“What time is it now?” asked the man.

“You’re the one with the watch,” said the girl softly.

“So I am.”

It was five in the afternoon. On Interstate 80 the sun was blinding now. Jack pulled down the sun visor. He was tired of driving, but he didn’t want to keep the girl from reading The Oregon Trail Revisited.

“Where’s the next campground?” he asked.

“At North Platte,” she said. “A half hour’s drive. Shall I take over?”

“No, it’s all right.”

“There’s a Buffalo Bill museum,” she said, and plunged back into her book.

La Grande Sauterelle was addicted to books. She loved books and words. One day she had thrown a tantrum because someone had said: “One picture is worth a thousand words.” She had “borrowed” a magazine, taken a pair of scissors and cut out the letters needed to compose the following sentence, which she taped to the Volkswagen’s dashboard: ONE WORD IS WORTH A THOUSAND PICTURES.

Her attitude toward books was very special. The most astonishing thing Jack had ever heard was something La Grande Sauterelle said about books one night when they were in St. Louis and were having trouble sleeping because the damp heat from the Old Mississippi was seeping into the Volkswagen. Jack had been depressed that night and he couldn’t recall her exact words, but they were something like:

“You shouldn’t judge books one by one. I mean, you mustn’t see them as independent objects. A book is never complete in itself; to understand it you must put it in relation to other books, not just books by the same author, but also books written by other people. What we think is a book most of the time is only part of another, vaster book that a number of authors have collaborated on without knowing it. That’s all I have to say about books and now I’m going to try to sleep. Good night.”

JAM PACKED with tourists and utterly bare of trees, the North Platte campground wasn’t very pleasant. They grabbed a bite to eat, then went at once to the Buffalo Bill museum.

William F. Cody had been nicknamed Buffalo Bill in 1867, when the Kansas Pacific Railroad hired him to supply fresh meat for its employees; in discharging his duties he had killed a dozen buffalo a day for eighteen months.

“That must add up to five or six thousand buffalo,” said the girl.

Her face was hard again and her eyes shone, and Jack saw at once that Buffalo Bill, like his brother’s other heroes and his brother himself, was about to come under fire. This time, anticipating her, he himself denounced the buffalo hunter’s alleged heroic deeds: he had “killed his first Indian at the age of twelve”; he had become a scout for the despicable General Custer; he had emerged victorious from a duel with Yellow Hand, one of the greatest chiefs of the Cheyenne, and finally he had organized a sort of travelling circus, the Wild West Show, which had been presented in a number of European countries.