why the ticket-taker had not asked her to surrender hers.
Perhaps not every ticket gives you the right to roam about the grounds?
She found herself facing an open space ringed with tiered seats. The sylph flitted by, caught her eye, and waved her to follow. A moment later she was glad she had; the sylph led her past the crowds that were jockeying for the seats nearest the entrance and to a tier of seats, still mostly empty, on the opposite side of the arena space. She climbed up the steps, glad of her divided skirt and feeling a great deal of pity for the townswomen in fashionable garb. Even those wearing humble dirndls were managing better than women encumbered by yards of skirt and tight corsets, much to the amusement of some naughty boys.
She sat where the sylph pointed: about halfway up the tier, with some children on the seats immediately below her, so her view was not going to be obstructed. Just as she settled in, a brass band at the head of the arena struck up a jaunty tune. She didn’t recognize it, but then, most tunes she wouldn’t anyway. Mother wasn’t much for music, and Joachim and Pieter mostly knew hymns and drinking songs.
The band continued to play as people found their seats. There were vendors of food scattered about the arena, but fortunately they were mostly hawking fruit, candy, and nuts. None of those things had any aroma to them, so Giselle was able to put her hunger out of her mind and concentrate on her surroundings. The grass in the arena had been trampled flat but not yet pounded into dust. There was a low wooden barrier between the stands and the arena. The band was very colorful, dressed in bright red uniforms with a great deal of gold braid. Next to them was an entrance closed off by red curtains that presumably cloaked an opening in the wall around the arena. This, Giselle guessed, was where the performers would come from. Finally, when it appeared that no one else was going to want in, the tent flaps closed, and the band finished with a flourish.
Then there was a fanfare, a lot of strange shouting, the red curtains parted, and a man on a white horse, dressed in a white suit with a great deal of brass buttons and fringe on it and a white hat of a sort she had never seen before, galloped into the center of the arena and made his horse rear up while taking off his hat to the crowd.
“Ladies! Gentlemen!” a man next to the brass band called through a cone-shaped object. “Welcome to Captain Cody’s Wild West!”
Captain Cody—since that was undoubtedly who this was—made his horse gallop at a furious pace around the ring, while the Captain was making whooping noises and firing his pistols in the air as the band played. He made one circuit of the arena seated—and then to Giselle’s wide-eyed astonishment, somehow got to his feet, and while standing on the saddle made a second circuit as perfectly erect just as if he was standing on unmoving ground and not a galloping horse, while taking off his hat to the crowd. As he came around the second time, Giselle got a good look at him, and he would probably have been quite ordinary looking if it had not been for his costume, his long, flowing hair and his bushy moustache.
The band concluded their tune as Captain Cody somehow dropped back into the saddle and rode out through the red curtains at the far end of the tent that she could now see were held open by a couple of men. But the audience was not given a chance to catch their collective breath, as the announcer called out, “And now, the Grand Parade March!”
Now, oh now, she got to see everything she had been longing to see!
The first riders through the curtains were going four abreast, at a canter. The two in the middle were wearing tan leather outfits with long fringes on the sleeves and the seams of the trousers. One wore a hat like Captain Cody’s, only brown, the other wore—oh! It was a hat made from an animal—a coonskin hat exactly like the one Old Shatterhand wore in the illustrations! The one on the right carried the flag of the United States. The one on the left carried the flag of the German Empire.