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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, drenchedchildren 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 shiftedhis 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.