chipped only a little bit.
    Me and Maude walked around in the house for a time. She came across a worn quilt in a window box. Once the mouse droppings were shaken out, she pronounced it good enough to sleep on.
    I found half a dimer. I'd seen it before, but Aunt Ruthie would have said to me, don't look a gift horse in the mouth. It might could be said I was lucky I had seen it before, since some of the pages were missing.
    Maude put a toe into some mattress stuffing piled in the corner of a wardrobe, where it might once have served as a nest.
    We used a worn-down broom to scrape a piece of floor clear of dried leaves and such. This uncovered a broken mirror.
    Small piles of butternuts littered the corners of the rooms, but we left them untouched. We couldn't get into them anyway, butternuts being hard enough to bust a nutcracker.
    It was an old house, comfortable with the company of mice and squirrels and with the smell of damp. And yet it lent