The thought of her in the arms of an Indian grinds away at him. When he finally finds her, she tells him the Indians are her people now and runs away. The dynamic here is that Wayne has forgiven his niece, after having participated in the killing of the people who, for 15 years or so, had been her family. As the movie ends, the niece is reunited with her surviving biological family, and the last shot shows Wayne silhouetted in a doorway, drawn once again to the wide open spaces. There is, significantly, no scene showing us how the niece feels about what has happened to her.
Sport wears an Indian headband.
A letter and clippings from the Steensmans, Iris' parents, thank him for saving their girl. But a crucial earlier scene between Iris and Sport suggests that she was content to be with him, and the reasons why she ran away from home are not explored. The buried message of both films is that an alienated man, unable to establish normal relationships, becomes a loner and wanderer, and assigns himself to rescue an innocent young girl from a life that offends his prejudices. Travis goes through the motions of ingratiating flattery on the second occasion, but we, and Palatine, sense something wrong. That goes wrong with the porno movie.