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?