Johanna's escape attempt at Spanish Fort

Johanna's escape attempt at Spanish Fort is the moment when her desire to return to her Kiowa life becomes an immediate, dangerous act. After slipping away in the night, she reaches the swollen Red River and calls across to people on the far bank; Jefferson Kyle Kidd and Simon catch up with her, but a warning shot and a second bullet drive them to pull her back. The rescue preserves her life while making plain that she does not experience the white world to which they return her as a secure home.

Disappearance and pursuit

Simon discovers Johanna is missing after he and Doris fall asleep beside a fire, sitting on a shot box and flour keg near the Curative Waters wagon. She has left on foot, and her china-headed doll is gone too. Simon brings the news to Jefferson Kyle Kidd at the Masonic Lodge, just as Kidd is putting away his newspapers. The report changes the night’s purpose at once: Kidd sweeps his papers, eyeglasses, lantern, and money tin into his portfolio, puts on his silk hat, and runs out into the rain.

The trail leads east from Spanish Fort toward the river. Johanna is barefoot, and the marks of her toes are visible in the sloppy red clay. Kidd follows them with the beam of his bull’s-eye lantern as the storm intensifies. Lightning breaks over the road, and the Red River, already beyond its banks, sounds from a distance like an inland sea. The route winds among post oaks and bur oaks toward the flood’s edge. Kidd is in pain and conscious of his age, but he continues after her; when Simon joins him, Kidd accepts the help of the strong, capable fiddler rather than face the search alone.

The river crossing

At the water’s edge they see Johanna standing on a low shelf of red stone, about thirty yards ahead. She is soaked, her skirts heavy with rain, and she holds the doll against her chest. Across the flooded river, a party of Indians has stopped. Their camp may have been driven from its place by the rising water: their tipi poles are piled on horses, and children sit wrapped in buffalo robes on travois. The group is moving, but the torrent separates them from Johanna.

Johanna calls to them in Kiowa, trying to make herself heard over the river. Her appeal is not simply a request to cross. The narration presents her as calling for her parents and siblings and for a life shaped by movement across the Plains, following the buffalo and meeting hardship without the furnishings and provisions of settled life. Against the distant modern world of telegraph wires, railroads, and political structures, that life remains the one she is trying to reach. The people across the water look toward her, but the distance and noise prevent communication; they do not understand who she is or what she wants.

The warning shots

One of the warriors raises a long-barreled Sharps rifle and fires. The bullet strikes the stone near Kidd and Simon, scattering pieces of red sandstone. They drop into the grass. The sound reaches them only as a dull report across the water, and the shot functions as a warning to stay away. Johanna has not moved. She calls again, then sets the doll against the rock, facing Indian Territory, as if leaving it oriented toward the place she hopes to return to.

Kidd understands that the rifle can fire again. He jumps up, grabs the ten-year-old by the back of her dress, and turns her away from the river. Simon takes her other arm, and together the men drag her toward the wagon. A second heavy bullet passes overhead and tears a large limb from a bur oak. Their retreat is therefore not a calm persuasion or a negotiated decision: it is a forced removal under fire, with the immediate danger of the crossing on one side and Kidd’s effort to keep Johanna alive on the other.

Return and consequence

Back at the Curative Waters wagon, Kidd remains awake late into the rainy night. Johanna sleeps; he changes his clothes, smokes his pipe, drinks the rum Simon and Doris left, and counts his money. He reflects that Johanna did not cry once. His exhaustion and resentment at the burden of the undertaking coexist with his resolve: he has promised to get her back to her relatives, and he will keep that promise even if he never fires another gun.

The episode does not resolve the distance between Johanna and the people escorting her. Instead, it gives that distance a visible shape: a flooded river, voices that cannot carry across it, and a doll placed facing the far bank. Kidd and Simon prevent a likely fatal crossing, but their intervention also returns Johanna to the journey she has been resisting. Her escape attempt makes the mission’s central difficulty unmistakable: getting her physically to her relatives is not the same as restoring the life she considers hers.