herself explaining the difference in how her people viewed the American frontier and especially its Indians, and how all this was due to the overarching influence of a writer who probably hadn’t ever been as near to a single real Indian as she was now, much less been the actual hero of the Western escapades he had written about so voluminously, and with such apparent authority.
When she finished, Leading Fox rode beside her in silence for a long while. She didn’t dare say anything. All those things Karl May had said about Indians . . . what if he was angry? What if he was insulted? What if—
Beneath the well-worn leather of his buckskin shirt, his shoulders were shaking. After a moment, she realized he was laughing, silently. Finally he spoke.
“Apache . . . living in a pueblo! The Mescaleros friends with the Dineh! Apache farming!” His shoulders continued to shake. “And this is all only in the first book, you say! And there are many more such . . . books . . .” He finally calmed himself, but it was clear he was greatly amused. “Well, that does explain why your countrymen seemed to regard me as an object almost of veneration—and without ever realizing I am a Medicine Chief. I should like to meet this Karl May of yours one day. Although I fear he would not like to meet me. It would not be pleasant for him to have his illusions exploded.”
She opened her mouth to object, but Leading Fox raised his hand.
“No, I completely agree with the Captain that we should not explode these illusions. We should work within them. My tribesmen and I came over the great water in order to make a great deal of the white man’s money. The best way that we can do this in your land is to give your people what they wish to see. Cody is using our time between stops to think this over, and how he can change the show to match these expectations without changing what we actually perform all that much.” Fox smiled slightly as she heaved a sigh of relief. “I will tell you, it will improve our spirits, my tribesmen and I, to be transformed into heroes, and I do not think the others will care once Cody puts it to them that we stand to make much more money.”
“I . . . I thought Indians didn’t care about money . . .” she said, hesitantly. “I don’t mean to . . .”
Fox’s raised eyebrow caused her to stop before she said anything else. “Under most circumstances you would be correct. But my people, my little tribe, have been studying you whites for some time, working for you and among you. The Pawnee have been Scouts for the Union Army for many years now, partly because the Union Army fought the Cheyenne, the Arapaho and the Sioux, who were our enemies. Our reservation lands are poor. We have observed that time and time again, when something that a white man wants is found on our reservation lands, we are pushed to poorer lands yet. The only thing that the white man respects is a deed of land bought with money.” Leading Fox shrugged, slightly. “So, now in Cody we have a white friend who will buy land for us, and my tribe, at least, will never be pushed out again. If a white man tries to take it from us, we will go to the white man’s court, and show our paper, and he will go away unsatisfied. We may not have the breadth of land that we once were able to roam across freely, but we will have good land, land we can farm, land that will feed us. We will have to give over hunting the buffalo in favor of keeping cattle, yet that is a small price to pay for being free. But for that—”
“You need money!” she exclaimed.
“Even so,” he replied, with a nod. “In the Scouts, we learned to fight with the white man’s weapons. So we shall do so again, and the weapon is money. My tribe, at least. Perhaps, in time, we will seem to vanish into the white man’s landscape, as we vanished into our own, and he will take no heed of us, and we will go about our living in peace.”
It seemed horribly unfair that Leading Fox and his people were being forced to work so far from home in order