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News of the WorldPaulette Jiles
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DEDICATION For friends on the long trails: Susan, June, April, Nancy, Caroline, Wanda, Evelyn, and Rita Wightman Whippet CONTENTS Dedication Map One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten Eleven Twelve Thirteen Fourteen Fifteen Sixteen Seventeen Eighteen Nineteen Twenty Twenty-One Twenty-Two A Note from the Author Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Paulette Jiles Copyright About the Publisher MAP ONE Wichita Falls, Texas, Winter 1870 CAPTAIN KIDD LAID out the Boston Morning Journal on the lectern and began to read from the article on the Fifteenth Amendment. He had been born in 1798 and the third war of his lifetime had ended five years ago and he hoped never to see another but now the news of the world aged him more than time itself. Still he stayed his rounds, even during the cold spring rains. He had been at one time a printer but the war had taken his press and everything else, the economy of the Confederacy had fallen apart even before the surrender and so he now made his living in this drifting from one town to another in North Texas with his newspapers and journals in a waterproof portfolio and his coat collar turned up against the weather. He rode a very good horse and was concerned that someone might try to take the horse from him but so far so good. So he had arrived in Wichita Falls on February 26 and tacked up his posters and put on his reading clothes in the stable. There was a hard rain outside and it was noisy but he had a good strong voice. He shook out the Journal's pages. The Fifteenth Amendment, he read, which has just been ratified on February 3, 1870, allows the vote to all men qualified to vote without regard to race or color or previous condition of servitude. He looked up from the text. His reading glasses caught the light. He bent slightly forward over the lectern. That means colored gentlemen, he said. Let us have no vaporings or girlish shrieks. He turned his head to search the crowd of faces turned up to him. I can hear you muttering, he said. Stop it. I hate muttering. He glared at them and then said, Next. The Captain shook out another newspaper. The latest from the New-York Tribune states that the polar exploration ship Hansa is reported by a whaler as being crushed and sunk in the pack ice in its attempt to reach the North Pole; sunk at seventy degrees north latitude off Greenland. There is nothing in this article about survivors. He flipped the page impatiently. The Captain had a clean-shaven face with runic angles, his hair was perfectly white, and he was still six feet tall. His hair shone in the single hot ray from the bull's-eye lantern. He carried a short-barreled Slocum revolver in his waistband at the back. It was a five-shot, .32 caliber and he had never liked it all that much but then he had rarely used it. Over all the bare heads he saw Britt Johnson and his men, Paint Crawford and Dennis Cureton, at the back wall. They were free black men. Britt was a freighter and the other two were his driving crew. They held their hats in their hands, each with one booted foot cocked up against the wall behind them. The hall was full. It was a broad open space used for wool storage and community meetings and for people like himself. The crowd was almost all men, almost all white. The lantern lights were harsh, the air was dark. Captain Kidd traveled from town to town in North Texas with his newspapers and read aloud the news of the day to assemblies like this in halls or churches for a dime a head. He traveled alone and had no one to collect the dimes for him but not many people cheated and if they did somebody caught them at it and grabbed them by the lapels and wrenched them up in a knot and said, You really ought to pay your goddamn dime, you know, like everybody else. And then the coin would ring in the paint can. HE GLANCED UP to see Britt Johnson lift a forefinger to him. Captain Kidd gave one brief nod, and completed his reading with an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer concerning the British physicist James Maxwell and his theories of electromagnetic disturbances in the ether whose wavelengths were longer than infrared radiation. This was to bore people and calm them down and put them into a state of impatience to leave—leave quietly. He had become impatient of trouble and other people's emotions. His life seemed to him thin and sour, a bit spoiled, and it was something that had only come upon him lately. A slow dullness had seeped into him like coal gas and he did not know what to do about it except seek out quiet and solitude. He was always impatient to get the readings over with now. The Captain folded the papers, put them in his portfolio. He bent to his left and blew out the bull's-eye lantern. As he walked through the crowd people reached out to him and shook his hand. A pale-haired man sat watching him. With him were two Indians or half-Indians that the Captain knew for Caddos and not people of a commendable reputation. The man with the blond hair turned in his chair to stare at Britt. Then others came to thank the Captain for his readings, asked after his grown children. Kidd nodded, said, Tolerable, tolerable, and made his way back to Britt and his men to see what it was Britt wanted. CAPTAIN KIDD THOUGHT it was going to be about the Fifteenth Amendment but it was not. Yes sir, Captain Kidd, would you come with me? Britt straightened and lifted his hat to his head and so did Dennis and Paint. Britt said, I got a problem in my wagon. She seemed to be about ten years old, dressed in the horse Indians' manner in a deerskin shift with four rows of elk teeth sewn across the front. A thick blanket was pulled over her shoulders. Her hair was the color of maple sugar and in it she wore two down puffs bound onto a lock of her hair by their minute spines and also bound with a thin thread was a wing-feather from a golden eagle slanting between them. She sat perfectly composed, wearing the feather and a necklace of glass beads as if they were costly adornments. Her eyes were blue and her skin that odd bright color that occurs when fair skin has been burned and weathered by the sun. She had no more expression than an egg. I see, said Captain Kidd. I see. He had his black coat collar turned up against the rain and the cold and a thick wool muffler around his neck. His breath moved out of his nose in clouds. He bit his lower lip on the left side and thought about what he was looking at in the light of the kerosene hurricane lantern Britt held up. In some strange way it made his skin crawl. I am astonished, he said. The child seems artificial as well as malign. Britt had backed one of his wagons under the roof of the fairway at the livery stable. It didn't fit all the way in. The front half of the wagon and the driver's seat was wild with the drumming noise of the rain and a bright lift of rain-spray surrounded it. The back end was under shelter and they all stood there and regarded the girl the way people do when they come upon something strange they have caught in a trap, something alien whose taxonomy is utterly unknown and probably dangerous. The girl sat on a bale of Army shirts. In the light of the lantern her eyes reflected a thin and glassy blue. She watched them, she watched every movement, every lift of a hand. Her eyes moved but her head was still. Yes sir, said Britt. She's jumped out of the wagon twice between Fort Sill and here. As far as Agent Hammond can figure out she is Johanna Leonberger, captured at age six four years ago, from near Castroville. Down near San Antonio. I know where it is, said Captain Kidd. Yes sir. The Agent had all the particulars. If that's her, she's about ten. Britt Johnson was a tall, strong man but he watched the girl with a dubious and mistrusting expression. He was cautious of her. My name is Cicada. My father's name is Turning Water. My mother's name is Three Spotted. I want to go home. But they could not hear her because she had not spoken aloud. The Kiowa words in all their tonal music lived in her head like bees. Captain Kidd said, Do they know who her parents are? Yes sir, they do. Or as much as he can figure out from the date she was taken. The Agent, here, I'm talking about. Her parents and her little sister were killed in the raid. He had a paper from her relatives, Wilhelm and Anna Leonberger, an aunt and uncle. And he gave me a fifty-dollar gold piece to deliver her back to Castroville. The family sent it up to him by a major from San Antonio, transferred north. He was to give it to somebody to transport her home. I said I would get her out of Indian Territory and across the Red. It wasn't easy. We like to drowned. That was yesterday. The Captain said, It's come up two foot since yesterday. I know it. Britt stood with one foot on the drawbar. The hurricane lantern burned with its irresolute light on the tailgate and shone into the interior of the freight wagon as if revealing some alien figure in a tomb. Captain Kidd took off his hat and shook water from it. Britt Johnson had rescued at least four captives from the red men. From the Comanche, from the Kiowa, and once from the Cheyenne up north in Kansas. Britt's own wife and two children had been taken captive six years ago, in 1864, and he had gone out and got them back. Nobody knew quite how he had done it. He seemed to have some celestial protection about him when he rode out alone on the Red Rolling Plains, a place which seemed to invite both death and dangers. Britt had taken on the task of rescuing others, a dark man, cunning and strong and fast like a nightjar in the midnight air. But Britt was not going to return this girl to her parents, not even for fifty dollars in gold. Why won't you go? said Captain Kidd. You have come this far already. Fifty dollars in gold is a considerable amount. I figured I could find somebody to hand her off to here, Britt said. It's a three-week journey down there. Then three weeks back. I have no haulage to carry down there. Behind him Paint and Dennis nodded. They crossed their arms in their heavy waxed-canvas slickers. Long bright crawls of water slid across the livery stable floor and took up the light of the lantern like a luminous stain and the roof shook with the percussion of drops as big as nickels. Dennis Crawford, thin as a spider, said, We wouldn't make a dime the whole six weeks. Unless we could get something to haul back up here, said Paint. Shut up, Paint, said Dennis. You know people down there? Well, all right, said Paint. I can hear you. Britt said, There it is. I can't leave my freighting that long. I have orders to deliver. And the other thing is, if I'm caught carrying that girl it would be bad trouble. He looked the Captain straight in the eye and said, She's a white girl. You take her. Captain Kidd felt in his breast pocket for his tobacco. He didn't find it. Britt rolled a cigarette and handed it to him and then snapped a match in his big hand. Captain Kidd had not lost any sons in the war and that was because he had all daughters. Two of them. He knew girls. He didn't know Indians but he knew girls, and what was on that girl's face was contempt. He said, Find a family going that way, Britt. Somebody to drown her in sweetness and light and improving lectures on deportment. Good idea, said Britt. I thought of it already. And so? Captain Kidd blew out smoke. The girl's eyes did not follow it. Nothing could move her gaze from the men's faces, the men's hands. She had a drizzle of freckles across her cheekbones and her fingers were blunt as noses with short nails lined in black. Can't locate any. Hard to find somebody to trust with this. Captain Kidd nodded. But you've delivered girls before now, he said. The Blainey girl, you got her back. Not that far a trip. Besides I don't know those people down there. You do. Yes, I see. Captain Kidd had spent years in San Antonio; he had married into an old San Antonio family and he knew the way, knew the people. In North and West Texas there were many free black men, they were freighters and scouts and now after the war, the Tenth U.S. Cavalry, all black. However, the general population had not settled the matter of free black people in their minds yet. All was in flux. Flux: a soldering aid that promotes the fusion of two surfaces, an unstable substance that catches fire. The Captain said, You could ask the Army to deliver her. They take charge of captives. Not anymore, said Britt. What would you have done if you hadn't come across me? I don't know. I just got here from Bowie. I could have gone south to Jacksboro. I saw your posters when we pulled in, Britt said. It was meant. One last thing, said Captain Kidd. Maybe she should go back to the Indians. What tribe took her? Kiowa. Britt was smoking as well. His foot on the drawbar was jiggling. He snorted blue fumes from his nostrils and glanced at the girl. She stared back at him. They were like two mortal enemies who could not take their eyes from one another. The endless rain hissed in a ground spray out in the street and every roof in Wichita Falls was a haze of shattered water. And so? Britt said, The Kiowa don't want her. They finally woke up to the fact that having a white captive gets you run down by the cav. The Agent said to bring all the captives in or he was cutting off their rations and sending the Twelfth and the Ninth out after them. They brought her in and sold her for fifteen Hudson's Bay four-stripe blankets and a set of silver dinnerware. German coin silver. They'll beat it up into bracelets. It was Aperian Crow's band brought her in. Her mother cut her arms to pieces and you could hear her crying for a mile. Her Indian mother. Yes, said Britt. Were you there? Britt nodded. I wonder if she remembers anything. From when she was six. No, said Britt. Nothing. The girl still did not move. It takes a lot of strength to sit that still for that long. She sat upright on the bale of Army shirts which were wrapped in burlap, marked in stencil for Fort Belknap. Around her were wooden boxes of enamel washbasins and nails and smoked deer tongues packed in fat, a sewing machine in a crate, fifty-pound sacks of sugar. Her round face was flat in the light of the lamp and without shadows, or softness. She seemed carved. Doesn't speak any English? Not a word, said Britt. So how do you know she doesn't remember anything? My boy speaks Kiowa. He was captive with them a year. Yes, that's right. Captain Kidd shifted his shoulders under the heavy dreadnought overcoat. It was black, like his frock coat and vest and his trousers and his hat and his blunt boots. His shirt had last been boiled and bleached and ironed in Bowie; a fine white cotton with the figure of a lyre in white silk. It was holding out so far. It was one of the little things that had been depressing him. The way it frayed gently on every edge. He said, Your boy spoke with her. Yes, said Britt. For as much as she'd talk to him. Is he with you? Yes. Better on the road with me than at home. He's good on the road. They are different when they come back. My boy nearly didn't want to come back to me. Is that so? The Captain was surprised. Yes sir. He was on the way to becoming a warrior. Learned the language. It's a hard language. He was with them how long? Less than a year. Britt! How can that be? I don't know. Britt smoked and turned to lean on the wagon tailgate and looked back into the dark spaces of the stable with the noise of horses and mules eating, eating, their teeth like grindstones moving one on another and the occasional snort as hay dust got up their noses, the shifting of their great cannonball feet. The good smell of oiled leather harness and grain. Britt said, I just don't know. But he came back different. In what way? Roofs bother him. Inside places bother him. He can't settle down and learn his letters. He's afraid a lot and then he turns around arrogant. Britt threw down his smoke and stepped on it. So, gist of it is, the Kiowa won't take her back. Captain Kidd knew, besides the other reasons, that Britt trusted him to return her to her people because he was an old man. Well, he said. I knew you would, said Britt. Yes, said the Captain. So. Britt's skin was saddle colored but now paler than it usually was because the rainy winter had kept the sun from his face for months. He reached into the pocket of his worn ducking coat and brought out the coin. It was a shining sulky color, a Spanish coin of eight escudos in twenty-two karat gold, and all the edge still milled, not shaved. A good deal of money; everyone in Texas was counting their nickels and dimes and glad to have them since the finances of the state had collapsed and both news and hard money were difficult to come by. Especially here in North Texas, near the banks of the Red River, on the edge of Indian Territory. Britt said, That's what the family sent up to the Agent. Her parents' names were Jan and Greta. They were killed when the Kiowa captured her. Take it, he said. And be careful of her. As they watched, the girl slid down between the freight boxes and bales as if fainting and pulled the thick blanket over her head. She was weary of being stared at. Britt said, She'll stay there the night. She's got nowhere to go. She can't get hold of any weapons that I can think of. He took up the lamp and stepped back. Be really careful. TWO THE WOMEN OF the town of Wichita Falls gave her a blue-and-yellow-striped dress and underthings, worsted stockings, a nightgown with a lace banding at the neck, and shoes that more or less fit, but they could do nothing with her. They were reluctant to use force on a small, thin girl with scars on her forearms and a stare like a china doll. They didn't want to wrestle with the child, and in addition she had lice. Finally the Captain took her to Lottie's establishment. The women there were bold and somehow virile, and had tramped the roads as camp followers. Many had been in jail here and there. They were not in the least reluctant to use force. It cost them two hours to get her into a bathtub and washed and to dispose of her Kiowa dress. One of the women threw the glass beads and the deerskin dress with its valuable elk teeth out the window. They pulled the feathers from her hair, which was crawling with graybacks. They held her head under a stream of hot water from a pitcher and scrubbed her scalp and her body with blue soap. She fought with them; for ten years old she was agile, thin, amazingly strong, and soapy. Water and suds ran down the walls. At the end, the tub lay on its side and the water drained between the cracks of the floorboards into the receiving parlor below and stained the red flocking on the wallpaper while the girl's flat and glassy eyes regarded them all from the floor where she crouched. Her hair was plastered all over her head like wet strings. They wrestled her into the underthings and the dress and the stockings and the shoes. They shoved her out the door and good riddance. The stockings were wet and twisted. The rain filled the street, making long thin lakes like stripes in the wheel tracks. The Captain held her stiff, wooden hand as they walked back to the livery stable. She did not pick up her skirt apparently because she did not know how, or did not know it was necessary. Or did not care. By the time they got to the stable the dress hems were carrying several pounds of red sludge, and she bent her head low and when she made a strangled noise he realized she was trying not to cry. Captain Kidd bought a spring wagon from the livery stable. He bought it with the Spanish coin and was lucky to get it. It was in fact an excursion wagon painted a dark and glossy green and in gold letters on the sides it said Curative Waters East Mineral Springs Texas and he had no idea how the wagon had come all the way from near Houston to this little town on the Red River. The wagon surely had a story all to itself that would now remain forever unknown, untold. It was a jaunty little vehicle with two rows of seats running the length of the wagon bed so the people going to the curative mineral waters could sit and stare across at one another. There were poles to support a canopy and side curtains. This was but poor protection against hard weather but it was all he had. He would sell the wagon in Castroville or San Antonio if he ever got there and in the meantime it would be a luxury to travel in a vehicle with a spring seat to take the ruts and the hammering. His roan mare packhorse could pull it and his bay saddle horse could come behind. It would also allow him to keep the girl within sight. He wished he knew her name in Kiowa. He would call her Johanna, as if it mattered. She didn't know the word "Johanna" from Deuteronomy. Captain Kidd changed to his duck coat and trousers of jeans cloth, a double-breasted plains shirt. He put on his old traveling hat with the uneven brim. He laid his black reading suit in careful layers into his carpet bag and his good black hat for readings into a tin hatbox. A hat can, as the cowboys said. Young people could get away with rough clothing but unless the elderly dressed with care they looked like homeless vagabonds and at every reading he must present the appearance of authority and wisdom. He packed up his newspapers and his cutthroat razor and its cake of soap, the brush, his shot box with powder and caps and wads and the spring-loaded powder charger. Into the bed of the Curative Waters wagon he threw his shotgun, purchases of tinned butter and dried beef, bacon, two sheepskins, a small box of medical supplies, a keg of flour, water bottles, a candle lantern and candles, a small stove. Then his portfolio with his newspapers and a map of the roads of Texas, which he rarely used. Finally his riding boots and his saddle and blankets. He lifted the girl into the wagon bed and made "stay" motions with his hands. Then he went looking for Britt. THEY WERE PARKED in front of a general merchandise store. Dennis and Paint were trying to even out their loads in both wagons. Britt's boy was there with them; he worked hard and quickly and seemed to look constantly and anxiously at his father. Dennis supervised the loading. They had to cross the upper Little Wichita and they did not want the wagons to go down by the head. Their teams were big strong bays. Admirable horses. The Captain said, Britt, which roads are open? Britt climbed up to the driver's seat on one wagon with his boy at his side and Dennis was at the reins in the other. Paint sat beside Dennis smoking a cigar with great enjoyment. A light rain was still drifting down into the colorless late-spring world of North Texas and its low and restless sky. Britt said, Take the road alongside the Red east to Spanish Fort, Captain. They say it's not flooded yet, and then from Spanish Fort the southeast road to Weatherford and Dallas is good. Get to Spanish as quick as you can and away from the Red because it's still coming up. From Weatherford and Dallas you can get directions for the Meridian Road heading south. Very well, said the Captain. I am obliged. He thought about his solitude. About his thin, lean life and the coal gas. He said, The Meridian Road heading south. Britt had a military bearing and the attentive gaze of a man who had spent long hard months with a scouting company. He bent down from the wagon seat and held out his hand. And sir, let me see that Slocum you got. Captain Kidd pulled aside his threadbare canvas chore coat and reached behind and drew out the revolver. He handed it to Britt butt-first. Water dripped from his bare hand. Britt turned it over. He said, Captain, this is the kind of thing I got for Christmas when I was ten. It doesn't even have standard charges. Britt laid the Slocum at his side and then drew out his own Smith and Wesson and handed it to the older man. I owe you, he said, for taking that maniac. What else are you carrying? A twenty-gauge. Captain Kidd tried to keep from smiling. A younger man with all the latest devices, taking care of the doddering old. Watch your right side. I'm left-handed. All the better. Captain Kidd reached up and shook hands with Britt and watched them leave. The two long, narrow wagons were weighted with their loads and the teams of big bay horses leaned into their collars and plumed out smoke and pulled until the back bands stood up off their spines. The wheels moved through the red mud of the street at first slowly, one spoke rolling up after another. Dennis sang out to his team in his high, thin voice, Walk on, walk on! And Britt stood braced behind the driver's seat with the reins in his hands and his big hat flinging water and called his horses by their names encouragingly and then the two freight wagons began to move at a walking pace. The Captain unwound his long reins from the driver's post and at first his little packhorse mare sulked and refused and danced around in the harness, which she did not like, but at last leaned forward and pulled. The Captain called out, Am I not good to you, then, Fancy? Do I not feed you and put shoes on your feet? Move on, girl! Several people standing out of sight in doorways watched them leave. Some were shaking their heads at the sight of the old man and the ten-year-old girl wild with dread, her new dress splattered with Red River mud and her hems coated in a slurry of iron-red mire. And there were other, more covert faces, looks of interest and of greed; the pale-haired man with his neck bound in a blue-patterned neckerchief and tobacco smoke drifting from his nose. Britt and his two wagons went south down Childress Street toward the lower Little Wichita, and the Captain and the captive girl set out east toward Spanish Fort. The wheels threw up spinning arcs of slurry and water that planted polka dots all over the wagon sides. The Captain and Johanna would travel through the Cross Timbers to Spanish Fort and then on south to Dallas and eventually four hundred miles farther south, down into the brasada, the short-brush country of San Antonio, with its slow, uncoiling alluvial rivers and its great live oaks in the valleys, its slow uncoiling people. The man with the pale hair dropped his cigar butt in a puddle. With him were the two others, Caddos who had slid in a sideways direction from the tribal lands, and as they drifted they had gathered trouble and a great deal of peculiar knowledge about human beings, what human beings would do or say under extreme duress. It was not something you could do anything with but it interested them all the same. THREE THE CAPTAIN STARTED out his headlong rush toward military rank with the Georgia militia in the War of 1812, which had stretched out to 1815. He had just turned sixteen. His militia had traveled west to the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama under Jackson. Jefferson Kyle Kidd was at that point nothing but a private who had lifted his hand to vote for a man named Thompson for captain. They were sitting on piles of rails in the Georgia hill country, the day before they were to leave out. After putting their supplies, arms, ammunition, and personal kits together, then finding horses, they realized that it was necessary to hold elections for officers. That in fact they needed officers. That one had to say Yes Sir and No Sir and make a salute and present a military bearing. Two of the officers they had elected last year weren't standing and three had moved to Tennessee. They were confused as to the purpose of sergeants and corporals and so decided to forego them. He himself was a Georgia hill country person and spoke that way and thought that way for all of his life, the habits and intonation would stay with him always. He lifted his hand for Thompson. On March 27, 1814, at the battle itself, he was hit on the outside of the right hip, leaving a long sear of fragmented flesh and torn homespun and bright red blood. He and the Georgia boys were with Coffee's forces south of the bend. They had pulled down the timbers of a cabin for breastworks. He didn't even know at first he had been shot. He was lying beside two boys from his county firing over the timbers where a large soap kettle had rolled out of the fireplace. Round after round from the Creek and Choctaw across the river struck the kettle and made it ring like a bell so that it was hard to hear Thompson lying out in front and crawling toward them, toward cover. Finally Sherman Foster called to him, Jeff, Jeff, that's Captain Thompson out there! The Red Sticks, the Muskogee Creek Indians, across the Tallapoosa were laying in a very accurate fire. They had the range on the cabin and the soap kettle and, he now realized, Thompson. All the Red Sticks had were smoothbores but those great .72 caliber balls could kill you just as dead as a rifled gun. The barrels of their guns on the other side of the river looked as long as wagon tongues. He wrapped the firing mechanism of his flintlock rifle in his kerchief and laid it down in the sand. He pulled the powder horn and powder-measure strap off over his head. Shucked off his cartridge box and crawled out to get his captain. Even though it was late March the Alabama sun blazed and roasted everything in its light. The river itself was like some kind of running metal. The smoke of their firing lay in planes. There was no wind. Now Thompson was silent. Why had he gone out there, past the barricade? Everything was the color of a biscuit, the color of yellow sunlight and the sulphur shades of gunpowder smoke. He slid between two collapsed timbers and when he reached for Thompson's outflung arm the sand erupted around him as if tiny explosive charges had been set underground. The firing was continuous. He laid hold of the bloodied arm and its torn shirtsleeve and dragged Thompson back into the shelter of the crisscrossed cabin timbers. He pulled him over a broken mirror and a calendar and some spoons. Thompson's boot heels caught the calendar and its pages rolled over—March and April and May. When he got him back under cover the captain was dying. It was a strange thing to roll a man's body over on its back and look for signs of life. A thing invisible. He had been hit in the V of his throat. Where've you been all the day, Randall my son? O Mother, make my bed soon for I am sick to my heart, and I fain would lie doon. He had heard that song all his life and now he knew what it meant. He tore open Thompson's military jacket, his shirt; he saw life draining away, draining away. You're hit, Sherman said. Look at you, you're hit. I am? Jefferson Kyle Kidd, sixteen years old last week, lay back in the yellow dirt and looked down his own body, the homespun brown pants and square-toed boots and his lanky long legs, the spreading red stain on the outside of his right hip. The weave of the homespun had been driven into his flesh. I'm all right, he said. It's all right. Later they had to pull his pants off and truss up the bandage around his hip bone and his crotch, which was embarrassing, but it healed well. He was elected sergeant because they were told they needed one. Sherman moved up to lieutenant and Hezekiah Pitt was made captain to replace Thompson. So there he was with a rank he knew nothing about. After the battle he sat in a tent with some of the officers of the Thirty-ninth U.S. Infantry to ask them about the duties of a sergeant and made a list. He was anxious to do well and to get everything right. They laughed at him; elected sergeant and not even twenty years old yet. Such was the militia. They laughed at the way he spoke. They were men from Maine and New York, they said noiss and reaftah and keaf. He bent tight to the paper so they could not see his puzzled expression and eventually figured out these words meant nurse and rafter and calf. He wrote down, in a neat list, all the obligations of a sergeant because written information was what mattered in this world, from after-action reports to scout maps to the list of company clerk duties. Then the Georgia and Tennessee militias and the Army regulars started out for Pensacola. They were in the country the people called Alabama, and the United States government called Mississippi Territory. Since he had carried himself well at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend and was of age he was forwarded to the Thirty-ninth Provost Marshall's Department. They needed him. He was a big tall cracker. It was a long march to Pensacola. They marched south out of the Alabama hill country and down into the sawgrass country, through wastes of fan palm standing at a height to rake at his hip wound, all of it covered in green briar vines that grew thorns on every inch of their whipcord trailers and all along the march the company musician played "Stone Grinds All" and "Little Drops of Brandy" on his breathless Irish tin whistle in the key of D, over and over. At Pensacola the Army put him to transporting prisoners. He hated it. He learned all the devices of interrogation and the secret codes with which his British prisoners communicated with one another, how to use wrestling holds on a fighting prisoner, a thumb lock. He learned the uses of manacles and leg irons, the maintenance of prisons in the hot sands of the Florida gulf. Within a few months he talked his way out of the Provost Marshall's unit and its commanding officer's managerial hands and into the message corps. The runners. Then at last he was doing what he loved: carrying information by hand alone through the Southern wilderness; messages, orders, maps, reports. Jackson's army had no other signal capacity, not like the Navy. Captain Kidd was already over six feet tall and he had a runner's muscles. He had good lungs and he knew the country. He was from Ball Ground, Georgia, in the Blue Ridge, and covering ground at a long trot was meat and drink to him. At that time his hair was a deep brown tied up in a pigtail and nothing pleased him more than to travel free and unencumbered, alone, with a message in his hand, carrying information from one unit to another, unconcerned with its content, independent of what was written or ordered therein. He ran at the far fringe of Jackson's Tennessee Regulars and their crossed white bandoliers. He saluted the adjutant at a staff tent, received instructions, stuffed the messages in his bag, and he was off. A lifting, running joy. He felt like a thin banner streaming, printed with some regal insignia with messages of great import entrusted to his care. He was given a runner's corps badge made of silvery metal. He smeared bacon fat on it and dusted it over so it would not shine and give him away as he jogged on through the hills, through the sand and fan palms of the coast. They gave him a flintlock pistol to carry but it was heavy and the gooseneck cock was always catching on something so he pulled the load and carried it in his knapsack. He dodged artillery and musket fire at Fort Bowyer in Mobile and then back across the Georgia line to Cumberland Island with his messages in a leather budget both on foot and riding those little Florida horses called Tackies. Two years of directed flight across Georgia and the Alabama country, solitary, with his information in hand. Once he fell asleep exhausted in a big empty ash hopper by a cabin to wake up and find himself in a farmyard full of Brits. He stayed where he was until it was hot noontime, when they all left. If they had discovered him they would have shot him dead in the hopper. He always recalled those two years with a kind of wonder. As when one is granted the life and the task for which one was meant. No matter how odd, no matter how out of the ordinary. When it came to an end he was not surprised. It was too good, too perfect to last. He wanted then to go west to the Spanish settlements but he had a widowed mother and younger sisters to look after and to provide for. He was not a man to marry without due deliberation. Twice he deliberated too long and the young women returned his letters and married others. By the time he completed his apprenticeship to a printer in Macon his mother had died and both sisters finally married. After Santa Ana had shot up San Antonio and burned the bodies of Travis and his men at the Alamo and then got whipped at San Jacinto, he left for Texas. The second war was President Tyler's war with Mexico. By that time Jefferson Kidd was nearly fifty and had long settled into life in San Antonio, where he finally met his wife. He had set up his press in the Plaza de Las Islas, which was also called Main Plaza, on the first floor of a new modern building belonging to a lawyer named Branholme. He found type with tildas and the aigu accent and the upside down exclamation and question marks. He studied Spanish so he could print whatever circulars and broadsheets were needed, many for the Cathedral parish. The San Antonio newspaper fed him a great deal of business, as did the hay market and the saloons. Often on his long rides about Texas with his newspapers in his portfolio and the portfolio in his saddlebags, the Captain fell into memories of his wife. The first day he ever saw Maria Luisa Betancort y Real. This was how the Captain knew that things of the imagination were often as real as those you laid your hand upon. And as for making her acquaintance, seeing and meeting were two different things. She was of an old Spanish family and formal arrangements had to be made for an introduction. There is a repeat mechanism in the human mind that operates independently of will. The memory brought with it the vacuity of loss, irremediable loss, and so he told himself he would not indulge himself in memory but it could not be helped. She was running down Soledad after the milkman and his buckskin horse. The milkman's name was Policarpo and he had passed by her family's house without stopping. Poli! Poli! She lost a shoe running. She had gray eyes. They were the color of rain. Her hair was curly. Her family's house was the big casa de dueña of the Betancort family at the intersection of Soledad and Dolorosa. The corner of Sad and Lonely. The Captain walked out of his print shop and took the buckskin's halter. Poli, stop, he said. A señorita wants you. So he recalled it anyway, against his will, every bead on her sash fringe and her hand on his arm to balance herself as she wormed her thin, small foot back into the shoe and then the warm milk pouring into her jug. The milk smelled like cow, the vanilla scent of the whitebrush that the milk cows loved to eat on the banks of Calamares Creek. Her gray eyes. So he became a man with a wife and two daughters. He loved print, felt something right about sending out information into the world. Independent of its content. He had a Stanhope press and a shop with nine-foot windows that allowed all the light he needed onto the casings and the plates and layout tables. During the Mexican War they said they needed him anyway, even at his age. He was to organize the communications of Taylor's forces and was given a small hand press to print orders of the day. He had never seen a hand press so small. He wrote up Taylor's orders and handed them to Captain Walker of the Texas Rangers and Walker's horsemen galloped with messages between Port Isabel on the Gulf to the Army encampment north of Matamoros, on the Rio Grande. At one point an aide-de-camp on Taylor's staff came up with the idea of sending up a hot-air balloon to spy on Arista's lines and drop propaganda. Finally someone else pointed out that one good shot would bring the balloon down. Others pointed out that most of the Mexican recruits could not read. A lieutenant-colonel quashed the brainstorm. Never underestimate the ingenuity of the U.S. Army. Taylor made him a brevet captain in the Second Division so he could organize the couriers and get what he needed: paper, ink, horses. His service in the War of 1812 recommended him for the rank. Ever afterward he was known as Captain Kidd. And so he was at Resaca de la Palma when one of Arista's twelve-pound balls came through the staff tent and shattered a table into fragments three feet from him. Oil from the lamps jumped into great transparent dots on the canvas. A major stood arrested with a table splinter through his neck. This collar is too tight, he said, and fainted. Against all odds he lived. He heard the centinela alerto as the men crashed through Arista's lines and saw them come back cheering with their loot; the Mexican general's table silver and his writing desk and the colors of the Tampico Battalion. What is the use of winning a battle without loot? You overwhelm them and take their stuff—military basics. He was with Taylor's forces at Buena Vista, in the high mountains above Monterrey. They had been shot at all the way from the Rio Grande by either Mexican Army sharpshooters or Apaches, it was a toss-up as to which. The Captain was handed a Model 1830 Springfield flintlock but he had been raised with them and knew them well. He lay in a wagon bed and fired at the gunsmoke and, he hoped, brought down more than one hidden sniper. It was the middle of February of 1847. In the thin air of the mountains outside that Mexican town, with smoke from their campfires rising straight up in the still air, the young men wanted to know about the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. They wanted to compare their own behavior with that of their forebears. They wanted to know if they measured up, if what they endured was as difficult, if their enemies were as cunning and as brave. The Texas Rangers lounged against the caissons and listened. They were cool young men and utterly reckless and apparently without fear. The Mexicans hated them and called them rinches but if they could have fielded an independent cavalry wing as skilled and as lethal they would have, but they didn't, and so there you were. The Captain had never met any troops or unit like them. They listened out of courtesy to an older man. And so in the cold night under the high stars of Mexico, he told them what he could. Or what he felt like telling. The Creek and the Choctaw were using smoothbores, he said. His Georgia militia company brought their own rifles and used minie balls, that on their way to Pensacola their wagons had sunk hub-deep in the sand. That his captain had got killed on the second day of the battle and he managed to crawl out and drag him back under cover but he died. And quickly went on: that Jackson was a fearless man, he was a maniac when he was fighting. The question hung unasked in the air: Were you wounded? And yes, I got shot in the hip, he said. Didn't hit the bone. I didn't know it until later. The Red Sticks had run out of ammunition and they were firing all kinds of things out of those smoothbores. I think I got hit with a spoon. He paused. The knees of his trousers smoked from the heat of the fire and his hands were stained with ink. At that time he carried a new Colt revolver and it dragged and was heavy at his belt. The Rangers smoked and waited in silence in the shadow of their hats. Their beards were silky because they were young but when you looked at their faces it seemed they were artificially aged in some way. They wanted some wisdom, some advice. You can get hit and not know it, he said. So could the man next to you. Take care of one another. They nodded and stared at the fire and thought about it. They thought about fighting now in a strange land and against a strange army, one that was stiffly European and formal where the barefoot mestizo privates still were forced to wear neck stocks. Their own opponent was José Mariano Martín Buenaventura Ignacio Nepomuceno García de Arista Nuez, who was a fiercely committed republican and at odds with his own general staff. The Mexican Army was in fact torn into factions by immovable aristocrats and generals with liberal theories. Afterward, late, when he was alone and the fire of mesquite wood was dying, it came to him that he should take on the task of dispensing these interesting, nay, vital facts gleaned from the intelligence reports and the general press. For instance, the struggles going on at the top levels of the Mexican Army. If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five. And then he had come to think that what people needed, at bottom, was not only information but tales of the remote, the mysterious, dressed up as hard information. And he, like a runner, immobile in his smeared printing apron bringing it to them. Then the listeners would for a small space of time drift away into a healing place like curative waters. FOUR SHE WALKED ALONGSIDE the wagon, singing. Ausay gya kii, gyao boi tol. Prepare for a hard winter, prepare for hard times. She walked beside the horse barefoot with the soles of her small feet hard as wood. Like all people who do not wear shoes her big toes pointed straight ahead. Ausay gya kii, she sang. As far as she knew she was walking into disaster, into a land blighted and starved. All around in the rolling hills there were neither buffalo nor canyon wrens with their spilling of song. In this land there were no Kiowa or mother or father. She was utterly alone, trapped in peculiar clothing, a dress made of cloth with blue and yellow stripes and a tight waist. She had been laced into a thing that she could only imagine was for magical purposes, meant to confine her heart and her breath in a sort of cage to hold her forever like a shut fist that would never open. She put her hand on the shaft of the wagon and sang as she walked because it was better than weeping. The land was covered with the short, contorted oaks of the Red River valley, their limbs all so black with rain. The earth rolled loose on either side as if it had been released from the confinement of towns. It was a puzzling thing as to why they packed up in towns in the way they did. She carried her shoes around her neck with the laces tied together and walked in the felting of wet leaves. She would find out where they were going and then either escape or starve herself to death. It was not worth being alive when one was alone among aliens. People who would kill you, who had killed your dear ones. The Agent had said she was going back to her people. As far as she could tell he was not making a joke. The Captain sat in the driver's seat of the wagon with his coat collar turned up and the brim of his old field hat down over his forehead. A light drizzle drifted through the landscape of cranky post oak trees whose limbs did not have six inches of straight in any of them. The road rose and fell on the short and choppy hills on the south bank of the Red. His bay saddle horse, Pasha, was tied at the rear of the wagon to a ringbolt and sauntered along, happy and free of a rider. His packhorse, Fancy, was now between the shafts; she had been broken to harness and went along well enough. She looked longingly from one side of the two-track road to the other at the tufts of grass, now just coming up green in late February. To their left was the Red River, a wide sheet of water the color of brick. He pulled up. He motioned to the girl. She stood beside the packhorse and gripped the harness. She stared at him and did not come any closer. Look here, he said. He pulled out the Smith and Wesson. He clicked the cartridge cylinder loose and flipped it out, showed her the charges. With a twist of his hand he snapped it back into place. He said, This is in case there's trouble. He stared about himself in a theatrical manner, mimed caution, held out the revolver toward the trees and made shooting noises. He put it back on the wagon floorboards on his left side with a broad, obvious gesture. She was still, unmoving. Only her eyes moved. And this, he said. He pulled out the old shotgun. He reached into the wagon box and took out a handful of shells. He said, In case of attack, this completely inadequate load of bird shot will make a loud noise, if nothing else. The girl watched carefully, confused, as he lifted the shotgun and then her face cleared. He had been holding the shotgun and the revolver left-handed. The Captain turned the shotgun muzzle in every direction with his deep hawk's eyes squinted down the barrel. He put everything back. He didn't smile at her. He knew better. She stood still as a fallen leaf. He sat, lanky and tall, on the driver's seat and regarded the girl with a calm look until finally she gave him one sharp nod. It seemed to him she understood but was not willing to concede they might be on the same side against anyone or anything. They went on. He thought about her oddness. What was it that made the girl so strange? She had none of the gestures or expressions of white people. White people's faces were mobile and open. They were unguarded. They flung their hands about, they slanted and leaned on things, tossed their heads and their hats. Her faultless silence made her seem strangely not present. She had the carriage of every Indian he had ever seen and there was a sort of kinetic stillness about them and yet she was a ten-year-old girl with dark blond hair in streaks and blue eyes and freckles. You, he said, and pointed at her. She made a small, slight dodging motion to one side. Her loose biscuit-colored hair flew in a wave. Kiowa people never pointed with their fingers. Never. They pointed with gun barrels and with the shaman sticks that threw venomous demons into an enemy's body. Otherwise not. He could not know that. You, Jo-han-ah, he said. You, Johanna. She was leaning slightly forward from the waist as if this would help her understand. She held on to the roan mare's back band. The rich scent of the horse and its warm anatomy was the only thing familiar to her in this catastrophic change in her life. Captain. He pointed to himself. She walked sideways in order to look at him and after a minute or so she understood that this pointing might not do any harm. He could not be throwing the demons into himself. Surely not. He tried again. He sat quietly with the reins in his right hand and with his left he pointed to her again. Johanna, he said, patiently. He made an encouraging gesture. He waited. She let go of the back band and stood still and held up both hands in front of herself with the palms out. He pulled up the little roan mare. She called on her guardian spirit, the one who had told her she must wear two down puffs in her hair along with a golden eagle wing feather as a sign that he would always be with her. They had taken them away. They had thrown it all out a window. But her guardian spirit might still hear her. The old man wanted her to say some enchanted naming word. It might not be harmful. She said, Chohenna. When she spoke her lower teeth showed white. He pointed to himself. Captain, he said. Kep-dun, she said. He pointed to her again. She stiffened a moment in fear but gathered her courage and said, Chohenna. Then he pointed to himself again. She said, Kep-dun. Very well. Now, we'll go on. THEY CROSSED THE upper Little Wichita only a mile from where it ran into the Red River and they crossed it at a run. The Captain lifted Johanna into the wagon bed, pulled Pasha's lead rope loose and let him go. He found the camp knife, a butcher knife, and stuck it sheath and all into his belt in case he might have to cut Fancy out of her harness. They started a quarter-mile from the crossing at a fast trot and then hit the water at a gallop. Johanna clung to the long seats and waves of spray battered the Curative Waters East Mineral Springs Texas gold letters. They slowed as the current stopped them and then it took hold of the little mare and their wagon as well. Crows shot up out of the far bank screaming. Foam churned around them, drift and duff ran on top of the fast water in snaking lines. Briefly the wagon floated. The roan mare snorted, went under, came up and beat at the floodwaters with her hooves. Then she struck hard bottom and they pulled up on the far bank with water draining in streams. Pasha was a constitutionally brave horse and he plunged in after them without hesitation and struck out and came out a few yards downstream with triumphant little tosses of his head. He shook himself in a flying halo of spray and came trotting to join them and was retied to the wagon. As they went on the Captain cocked his head and listened to a steady clicking sound. He got down and looked at the front wheel. There was a break in the iron tire. Nothing to do about it now; maybe there would be a blacksmith in Spanish Fort. THAT NIGHT THE Captain demonstrated to her the little sheetiron stove he had bought along with the wagon. It would make less smoke than a campfire. It was the size of a large ammunition box with a small chimney going up two feet or so, enough to keep smoke out of their faces. He let down the tailgate and patted the stove where it sat, square and black and forbidding. She had no idea what it was for. Stove, he said. Fire. He fitted the pipes. She stood in front of it in her yellow-and-blue-striped dress, her bare feet, the bright taffy-colored hair streaming down her back, damp with the drizzle. In a swift motion she suddenly carried her right arm down in front of herself and then snapped her fingers upward in a blossom of hard nails and calluses. Ah, said the Captain. Sign. The sign for fire. He knew a bit of the Plains Indians sign language and so he made the sign for Yes. This was encouraging. They at least had some limited means of speech. He showed her how the stove worked—the top lid the size of a hand, the draft wheel. He strung up one of the wagon's side curtains between a short, warped post oak and the wagon side to make a shelter against the drizzle. She watched his every move. Perhaps she was afraid, perhaps she knew she had to learn how these things worked. The horses were happy with their morales, feed bags holding a hefty portion of shelled corn. The girl stood beside the little mare and ran her hand down the horse's leg. She made a little pitying noise. The mare was young and strong but she had a slightly twisted right foreleg, the hoof turned inward several degrees and because of this the Captain had got her cheap. The girl had spotted it immediately and she patted the mare gently as she and Pasha stood side by side and ground up their corn with a noise like hand grinders. The Captain found dry sticks in the clusters of tall bear grass and fished his match safe out of his inner coat pocket. He did everything slowly and deliberately. He started the fire. Johanna watched with a cautious expression, a mistrustful look. She bent toward the little stove to peer in the grate and saw the air sucked into it to make the sticks burn with more intensity. Cautiously she patted the top and then snatched her hand back. Pi tso ha! Yes, he said. Whatever that means. Hot, I suppose. He made up coffee and a corn dodger and fried bacon. She sat under the canvas side curtain with her food in her hands for a long time. At last she sang over it, as if adoring it, as if the bacon were a live being and the smoking dodger a gift from the Corn Woman. There was no campfire to throw shadows but there was a half-moon waxing and it seemed to run in reverse between cascading clouds that flowed together and then pulled apart and then ran together again. The Captain wiped his plate with the cornbread. She might run. She had nowhere to go, however. The Kiowa were across the river and the river was a loose and moving ocean of foaming rusty floodwater nearly half a mile wide that carried off entire trees. She might lay hands on the revolver or the shotgun, and he could wake up in the next world. The Captain lay back on his old Spanish saddle that he had turned upside down, his head pillowed on the fleecing. He brought out the Chicago Tribune and flipped through it by the light of the candle in the candle lantern. She lay rolled in a thick serape called a jorongo in a red-and-black diamond pattern and stared at him with her open, flat blue eyes. He rattled the pages and said, There's a big new packing plant in Chicago. Astounding, isn't it? They feed the cattle in at one end and at the other end they come out in cans. She never took her eyes from him. He knew she was prepared for some kind of violence. Captain Kidd was a man old not only in years but in wars. He smiled at her at last and took out his pipe. More than ever knowing in his fragile bones that it was the duty of men who aspired to the condition of humanity to protect children and kill for them if necessary. It comes to a person most clearly when he has daughters. He had thought he was done raising daughters. As for protecting this feral child he was all for it in principle but wished he could find somebody else to do it. You are an immense amount of trouble, he said. We will both be happy when you are with your relatives and you can make their lives a living hell. Her face did not change. She wiped her nose slowly on her sleeve. He turned the page. He said, This is writing. This is printing. This tells us of all the things we ought to know in the world. And also that we ought to want to know. He glanced over at her. He said, There are places in the world called England and Europe and In-di-a. He blew smoke from his nose. He probably should not be smoking. You could smell it for miles. In-di-a, she whispered. She began to place her fingertips together one by one. He lay back in his blankets and said his prayers for Britt, who was always in harm's way in his travels. For the safety of his daughters and son-in-law and the grandsons, perhaps soon to travel, at his request, the long and perilous journey from Georgia. This would include crossing the Mississippi. For his own safety and that of Johanna, also in harm's way. So many people, so much harm. He put his hat over his face and after a while he fell asleep. FIVE THE NEXT DAY they went on toward Spanish Fort. The road wound along the south edge of the river in the great valley of the Red. More than a mile away south was the rise of land and the bluffs. At some distant time the river had been there, tearing away land; over the centuries it moved like a big red snake from one side of its valley to the other. The rain had stopped for now. The Captain was unhappy about her walking but she would not ride nor would she put on her shoes. She watched the river. She well knew that on the other side was Indian Territory. Her mother was over there, her father, perhaps brothers and sisters and all her kin group, her clan within the tribe, perhaps a young man to whom she might have been promised. The black trunks of the live oak were twisted and wiry as chimney brushes. A good place for an ambush. He wished he had a dog. He should have got a dog from somebody. She stopped and held up her hand. She was looking ahead. He twitched the long reins and Fancy stopped. Behind them Pasha pointed his ears ahead and suddenly called out in a long, ringing cry. Captain Kidd pulled out the revolver and once again checked his loads. All dry. He laid it beside him on the floorboards next to the wagon seat on the left side and covered it with a canvas-wrapped flitch of bacon. He reminded himself that the .38 cartridges were hidden in the flour keg. After a few moments he heard the sound of about ten horses, and the jingling of bits and saddle gear. Their shod hooves clicked on the stones of the road. A company of U.S. Army mounted infantry rode into view a quarter of a mile down the road. He jumped down and grabbed the girl by the upper arm. He made the sign for "good" in front of her face. They were on one of the few straight and level stretches between all the thick post oak and the soldiers came toward him and Johanna in a unit of blue and of flashing well-shined leather, appearing out of the trees like ghost soldiers. He turned her to him and made the sign for "friend." She had turned the color of pastry. Her lips were trembling. He led her to the wagon wheel and lifted her so that she put one bare foot on a spoke and then sprang up into the wagon bed and sank down in a welter of skirts and loose hair. She pulled the thick wool jorongo over her head. He came up after her, sat down on the driver's seat, unwrapped the reins from the driver's post. It's all right, Johanna. Johanna? He knew she thought he was going to hand her over to the Army. That this was probably an arranged meeting. The man in front was a lieutenant; his shoulder insignia with the double bars winked in the dim light. Therefore it was a regular patrol trotting up and down the road on the south side of the Red looking for signs of raiders crossing over although with the flooding it was unlikely. They all carried the squareback Navy Colt five-shot revolvers that looked as big as pork hams in their holsters and the .56 caliber Colt carbines, also standard issue for the wild country. The lieutenant called for the column to halt and then rode alongside and said, Good day. The ten men behind him kicked their feet out of the stirrups to relieve their knees and some took the opportunity to drink from canteens. At the rear their pack mules brayed at his horses in long demented shrieks like train whistles. Good day, said the Captain. The lieutenant looked over the wagon and saw the girl on the floor of the wagon bed just behind the Captain, her expression of stiffened fright, or even terror. She was as close to the Captain's revolver as she could get. She slid out her hand and grasped the butt where it lay hidden under the flitch of bacon, her hand and arm covered in the red wool serape. The young lady seems very disturbed, said the lieutenant. There was surprise in his voice, suspicion. She was a captive, said the Captain. I'm returning her to her people in Castroville, Bexar County. He handed over the Agent's papers. I'd like to have a look at her, said the lieutenant. He read through the papers. The Agent's handwriting was very good, very clear. He read it easily, the girl's description, her approximate height and complexion. Then he raised his head. His shoulder bars winked with drops. The river made an endless thunder to their left. They could see it through the trees. Yes, I'll try, said the Captain. He settled his hat more firmly on his head and stepped over the back of the wagon seat and grasped the thick red wool and pulled it from her head. Johanna, he said. Johanna. He patted her shoulder. Well damn, said the lieutenant. He was taken aback by the flat, wild look on the girl's face. You'd think she would be happy to be going home. The Captain stood between Johanna and the lieutenant. He said, They took her at age six. As far as she knows she's a Kiowa. I see. Well, I hope you'll apprise her of the facts. He leaned to one side to see around the Captain and stared at her appraisingly and then bent from his saddle to hand the papers back to the Captain. He said, You're the man who reads the news. Yes, I am. I was there at Fort Belknap when you read. Glad to hear it. I don't suppose you have your loyalty oath papers to show me. No, I don't. Since you are on a sort of official business you will need them. If you voluntarily aided the Confederate Army in any way you will need a certified copy of your loyalty oath. I did not. Were your boys in the conflict? I don't have any. Are you armed? All I have is a twenty-gauge shotgun. Let me see it. Captain Kidd drew out the old shotgun and worked the bolt and caught the shell as it flew out. Bird shot. He stood in the wagon bed and handed it over. Johanna had in some way fed her thin body almost completely under the wagon seat and again drew up the thick red wool Mexican blanket over her head. She drew the revolver close to her and stared at the wagon floorboards and listened to every nuance, every tone in the men's voices. It was clear that the Captain was not going to let them have her. The Army man was a man with a hard voice but now his voice dropped and became more conversational. How is it charged? the lieutenant said. Number Seven bird shot. Can't do much with that. I suppose it's all right. The lieutenant handed it back. You don't carry a rifle or a handgun? Well hell no, said the Captain. He slid the shotgun back into the wagon bed. I might run into some Comanches and they'd take it away from me. He brought out his tobacco and filled his pipe. They might shoot me with it, he said. He struck a match. There was no point in saying anything about the gaudy and corrupt Reconstruction government running Texas, the mindless law against carrying handguns, even up here on the frontier. Johanna listened as the Captain's voice developed an edge. He was being insulting to the soldiers. Her eyes brightened. Yes, very funny, said the lieutenant. He ran his eyes over everything in the wagon bed; the provisions and blankets, the little iron stove, the portfolio of newspapers, a sack of cornmeal, the sack of dimes and other coins, his shot box with the paper hulls and bird shot, a small keg of flour. He glanced at a flitch of bacon beside the wagon seat on the left side. The lieutenant regarded the flour keg and said, What's in that? Flour. Very well. I suspect they'll rescind that law here before long. I know people need sidearms to defend themselves. Surely not, said the Captain. The lieutenant ignored this. And you are going where? Weatherford, Dallas, then south to Castroville and San Antonio. Very well. A long way. Good day, sir. I wish you a safe trip. SONS OF BITCHES, he said. You can come out now, Johanna. You can reappear like the flowers in May. They aren't going to slap you in leg irons and throw you into a cell. He smoked his pipe as he flicked the reins. The pipe had been carved from kaolin into the shape of a man's head and in the damp air the smoke hung unmoving so that they traveled on away from it and left it behind them hanging in the air. Johanna? From behind him he heard, Kep-dun. Don't stick a knife in my back. Don't let me hear the dreaded click of a cocked revolver hammer. Let us flounder on through life here as best we might. Kep-dun! She sprang lightly over the back of the driver's seat and sat down beside him. She held the revolver in one hand between her knees. She made several signs of which he only understood one, which was "good" and the other "let loose" or "free." Something like that. She smiled for the first time. There was no sign for "thank you." There was no word in Kiowa for "thank you." People should know that the one was grateful, because you know you have done something good, something commendable and there is no need to belabor the point. Kiowa is a tonal language and it sings up and down the complex verbs, and that by itself should be enough to express gratitude at being saved from the men in blue coats with the big long Army revolvers like hog's legs on their thighs, with their coats and pants all exactly the same, which was in itself unnatural. He had faced them down and saved her. She tilted her head to one side to regard him with a bright look on her small round face. Yes, let loose, he said. Free. He carefully took the .38 from her hand, clicked on the safety, and returned it to the left side of the seat and put the flitch over it again. She knew how to take the safety off, he thought. He smiled back at her in a rather stiff grimace. She wrestled with the yards of unfamiliar skirts and settled herself and smiled a small, slight smile at the sepia-toned, dripping world of the Red River valley. It was more a lift of the powdery blond eyebrows than a smile. She said something in Kiowa in a happy tone. My name is Ay-ti-Podle, the Cicada, whose song means there is fruit ripening nearby. She gestured back toward the big bay saddle horse and tossed her hair back. It was as if she wanted to include Pasha in this newfound happiness. Ah, Cho-henna, he said. He turned and looked down at her. If the officer had reached for her he had no doubt she would have cocked the revolver and shot him point-blank. He said, Your relatives are going to be so happy to get back their sweet precious lamb. Kep-dun! she said, brightly, and patted his bony hand. Cho-henna, he said. SPANISH FORT WAS a mile from the river inside a great bend. The Red River was the boundary between Indian Territory and that which was not Indian Territory. They had passed through a tangled country of short, sharp hills with knobs of stone on top of them that stood like monuments, like curtain walls. As they went on toward Spanish Fort they passed them by at walking speed and stared at them as if watching distant castles. A storm rolled up out of the northern March sky, out of the plains. They came to the town of Spanish Fort in the late afternoon. It was also known as Red River Station and with its two names it was busy. There had been at one time some sort of defensive works here, perhaps Spanish, perhaps not, but they were long gone. The Captain held the reins taut and dodged other vehicles. Johanna at first sat in the back, far inside the bulk of the Mexican-made jorongo; she clutched it tight around her so that she was the shape of a lime kiln in bright red and black. The Captain's excursion wagon made sharp noises as the shafts turned on the fifth wheel beneath his feet. They locked wheels briefly with a freight wagon and it took the driver and the Captain and several bystanders to get them backed and free. Pasha sat back on his halter rope but didn't break it. By this time the Captain was red mud to the knees. Red mud crusted the laces on his old lace-up boots. The streets were filled with layers of wood smoke as supper was now in preparation in the houses and establishments of the town. He turned his head to look up at second stories and at the people in the second stories doing what he could not tell other than arguing and slamming the windows shut against the wind. Horse soldiers rode by in twos. The wind came running at them from the northwest at full charge and blew off people's hats and tore at clotheslines. Town noises bit at the Captain's nerves and so what must it be like for her? He turned to pat her on the back, thudding gently on the thick red wool. She glanced up at him with fright on her face. There was a great barn on the far edge of town that served as a place to park but it was full of every imaginable four-wheeled conveyance. Not far away was the U.S. Cavalry encampment, so he drove into a tight grove of bur oaks beyond the edge of the town. There he put up the overhead canopy and then one of the side curtains, and the other side curtain he stretched out as an awning over the tailgate. He belled Fancy and then hobbled both her and Pasha and set them loose to graze. He stood for a moment to watch Pasha, with his thick, curved neck and large eyes. He was both smooth and calm. He remembered seeing the horse in a lot of twenty to be sold in Dallas. He had instantly turned away because if the dealer had seen the look on his face the price would have gone up a hundred dollars. Finally the Captain went to heave out the flour keg. He took out the box of .38 shells and put it under the seat. Everything good, he said to Johanna. He beat the flour from his hands. Here, my dear, do something. Try to get this stove going. Yes, Kep-dun, yes yes. She darted under the oaks, still barefoot, to gather firewood. Lightning cracked overhead with a noise like artillery while its blinding neurons of fire ran to every quarter of the sky. Spanish Fort was busy with freight wagons and supply establishments, with longhorn herds milling outside the town waiting to cross and anxious men conferring under canvas as to when the flood would subside. Trying to figure out how to get them over the Red before they ate up all the grass on this side of the river and starved. SIX CAPTAIN KIDD LEFT her feeding sticks into the toylike cast-iron stove and walked back into town grasping his hat brim. He found the man who took care of the Masonic Lodge and arranged to rent it that night. Then he walked about town to put up his bills. If he did not have the girl to care for he would not have to stay at the wagon, he could rent a room with a kerosene lamp and curtains and take a bath and he could eat in a restaurant. God above knew what she would do if presented with a dinner on a plate. In the light mist he tacked up each notice with four tacks. He had learned long ago that anything less left his advertisements prey to the wind and they invariably ended up in the hands of people who needed the paper to write grocery lists on, or for other purposes. He came upon a fiddler he knew. Simon Boudlin sat behind the glass window of a storefront that was both a ladies' millinery and a meat market. Simon sat in the window with his chin on his fist and his fiddle under one arm as if he were a display. He was watching the world go by. He was a short man but he carried himself as if he were six feet tall; he had straight, broad, and perfectly square shoulders and slim hips. His thick hair was a halo of unruly brown burrs, and he was freckled as a guinea egg. Simon lifted his fiddle bow by the frog and tapped on the glass. Captain Kidd saw him and went in. Simon. Captain. Are you playing tonight? Because I am reading. Where? At the Masonic Lodge. The Captain joined Simon in the window on another chair and laid his tack hammer and the sheaf of advertisements on the floor. He wiped off his old field hat with his sleeve. No, it's all right, said Simon. I have already played. No competition. He smiled. He had two teeth broken out of his jaw on the left side but you couldn't see it unless he smiled and then deep parentheses formed on either side of his mouth. He worked sometimes for the wheelwright and a wheel had come off the lathe where they were boring out the hub box and struck him in the jaw. Why are you here? He was not talkative until he had something to say. He was a careful listener and cocked his head like a titmouse, which he did now. Raindrops slid and sparkled on the glass and beyond it people wavered past with their heads down. I am on my way to Dallas and then on south, said the Captain. Coming from Wichita Falls. You got across the Little Wichita, then. Yes, and I think so did Britt Johnson and his crew. They went straight south. So you have nothing to do? Simon shook his head. I just played for the Fort Worth Dancing School master. They had the dancing school in the back, here. He pointed with the bow. The fellow who was supposed to play guitar for them was tuning his guitar there at the church on the piano and he got it an octave too high and busted every one of his strings. Simon bent his head down and laughed. Bang bang bang one after the other, you'd think he would have figured it out. He wiped his hand down his face to stop himself from laughing at the guitar player's misfortunes. Well, well, I did it myself once, long ago. And so! They came and got me out of the wheelwright's to play for them. You see. He plucked a curled shaving from his pants leg. Well then, listen. Captain Kidd shifted from one foot to another and briefly wondered if Johanna might have already absconded into the woods. He regarded his boots. His pants. Mud to the shins. Several women were buying ground meat, a man churned it out of a big-spouted grinder in a red sludge. On the other side of the store a girl and her friend were trying on hats. From the rear of the store came the light voices of yet more girls and the sound of several young men whose voices were very low and at other times broke and vaulted up the register. They came filing out carrying their dancing slippers. The Captain lifted his hat to them. Listen, he said. He groped around in his head for sentences and phrases and words to explain the situation. I'm listening, I'm listening, said the fiddler. He lightly tapped the head of the bow on the floor between his feet. Some song was running through his head. The thing is, I am returning a girl who was a Kiowa captive to her people, down south near San Antonio, and she's in the wagon there, in that bur oak stand behind the livery barn, cooking dinner in my wagon. Simon looked out the rainy glass at the vehicles passing by, the men and women hurrying along the raw, new boardwalk. You jest, he said. That's four hundred miles. No, I do not. How old is she? Ten. But Simon, she is wise in the ways of battle and conflict, it seems to me. Simon watched a cowboy walk by with his hat slanted against the increasing rain and his boots shining with wet. The fiddler nodded and said, They are always at war. Be that as it may. She has lost all acquaintance with the uses and manners of white people and I need somebody to keep watch on her while I do my reading. You and your particular friend Miss Dillon would do me a great favor if you would sit with her while I read. I am afraid if I left her alone she might go bolting off. Simon nodded slowly like a walking beam. He thought about it. She wants to go back to them, he said. She apparently does. I know of a person who was like that, said Simon. They called him Kiowa Dutch. He was blond-haired completely. Nobody knew where he had been captured from, or when. He didn't either. I played for a dance there at Belknap when they brought him in. He got away from the Army fellows who were returning him and he is up there yet. I think I heard about him, said the Captain. He drummed his fingers on his knee. You know, it is chilling, how their minds change so completely. But I have taken on this task and I have to try. Simon lifted his fiddle and ran the bow across the strings. His fingers, hard and coarse with joinery work, blunt at the tips, skipped on the strings and a tune emerged: "Virginia Belle." She bereft us when she left us, sweet Virginia Belle. Then he stopped and said, Sorry. I can't help it. So yes. I will go and get Doris. He sat for a moment considering where Doris might be. Probably attending a lady named Everetson who was ill with a fever. A yawn overtook him and he lifted the back of the fiddle over his mouth the way nonfiddlers would cover a yawn with their hand. He said, Captain, you have taken on a heavy load here, I'm afraid. He tapped his fiddle bow on his shoe. For an old man is what you mean. Simon stood and then bent to his case, flipped a piece of waxed silk around his instrument, and laid it in the velvet. Click click he snapped the catches shut. He straightened. Yes, for an old man is what I mean exactly. THE CAPTAIN AND Simon and Doris all hurried through the drizzle to the stand of bur oaks. Between their overhead of rust-colored leaves and the canopy and stretched side curtains, the wagon was dry enough. The girl had made them a supper of cornbread and bacon and coffee and was sitting cross-legged between the long seats like a Hindu yoga with it spread before her. In the lantern light the gold letters of Curative Waters shone brightly. They ducked under the side-curtain awning. Doris pulled off her dripping straw hat and said, Hello! Johanna glanced at the Captain as if to ask if he, too, saw this female apparition and then returned her gaze to Doris without saying a word. Doris carried a small bundle. She unwrapped it and held it out to the girl with a bright smile. It was a doll with a china head and painted dark eyes. It wore a dress in a brown and green check and shawl and its shoes were painted black on china feet. Johanna reached out one dirty hand from under her blanket and took the doll by the foot. She held it around the body for a moment. It was like the taina sacred figure that was taken from its wrappings only at the Sun Dance. She looked searchingly into its eyes. Then she propped it against one of the side benches and opened both her hands to it and said something in Kiowa. Hmm, said Simon. He stood under the stretched canvas and tousled his hair to shake off the wet. He had left his fiddle safe in his tiny room over the wagon maker's. He wore an old 1840s infantry coat with a high band collar. Its surface was a series of patches, some of which overlapped. My word. I believe she is addressing it. The fiddler held out his hands to the heat of the little stove, and worked his stiff fingers open and shut to loosen the joints. Doris found the ironstone plates in the cook box. She said, she is like an elf. She is like a fairy person from the glamorie. They are not one thing or another. She laid out the plates wherever she could find room on the tailgate and on tops of boxes. Simon regarded the light of his life with a solemn expression. Doris, he said, your Irish comes out at the strangest times. Don't stare at her, said Doris. That is what she is. She thinks it's an idol, said Simon. The Captain bent over the tailgate searching through his carpetbag and listened to them. Aye, perhaps, said Doris. She shoveled food onto the plates and laid whatever utensil she could find on each one; the two forks, the camp knife, a serving spoon and then lifted her head to look at the girl; so alone, twice captured, carried away on the flood of the world. Doris's eyes burned suddenly with tears and she lifted the back of her hand to her eyes. But I think not. The doll is like herself, not real and not not-real. I make myself understood I hope. You can put her in any clothing and she remains as strange as she was before because she has been through two creations. Doris laid a plate before the girl. Doris's hair was Irish black with blue lights in it, a rare, true black. She was a small woman and her wrists were ropy with muscle and hard work. She said, To go through our first creation is a turning of the soul we hope toward the light, out of the animal world. God be with us. To go through another tears all the making of the first creation and sometimes it falls to bits. We fall into pieces. She is asking, Where is that rock of my creation? The Captain took out shaving gear. He went to the far side and hung his mirror on a bolt end and shaved. He said, Miss Dillon, you know this how? An Gorta Mor, she said. In the famine children saw their parents die and then went to live with the people on the other side. In their minds they went. When they came back they were unfinished. They are forever falling. She shook out her wet, pinned-up skirt and watched as Johanna carefully ate pieces of bacon with her hands. Well, I don't know what I can do about it. The Captain came back around, put away his gear, and sat on the flour keg. He bent his long, elderly body with a light creaking of the spine and went through his newspapers. He had to make a living. This was intriguing but first he needed to hear the coins falling into the paint can; then he could listen to mysteries about unfinished children, trailing their griefs and ragged edges. And the newspapers, they say nothing about this at all or about the poor at all, Doris said. There are great holes in your newspapers. Nobody sees them. God sees them. The Captain ate his supper and then crossed his knife and fork on his plate and put the plate on the tailgate. Yes, I am sure He does. At any rate, she has to go back to her family. It's only my concern between here and Castroville. Who are her people? Germans. Ah! Doris clapped both hands over her face for a moment and then dropped them in her lap. And so now that's three languages the child must know. She wiped her hands on flour sacking. Leave her with us, Captain. We will take her. Simon stopped eating. He drew in his lower lip and raised both eyebrows in an expression of surprise. Doris said, She is like my little sister that died. Ahem, Doris, my dear, said Simon. And so we will be married next month with a child already. Doris lifted her slim shoulders. The priest, she said, has seen everything. The Captain thought, The girl is trouble and contention wherever she goes, wherever she lands. No one wants her for herself. A redheaded stepchild destined for the washhouse. Miss Dillon, that is generous of you but I must return her to her relatives as I said I would do, and for which I took a coin of fifty dollars in gold. Simon's relief was plain in his face. The girl shrank away into the interior, against the backrest, and hid in the thick jorongo. SEVEN CAPTAIN KIDD HAD changed into his reading clothes in the back of the Masonic Hall. They were a decent black frock coat, knee length, single-breasted, a matching vest, a white shirt in silk and cotton figured with a lyre design in silk of the same color—that is, a bit yellowed. He had one of the new ascots in black silk and a low-rise rounded silk topper. He stuffed his stained traveling clothes into the carpetbag and then went out and stepped up on the dais. He placed his bull's-eye lantern to the left on a wooden box (it said Kilmeyer Beer 50 bttls), so it would shine on his newspapers. He greeted the crowd and listened to the clink of dimes and five-cent pieces, two-cent pieces, pennies, and sometimes quarters into the paint can and if it was a quarter people made their own change. There were a good plenty of people. Mist was still coming down in minute blowing drops from the clouds that raced through the sky over Spanish Fort. He unfolded the London Daily News. He would give them a few paragraphs of hard news and then read of dreamlike places far removed. This was the arrangement of all his readings. It worked. The lantern beam shone sideways onto his face, casting brilliant lunar cells of light on his cheekbones through the lenses of his reading glasses. He read an article concerning the Franco-Prussian War. It involved delicate Frenchmen, scented with toilet water, being whipped soundly at Wissembourg by huge blond Germans who were fat and strong on sausages. The outcome was easily predicted. The audience sat rapt, listening. News all the way from France! Nobody knew anything about the Franco-Prussian War but all were jointly amazed by information that had come across the Atlantic to them, here in North Texas, to their town alongside the flooding Red River. They had no idea how it had got here, through what strange lands it had traveled, who had carried it. Why. Captain Kidd read carefully and precisely. His eyeglasses were round and rimmed in gold over his deep eyes. He always laid his small gold hunting watch to one side of the podium to time his reading. He had the appearance of wisdom and age and authority, which was why his readings were popular and the reason the dimes rang into the coffee can. When they read his handbills men abandoned the saloon, they slipped out of various unnamed establishments, they ran through the rain from their firelit homes, they left the cattle circled and bedded beside the flooding Red to come and hear the news of the distant world. And now he took them away to far places and strange peoples. Into mythic forms of thought and the structures of fairy tales. He read from the Philadelphia Inquirer of Dr. Schliemann's search for windy Troy somewhere in Turkey. He read of the telegraph wires successfully laid from Britain to India, an article in the Calcutta Times forwarded to the London Daily Telegraph, a technological advance that seemed almost otherworldly. As he glanced up it seemed to the Captain that he saw the blond man again or at least the glint of ash-blond hair just at the borders of his light. This went into his mind and then out of his mind as he grappled with the big four-sheets of the Boston Daily Journal. To finish, he read of the unfortunate Hansa crushed in the pack ice in its attempt on the North Pole, the survivors rescued by a whaler. This was proving the most popular as he could see by the small gestures of the audience; they bent forward, they fixed their eyes upon him to hear of undiscovered lands in the kingdoms of ice, fabulous beasts, perils overcome, snow people in furry suits. Simon came in the rear door of the Masonic Lodge just as he was replacing his newspapers into the portfolio. Sir, the girl's gone. Nothing galvanizes people like news of a missing child. The Captain swept everything into his portfolio, his newspapers and eyeglasses, the bull's-eye lantern with its smoldering wick, and the money tin; jammed his silk hat on his head; and ran to the door and straight out into the rain. They had fallen asleep, he and Doris, sitting on the shot box and the flour keg, leaning together against the big rear wheel in front of a good fire. Something made Simon wake up and she was gone. She had left on foot. The doll was gone too. It is easier to track a barefoot person than somebody with shoes. The toes dig in with four distinct marks and the big toe like a misplaced thumb broad alongside. The bull's-eye lantern beam picked up her prints on the sloppy, red-clay road going out of Spanish Fort, east toward the river. The river which was joyous in its escape from banks and boundaries, which had become a rolling inland sea. They could hear it from half a mile away. The rain increased, lightning came cracking down out of the northwest as the new storm front moved in on them in the night. The lantern lit the million billion drops that came down in colors of steel and ice. She had followed the ruts in the wagon road that led to the river. The track wound about among the post oak and bur oaks, twisted trees with fright wigs of dry leaves and soon the track would come to the edge of the flood. The Captain walked bent over and rained upon. His joints hurt. He needed to find somebody younger to take her south and deal with this kind of thing. Somebody agile and patient and strong. He and Simon the fiddler soldiered on. She's gone and it's my fault! Simon slapped himself on the thigh. It made a wet smack. Captain, I am so sorry! He had to shout over the noise of the rain. He gripped his hat brim and ran alongside the Captain. Never mind! the Captain shouted back. Can't be helped! He would as soon have Simon with him as anybody. Despite his short stature the fiddler was very strong and a hard fighter and a good shot. They ran on into the rain as if into a thicket. They bulled their way through. They tripped over the cut stumps where someone had cleared ground and tangled themselves in the parasitic love vine. They came upon Pasha and Fancy grazing, and were snorted at. The Captain felt himself growing thinner even as they walked. A man his age should have more weight on him, he should be in a hotel room in Spanish Fort after a good supper and leaning on the sill with tobacco smoke rolling out of his nose, watching the dim lights in the windows and counting his money. This was unfair. They stopped when they saw the glinting water. There at its edge, on a lift of red stone no more than thirty yards ahead, stood Johanna, wet as a dishcloth and her skirts heavy with rain. She clutched the doll to her chest. In the explosive lightning flashes the Captain could see, on the far side of the flood, a party of Indians. They were on the move. They had probably been flooded out of their campsite. The Red was still rising. Entire pecan trees rolled and ground like mill wheels in the current. The Indians had stopped to look across, perhaps at the distant lights of Spanish Fort, and Johanna was calling to them in Kiowa but they could not hear her. It was too far, the river was too loud. Johanna! the Captain called. Johanna! She put down the doll and shouted at the Indians with her hands around her mouth. What could she possibly think would happen? That they would come for her? She was shouting for her mother, for her father and her sisters and brothers, for the life on the Plains, traveling wherever the buffalo took them, she was calling for her people who followed water, lived with every contingency, were brave in the face of enemies, who could go without food or water or money or shoes or hats and did not care that they had neither mattresses nor chairs nor oil lamps. They stood and stared across the water at her like creatures of the sidhe, wet and shining in every flash from overhead. They stood among their jackstrawed tipi poles heaped on horses, drenched children gazing at her out of buffalo robes on the travois, the men ahead and at the side with their weapons wrapped in whatever would keep them dry. One of them shouted back over the water. The lightning made them appear in every detail like an intaglio and then disappear and then reappear again. Johanna called again. I have been taken prisoner, rescue me, take me back. She would turn her back on the modern world with the telegraph and the railroads and its elaborate political constructions piled layer upon layer. Everything gone . . . everything. And she would live in constant movement over the face of the earth, in gratitude to the sun and the grass, often dirty and lousy and wet and cold like those on the other side but she did not care. One of the warriors on the far side unsheathed a long weapon and lifted it. A lengthy barrel shone blue-white in a lightning flash. He aimed it and fired. A muzzle flash as long as a chimney brush and then the heavy bullet struck the stone near them and sent pieces of red sandstone flying. The report came to them as a dull chunk sound. They had not heard her; they didn't know who she was. A warning shot; stay away. The fiddler and the Captain fell flat, hands outstretched in the tall brown grasses. That was a Sharps! shouted the fiddler. The girl still called out, she had not moved. Then she bent to place the doll to sit against the rock, facing Indian Territory. Fifty caliber, said the Captain. If he fired once he'll fire again. He jumped up and grabbed the ten-year-old girl by the back of her dress and swung her around and ran. He shifted his grasp to one of her arms, and the fiddler got the other arm and so they dragged her back to her fate. To the wagon, to the white man's necessary world which did not seem to want her either. Another giant five-hundred-and-twenty-grain bullet tore through the air overhead. Even above the noise of the rain they heard the nyow-ow-ow sound and it hit a bur oak and tore off a limb big as a drainpipe. At the Curative Waters wagon the Captain sat awake late in the rainy dark and counted his money and thought about the long series of roads to San Antonio and Castroville. The girl was asleep. He slowly changed his clothes. He hurt in all his joints. He reflected on how she had not cried once. His pipe and the tot of rum Doris and Simon had left for him were of some comfort. He needed it. He stewed silently at the imposition of it all. He must have been out of his mind. Senile dementia. But he had promised. I'll do it, he thought. I will get her back to her relatives if I never cock another gun. He read through the Boston paper, staring mindlessly at advertisements for cures and false hair. THEY CONTINUED ON to the south. He had forgotten to find a blacksmith for the cracked tire rim but the wheels had swollen in the wet and perhaps had seized it tight to the felloes. The trace chains jingled, the horses' hooves kicked up little gouts of mud, the forested, hilly landscape slowly moved backward on either side. It was a mild day with white steam rising from the damp hollows. He would have to get the tire fixed in Dallas and his money was short. After he had paid the Masonic Hall and bought more supplies and grain for the horses, there was not much left. Since they had left the town she now sat up beside him and sang to herself, one hand dancing in the air. With the resilience of a ten-year-old she had accepted that she could not cross the Red and rejoin her people and so she sang and made dancing gestures. Well then, Johanna, he said. He had calmed himself. It was time to be patient. Auntie? Uncle? You will soon see them. She stared straight ahead with the blank look that meant a dredging of the mind, a searching through old indexes. He tried German. Tante Anna, he said. Onkle Vilhelm. She turned to him. Ja, she said. There was surprise in her voice. Then she seemed to struggle with a tangled thing inside her head, something knotted that would not unknot. She opened both stained hands on her lap and stared at the palms. She shut her fingers. She wasn't really seeing anything. Her face was no longer a child's face but one that had gone through something beyond description or comprehension and so was suspended for a moment in wordlessness. Her hands opened and shut, opened and shut. And then she spoke. Mama, Papa. She lifted her head to him. Todt, she said. They rolled through a bur oak forest with the steady click of the break in the iron tire counting out its revolutions; Fancy's harness jingled. Crooked zigzag limbs sifted through the air. Beneath them the crisp shells of acorns made crushed sounds. The Captain looked down at her, into her guileless eyes and the rediscovered pain in them. Sudden terrible memories. He bit the left side of his lower lip and was sorry he had brought it up. He tucked the blanket more tightly around her neck and smiled at her. He said, Never mind, my dear. Let's try an English lesson. She nodded gravely with one hand opening and shutting on a sleeve flounce. Hand, he said. He held up his hand. Hont, she said. Horse. He pointed to Fancy jogging along ahead of them. Hoas. The Captain knew nothing of the Kiowa language but he knew it had no R. Very good! he said in a cheerful tone. Felly good. But now her voice was low and discouraged. She had left the taina to keep watch across the Red River for her. That was taken care of. Now she had to begin a new, long, hard road to somewhere else. Felly good. THEY CROSSED CLEAR Creek and then Denton Creek and two days later they came finally into the small town of Dallas about four o'clock of a chilly afternoon. The girl was even more subdued and frightened than in Spanish Fort, stunned by the noise and the wagons. There were several two-story buildings of brick and stone. She jumped back into the rear and pressed against the backrest of the wagon seat, between the flour keg and his carpetbag. They came in to town on the north road, where it led past several blacksmith shops with their great shed-roof caverns and lit with scarlet light, full of men and horses, tobacco smoke and the noise of metal being forced to hold the things of this world together bolt by bolt. Johanna glanced into them with deep apprehension. The Captain was happy to see them. He would bring the wagon in tomorrow. First, of course, he would have to ask the price of a new tire rim and the labor. On into town, down Trinity Street, full of white men wearing their tight-fitting clothing and women in dresses that were architectural constructions of cloth and whalebone. Johanna gazed with some interest at two black women carrying shopping baskets with the heads of alarmed hens sticking out. Finally the Captain came into Gannet's livery stable yard and there stepped down. The stableman took hold of Fancy's driving bridle and cried, Whoa there! As if the weary little roan were about to charge through the back end of the fairway. Hang on to her there, said the Captain. She's about to go completely wild on you. Fancy hung her head and rolled her tongue under the straight bar of the driving bit and then yawned. Never know, the man said. Unpredictable, new horse, never saw it before. He hiccupped. Yes, said the Captain. You must only see new horses three or four times a day. The man unhitched the little roan and took the harness from her back. The Captain could smell alcohol on the man's breath. Mrs. Gannet came out of the feed storage room with three empty flowered feed sacks in her hands. Her bonnet sat on the back of her head and the strings hung down over her shoulders. Still very trim, the Captain thought. Girlish waist. Captain Kidd! she cried. She smiled and came to stand with one hand on the Curative Waters wagon's side to see the girl staring out of the red wool with eyes like a carp. She turned to the Captain with an interrogative look. As he explained he stood at the high back wheel with one arm on it, taller than Mrs. Gannet by a head. Even as he told his story he wondered that she ran the livery stable by herself. He was worn and stained with Red River sludge and he had to go about buying newspapers in what he stood up in. No help for it. San Antonio! said Mrs. Gannet. God above. That is very far, Captain. And you'll be alone on the roads. There's news of more raids all through the country. She turned to the stableman to see what he was doing. The Captain knew that raids were how she had become a widow. A year ago they had found Mr. Gannet in several pieces along the Weatherford road and none of them had any clothes on them. She said, Wait for a convoy, will you not? Yes, yes, he said. We'll see. It will be all right. He saw her dubious expression. I'm armed, he said. A sidearm and a shotgun. And now I have to go find the latest newspapers and a hotel. May I leave her with you for a few hours? I don't think she'll run away and go flitting about Dallas. In Spanish Fort there was someplace to go. The river. Here, she's deep inside enemy territory so to speak. He ran his blue-veined hand over a two-day growth of silver grizzle. I'm a mess, Mrs. Gannet. She laughed and said for the Captain to go about his business, she could look after the girl. If he would care to change in the feed room she would send out his traveling clothes to Mrs. Carnahan and also she would ask Mrs. Carnahan if she had a secondhand dress to fit the girl and perhaps other necessary garments. The girl needed a change of clothing. He reached for his portfolio and l