Somehow she managed to bring Lebkuchen to a halt exactly where she was supposed to, in the middle of the arena. Somehow she managed to bow gravely to either side of her. And somehow she managed to get Lebkuchen moving again, to the end of the arena, and then around to the left, lifting her hand to wave at the audience on that side, as Texas Tom rode out to the tumult of his own applause. Her chest felt tight, her face felt flushed, and the tent seemed utterly airless—and yet, as the assembled company rode back out again, she couldn’t wait for her turn to ride back in again.

6

“AND there are no mountains in Texas?”

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.”