her think that they were probably bringing in more money than the show had ever seen before. And certainly the show, and the tour of the camps, and the sideshows were all immensely popular. So much so that tickets had sold out for every show so far, even after Kellermann had arranged to expand the seating, and the stream of people coming through the “camps” on tour seemed endless. They really did not stop coming from the moment that the box office opened until the last of them was chased out at night. Kellermann had even been considering opening up the practice sessions to spectators! Paying ones, of course. Captain Cody persuaded him that this would be a bad idea, for which Giselle was quite grateful.
The show was so very successful that the show enclosure was completely surrounded by other vendors, other exhibitors, and tiny shows of dancers and freaks, jugglers and magic acts, acrobats and feats of accuracy and strength, all hoping to take advantage of those who were leaving disappointed because they could not get in.
The Pawnee were in great demand by photographers and journalists—none of which were surprised by the fact that Leading Fox was highly articulate in German. After all, wasn’t Winnetou?
It was fortunate that in a slightly smaller city, Neustadt, back in July, the entire show had really come to understand how much the German public relied on Karl May’s works to form their idea of what the American frontier and its denizens were like.
That had been at the point where their journey was scheduled to wend back westward, and the Captain had quickly decided after the first couple of days that he should be as much like Old Shatterhand as possible. He had quizzed Giselle long and in detail about the hero of those books, no longer treating them as a source of fun. The rest of the company had also picked up pretty much what Germans would expect of them—which really, aside from a few details, was what they had already been portraying. A bit more exaggeration of the eccentric, really; they’d added embellishments to their costumes in the form of leather pieces, animal teeth and skins, most of which were, ironically enough, bought in Germany to be added to their “rigs.” A moth-eaten stuffed bear, for instance, gotten at a secondhand dealer for a pittance, had been turned into two dozen necklaces featuring teeth and claws, and ragged fur collars and hatbands. For the rest, Kellermann, now fully acquainted with the contents of the first three Winnetou books, at least, “translated” what the others said with a “frontier” flair.
Now the whole business ran as smoothly as a well-oiled machine, with everyone knowing exactly what the Germans most wanted to hear and see, and making certain to give it to them.
If Neustadt had been a kind of dress rehearsal, then Freiburg was the full production.
The show was but one part of the enormous Oktoberfest carnival, which covered an area that was itself the size of a small city. The Oktoberfest field played host to huge tented beer halls able to hold hundreds of people at a time, to vendors of every sort of food and goods, to amusement rides, and musical entertainments and exhibitions—well, anything that you could fit under a tent and make money doing, you would find here just past the two pillars that marked the entrance to the field. On their weekly day off—the Captain and Kellermann chose Tuesday, at the request of the other shows—the company really didn’t have to leave the grounds to get pretty much anything they wanted. And more often than not, they didn’t ever have to pay. If it wasn’t for the vendors themselves giving them food and drink and entertainment just for the “draw” their presence made, it was random strangers thrusting drink and food and presents into their hands. Convinced that she and Rosa were Americans, the two girls had found themselves gifted with dirndls and blouses, shawls and embroidered stockings, and urged to “wear these when you go home and think of us.” All the women in the show had been gifted with these garments, but most of them had been given to Rosa and Giselle because they were most often together outside the show environs, and people seemed to be under the impression that they were sisters. It was a reasonable assumption, being as they were both blond and rather typically Bavarian in looks.