He buys a wagon, and they start their journey, much to the reluctance and outrage of the undomesticated Johanna but a relationship soon begins to develop between the two. At first reluctant to take her the 400 miles to the town near San Antonio where her aunt and uncle live, he soon realizes his itinerant life makes him the most plausible person for the job-and he also knows it’s the right thing to do. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a 70-year-old veteran of two wars and, in 1870, when the novel takes place, a professional reader-he travels through Texas giving public readings from newspapers to an audience hungry for events of the world. Tired of being harassed by the cavalry, the Kiowa sell her back to an Indian agent for "fifteen Hudson’s Bay four-stripe blankets and a set of silver dinnerware." Enter Capt. Instead, her memory extends only as far as her Kiowa family-she speaks no English and by white standards is uncivilized. Johanna Leonberger remembers almost nothing of her first 6 years, when she lived with her parents. In post–Civil War Texas, a 10-year-old girl makes an odyssey back to her aunt and uncle’s home after living with the Kiowa warriors who had killed her parents four years earlier.
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