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.”
If it had not been for those hectic visions, she would not have had an idea of what he was talking about. But she did. Even as he described those mountains, they rose, hazy, sunbaked, in her memory. She did not have to ask him about the lush forests so picturesquely described by May; she already knew they were a lie. She thought kahuraaru in Pawnee and what rose in her mind was not the deep greens, mosses, tender plants and towering trees of her own Black Forest, but trees scarcely taller than a good, two-story German cottage, deciduous trees of a green-brown or yellow-brown color with sparse foliage and small leaves, or evergreens of some sort that were no taller. And this was not the emerald lushness of her forest, These trees were widely separated, with parched and rocky ground covered with thin, dry grasses in between.
“And pueblos?” she demanded, for Winnetou’s Apache people lived in a pueblo, very distinctly described to the point where, if she had had the talent, she could have painted it; a stone city of several stories, built against and part of a cliff. “Are there tall stone pueblos, cliff-dwellings, four and five stories tall in Texas?”
Cody looked at her as if he thought she had gone mad. Even his moustache conveyed his doubt. “Ain’t nothin’ like that in Texas,” he averred. “Ye cain’t build against a cliff, it’s all clay an’ sandstone an’ shale, an’ it’ll crumble—”
And in her mind’s eye, she could see that, of course, as those hazy mountains became clearer in her mind. The slopes of rock and gravel beneath any vertical surfaces only showed that those surfaces were unstable, and anyone building against them would be insane.
“Th’only pueblos I know of in Texas are made of mudbrick,” Cody continued. “They ain’t but one floor tall. Be crazy to build ’em any taller. I heerd there’s stone ones off t’the West, but I ain’t seen ’em. Why’re you askin’ me this hokum, anyway?”
“Because . . . because of a book-writer,” she admitted, finally, and clumsily tried to explain the “Old Shatterhand and Winnetou” books to Cody, and how virtually everything that most people in Austria and Germany knew of the West and Indians and the frontier came from those books, and those about “Old Surehand” and “Old Firehand.” She had to give Captain Cody a great deal of credit. He didn’t laugh. And he didn’t interrupt her. Although several times it looked to her as if he wanted to explode. His moustache fairly took on a life of its own.
When she finished, he let out a long, exasperated sigh. “Well,” he said, finally, “Bein’ as I ain’t read these-here books meself, all I kin say is that Mister May of your’n ain’t set foot west of the Mississippi for sure, and I’d lay good money he ain’t never been in the United States a’tall. Seems t’me like he got hisself a buncha books by fellers that had, an’ he studied ’em good and hard, but there was a buncha stuff they either left out or figgered people already knowed, an’ that there is where he falls all over hisself makin’ mistakes. Like, I kin tell you from personal experience, Apaches of whatever stripe ain’t never been farmers and ain’t never gonna be, they ain’t never lived in pueblos, an’ they ain’t real fond of the Dineh, which is to say the Navaho, and the Navaho ain’t real fond of them. In fact, there ain’t no tribe whatsoever that’s fond of the Apache, ’cept another Apache, bein’ as they live by huntin’ an’ raidin’. The ideer an Apache chief’d be any kinda peacemaker ’mongst t’other tribes is enough t’make a cat laugh. An’