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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
    T HE 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