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.

The man’s tactic assuaged La Grande Sauterelle’s wrath and even prompted her to say that not everything Buffalo Bill had done was bad. She recalled that he had been one of the best riders for the Pony Express, the postal service that recruited young men for high-speed mail delivery between Missouri and California; once, when the Indians had set fire to the relay post where he was to have been replaced by another rider with a fresh mount, he had travelled 515 kilometres without a break. She added that toward the end of his life, he had a ranch in Wyoming where he raised buffalo.

“Maybe old Buffalo Bill realized that the buffalo were a vanishing species,” she said as they were leaving the museum.

“Perhaps he’s even responsible for the fact that there are still buffalo in America,” said Jack.

“You don’t have to go that far,” said the girl.

GENERALLY, of the two it was Jack who had more trouble sleeping; he would get up several times every night to eat cookies and reflect on all sorts of things. But that night, at the campground in North Platte, Nebraska, it was the girl who couldn’t get to sleep. She twisted and turned, grumbling, and three or four times she kneed Jack in the back.

In the middle of the night she started to mutter some English words in her sleep, words he had heard a number of times before but hadn’t understood, and this time he recognized an exclamation he’d seen in one of the books she was reading on the Indians. “White men, big shitters!”

As she was becoming more and more agitated, he touched her shoulder to waken her.

“Huh?” she said.

“You’re having a nightmare,” said the man.

“Oh . . . yes . . . the buffalo.”

She sat up in bed and began to talk about the buffalo. At first her words weren’t too coherent, but Jack listened patiently.