The Duty to Protect Children

The Duty to Protect Children is the moral conviction that turns Jefferson Kyle Kidd’s escort of Johanna Leonberger from an unwanted obligation into a responsibility he cannot set aside. The novel gives that duty both tenderness and danger: protecting a child means recognizing her vulnerability, but Kidd knows it may also mean using lethal force against those who would harm her.

A Duty Reawakened

Kidd’s first response to the responsibility is divided. As Johanna watches him by candlelight, wrapped in a red-and-black jorongo, he understands that she expects violence from him. He sees himself as an old soldier, familiar with war, and believes that men aspiring to humanity must protect children and, if necessary, kill for them. His conviction is sharpened by having raised daughters, but that history does not make him eager to begin again. He had thought his parental work was finished; though he accepts the principle of protecting this feral child, he privately wishes someone else would undertake it. His promise to get her to her relatives therefore carries a dry, teasing edge: he expects her to make their lives difficult, while offering no sign that he doubts the duty itself.

The journey makes the obligation personal rather than abstract. In Dallas, Kidd posts notices for his news readings while worrying about the long road ahead and whether he can keep Johanna safe. He feels old, tired of public causes and the changing fashions of a world he expects soon to leave. Yet having a life in his hands draws him back into the stream of human concern: matters that had seemed remote begin to matter again. His resistance persists—he has already raised his daughters, and he is a cranky old man—but an inner voice, sounding like his father’s, answers that he must do it again. The scene frames care not as effortless goodness but as a renewed undertaking accepted amid exhaustion and reluctance.

Kidd’s sense of duty also rests on obligations extending beyond the immediate bond with Johanna. At a moment when the burdens of postwar life crowd his thoughts—reuniting his family, pursuing legal claims, earning a living through readings, and delivering the child to relatives who may recoil from her—the reason he agreed to take her to Castroville comes back to him: Britt Johnson, a freed Black man. The recollection locates Kidd’s choice within a chain of human responsibility rather than simple personal attachment. Protecting Johanna is an urgent commitment, but the novel presents it as part of a wider moral world in which another person’s need can call an aging man back from indifference.

Protection Under Fire

The duty to protect Johanna becomes a test of action when the party is attacked in the Brazos country. Kidd tells her to get back, but she moves along the red sandstone caprock, barefoot, using a stove-lid lifter to pry up a broad slab. She tips it downhill; it breaks against a boulder and falls on a man concealed below. Her matter-of-fact declaration that the Caddos will die makes clear that she understands the encounter as a gunfight, not as a danger she can leave entirely to Kidd. He is astonished by her resourcefulness, yet the scene complicates the idea of protection: Johanna is a child exposed to violence, and also a participant who reads the terrain and acts within it.

The attackers’ fire makes Kidd’s responsibility immediate and bodily. A shard of stone strikes above his right eye, blood runs down his face, and for a time he cannot see from that eye. He thinks not only about whether he or Johanna can escape, but about what will happen to her if he is killed or incapacitated. When he orders her to flee, she instead crawls back carrying the shotgun, its ammunition, and the bag of coins. She offers the money as a way to stop the attack; Kidd tells her the men cannot be bribed. With only eight shots remaining, he shows her the tiny lead pellets in a shell, then recognizes that the dimes can be loaded with powder to make the shotgun far more powerful. Her practical ingenuity transforms the odds, and his laughter and praise mark a change from merely enduring the responsibility to working with her as an ally. The scene does not make protection gentle: it presents Kidd’s readiness to kill as inseparable from his effort to keep Johanna from being taken, while giving her own courage and invention an essential part in their survival.

Care Beyond the Battlefield

The duty extends beyond gunfire into the everyday collisions between Johanna Leonberger’s habits and the rules adults try to impose on her. Near Durand, Jefferson Kyle Kidd hears shouting and finds her bathing in the shallows, pursued by a woman with a wooden bucket. Johanna is naked except for worn underclothes; she screams in Kiowa and invokes the dark magic of her guardian spirit, while the woman protests that naked bathing cannot be allowed. Kidd notices the woman’s wedding ring and answers calmly that Johanna was merely bathing. His intervention does not erase the cultural conflict or make Johanna compliant. It does, however, redirect the encounter from condemnation toward an explanation of what she is doing, treating her behavior as an act to be understood rather than simply punished.

The final return to the Leonberger farm tests whether Kidd’s responsibility ends once he has delivered Johanna to her relatives. At night near D’Hanis, he pauses by the mesquite trees and sees her alone in a field, sent out after dark to fetch horses she calls softly in Kiowa. She is ten years old, staggering under several heavy leather halters and a wooden bucket of shelled corn—about twenty pounds of equipment in all—across unfamiliar ground. The family has left her in the same dress, without even offering a bath or a change of clothes. When she turns toward Kidd’s wagon, he also sees dark red stripes from a dog whip across her hands and forearms. What he witnesses makes the promised destination no longer sufficient proof that she is safe.

Kidd’s anger nearly stops him, but he speaks calmly and tells her to drop the bucket. Johanna vaults the fence and runs to him, crying that she will go with her grandfather. Her plea makes her choice explicit; Kidd does not have to infer consent from silence or decide for her what belonging should mean. He puts an arm around her, throws the halters into the road, and turns the Curative Waters wagon north. His warning that objections will be answered with ten-cent pieces recalls the improvised ammunition that helped them survive the earlier attack, but here it serves as a threat against anyone who would prevent their departure. The action completes a changed understanding of protection: delivering a child to relatives is not an absolute duty when the child’s treatment shows that the destination has failed her. Kidd accepts responsibility again, this time by reversing the journey, while Johanna’s own expressed wish determines its direction.

Narrative Significance

The novel leaves the duty’s central contradiction exposed rather than resolving it into a comforting rule: Kidd understands protection as a humane obligation, yet believes it can require violence. That conviction is not presented as a general license to punish or command; its force comes from the particular child in his care and from his recognition that an adult’s failure can leave her in danger. The ethic is therefore demanding and conditional: it requires judgment about what safety means in each circumstance, not mere completion of an assigned task.

Johanna’s presence also changes what protection can mean. She is not only someone acted upon by adults but a person whose knowledge, decisions, and wishes affect the course of events. The relationship’s moral measure is consequently not whether Kidd can make her conform to an adult account of proper behavior, but whether he can remain answerable to her safety without mistaking guardianship for ownership. In this tension, care becomes a continuing responsibility—one that may outlast the journey and revise its destination.