Savage Girl by Jean Zimmerman

slightly baffled by it. We were both young, she perhaps a bit younger, and I had enough experience with the weaker sex to expect some degree of attention, triflings, self-conscious posing. Something anyway. With her, nothing.
    Her age was indeed a minor puzzle.
    The morning after her introduction, as Sandobar nosed toward the dark line of the Wasatch Mountains, ahead of us to the east, Freddy and Anna and I sat together at tea in the parlor car.
    Tahktoo, Tu-Li and the Savage Girl formed another trio a little distance away, gathered around an upholstered sofa. Tu-Li attempted to untangle the ugly mat of black hair that rode on our new friend’s head like some sort of particularly unfashionable snood. Virginia—Ginny—Gin stole wondering glances at Tahktoo, peaceably at work knitting a shawl.
    “How old do you think she is?” I asked, repeating my mother’s question of a few days before.
    “Who?” said my father. I pulled a long look at him, and he laughed.
    “She says she doesn’t know,” he replied.
    “‘She says’? What do you mean? She doesn’t speak!”
    “Your father communicates with her,” Anna Maria said. I noticed that her eyes never strayed for long from the group across the car.
    “In Comanche?”
    They both were putting a calm front upon a thoroughly unsettling situation, and it infuriated me.
    “Sign language, dear,” Anna Maria said. “The lingua franca of the Plains.”
    Freddy passed his right hand laterally across his chest, then waved it significantly in a circular motion.
    “Oh, for pity’s sake,” I said. I didn’t believe a word of it, or in this case a hand twirl of it.
    But it was true, Freddy said. And it was the answer to Savage Girl’s abrupt disappearance in the Washoe.
    While she crouched at my feet in the coach after her rescue from the sideshow, I had been absorbed by the mere presence of her, but somehow I’d failed to notice that Freddy and she were having a conversation. An entirely nonverbal conversation, conducted in hand signs.
    Where?
she’d asked. Meaning where are you taking me?
    Home, far, east,
Freddy had signed.
    They had been engaged in a discussion, there in the coach! And me not knowing!
    “I don’t know whether to believe you or not,” I said.
    “That’s uncharitable, Hugo,” Anna Maria said. She called over to her maid. “Tu-Li, don’t tug at Virginia’s hair so!”
    “Believe me or don’t,” Freddy said, shrugging. “She did leave, and she did return.”
    I felt totally flummoxed. Whole worlds of activity going on, a rendezvous arranged, baths being built, all beyond my ken.
    “The tub in the baggage car,” I said. “I suppose she asked you to do that? With sign language? What’s the hand sign for ‘bathtub’?”
    “That was my idea, dear,” Anna Maria said. “I wanted her to feel at home. Really, I don’t know why you are getting upset.”
    “I’m not upset!” I cried.
    Freddy summoned Dowler over and requested a sheet of paper, an inkwell and a pen.
    “I think we should catalog what we know about her,” he said.
    “Who?” I said acidly. “You aren’t considering doing a study on her, are you? You said yourself she is clearly a fraud, not a feral child at all.”
    Anna Maria left us and sat down next to Tu-Li. She and the berdache both joined in on the impossible task of untangling Virginia’s hair.
    “One,” my father said, writing on the sheet of foolscap that Dowler had provided. “She is of European heritage.”
    I looked over at her. Her sideshow pallor was underlaid by a nut-brown burn from the sun, but yes, she clearly came not of native blood.
    “All right,” I said.
    “Two, she has spent time with a Comanche tribe.”
    “I’ll have to take your word for that,” I said. “I’ve seen you fake knowledge of a language before. What did you say to her again? In the barn.”
    “I invited her to come over to me,” Freddy said.
    “Do it once more.”
    “Kimaru, nai-bi,”
he pronounced.
    Savage Girl