Determined to reconcile what she knew of Indians and frontiersmen from Karl May’s books with what she had seen in her dreams the night that Leading Fox and she exchanged languages, Giselle had cornered Captain Cody.

They were about to pull up the tents and move on tomorrow, having, in Kellermann’s opinion, extracted all the money from the local economy that they were likely to. Their next engagement was for next week; they would have plenty of time to travel the three-days’ journey and practice on the way.

Giselle went out of her way to find Cody after the second show to cross-examine him. He invited her to a glass of beer in the outer room of his spacious tent, which served as a species of drawing room.

This close questioning was under the guise of being able to adequately counterfeit being a girl who could properly be called “Rio Ellie,” but the fact was, she already knew it didn’t matter what she told Austrians and Germans. If what she told them matched Karl May, they would go away happy.

No, this was purely for herself, because she was determined to know the truth.

The Captain had supplied her with beer, drawn from the little barrel of it he kept in this “drawing room,” and made sure the tent flaps were tied open for the evening breeze. And there was an evening breeze, not too cold, not too damp, supplied thanks to Giselle’s powers. An oil lantern fastened at the peak of the roof provided decent illumination, and out in the camp, the sounds of people packing up their belongings for the move tomorrow made an undercurrent to their conversation.

As they sat side by side in tolerably comfortable folding chairs of clever design, Cody scratched his head and settled back against the canvas of his chair. “Mountains in Texas? Not the sorta thing y’all call a mountain, no,” he admitted. “They’re all rock an’ brush, there ain’t no forest on ’em. Like if you scoured yer mountains here bare, down to the valley, an’ jest scattered bushes over ’em. It’s mostly desert where the mountains is.”

If it had not been for those hectic visions, she would not have had an idea of what he was talking about. But she did. Even as he described those mountains, they rose, hazy, sunbaked, in her memory. She did not have to ask him about the lush forests so picturesquely described by May; she already knew they were a lie. She thought kahuraaru in Pawnee and what rose in her mind was not the deep greens, mosses, tender plants and towering trees of her own Black Forest, but trees scarcely taller than a good, two-story German cottage, deciduous trees of a green-brown or yellow-brown color with sparse foliage and small leaves, or evergreens of some sort that were no taller. And this was not the emerald lushness of her forest, These trees were widely separated, with parched and rocky ground covered with thin, dry grasses in between.