—You don’t mind driving, do you, Billy?
—No. It’s a beautiful car.
—It is, isn’t it? And almost brand-new. I picked it up in Rapid City in late October. I wasn’t sure that I wanted a Nash—Fords should be good enough for a poet and historian, I think—but my brother-in-law knew the owner at the new Nash dealership and… well… it is an attractive vehicle, isn’t it? I could have chosen the Nash 41 for almost four hundred dollars less. It’s also a four-cylinder, but it’s not closed. On days like this—the temperature must be only twenty or so out there—it’s so much nicer to have a closed sedan, don’t you think?
—Yes.
—Of course, for a couple of hundred dollars more, I could have bought a Nash 47, and it’s certainly prettier, but it doesn’t have any luggage rack or compartment at all. None.
—No?
—No. None. But then—if I wanted to really spend more, and the salesman certainly tried to convince me to do so, I could have gone up to the Nash 48 Touring Car or—although this is silly even to contemplate—the new Nash 697 Sport Touring version with six cylinders. Six cylinders, Billy! They would certainly help with these hills we’ve been climbing!
—The four cylinders seem to be doing just fine, Mr. Robinson.
—Yes, it does seem to handle the grades well, doesn’t it? Of course, if I were dreaming of spending five thousand dollars or more for an automobile, I’d go for the LaFayette 134. It weighs more than two tons and—so I’ve read, at least—can travel at speeds up to ninety miles per hour. Tell me, Billy—why would any person need or want to go ninety miles per hour? Except perhaps at the Indianapolis Speedway, I mean?
—I don’t know.
—But I’m no Jimmy Murphy, and anyway, I’d have to buy a Duesenberg to compete there and I’m happy with this Nash. Do you mind if I take some notes as we continue our discussion about the old days?
—Go ahead.
—Speaking of racetracks, Billy… I’ve heard mention on the reservation of the Race Track, but it’s not a formation or place that the Park Service has on its maps or one that I’m familiar with.
—We drove through it coming out of Rapid City, Mr. Robinson.
—We did?
—The Race Track is the old Lakota and Cheyenne name for the valley that surrounds the Black Hills… the long, curving valley between the outer rim of red Hogback Ridge and the Hills themselves. If you went high enough in an aeroplane, perhaps you could see the entire reddish oval surrounding the Hills. That’s the Race Track.
—Good heavens, Billy. My whole life lived near the Hills—me as head of the state history effort—and I never noticed that the valley goes all the way around the Hills or that your people had a name for it. Race Track. Why Race Track—because the sunken oval of the valley resembles one?
—No, because it was one.
Paha Sapa looks over at the older man as Robinson is hurriedly taking notes. Doane Robinson is sixty-seven years old (nine years older than Paha Sapa in this last day of 1923) and wears no cap in the freezing air—the Nash’s heater is all but worthless—even though he is as bald as the proverbial egg. Robinson’s ever-present gentle smile is matched by kind eyes only partially hidden this morning behind the circular horn-rimmed glasses.
Once a lawyer (who supported the Sioux tribes in some of their early lawsuits against the state and federal governments), Robinson traded law for literature long ago to become South Dakota’s favorite humor writer and poet. He is also the state’s official historian. Most important, Paha Sapa trades these occasional interviews about the “old days”—in which he reveals very little of substance and almost nothing personal—for permission to borrow books from the historian-writer’s extensive home library. This arrangement has led to the majority of what fifty-eight-year-old Paha Sapa considers his personal and private “college education” in the past six years.
Robinson looks up from the notes.
—Did the Sioux and Cheyenne used to race there?
—Before the Lakota and Cheyenne, Mr. Robinson. This may have been before the First Man and his cousins came up into the world through Washu Niya, “the Breathing Cave.” The Park Service calls it Wind Cave.
—Yes, yes. I’ve long heard that the Cheyenne and Sioux and other Plains Indians believe that humans came into the world through Wind Cave. But why is it called “the Breathing Cave” rather than “the Birthing Cave” or somesuch?
—Because in the winter you can see the cave breathe through its various orifices. The warmer air comes out as regular breaths, almost identical to the breathing of a buffalo.
—Ahhh…
Robinson scribbles away at his notes. Paha Sapa concentrates on keeping the broad-beamed Nash on the frozen mud ruts of the road. He turns right onto the Needles Highway. The Nash’s engine is up to the climb, but the car’s gearbox is putrid—not nearly as good as the Fords and Chevies Paha Sapa has driven—and he has to take care not to grind the gears of the historian’s beloved new car.
Robinson looks up, and the sunlight gleams on his round glasses.
—Did the buffalo and the humans enter the world at the same time, Billy? I’ve heard different reports on that.
—The buffalo came first. The first buffalo that emerged from Washu Niya were tiny—the size of ants—but the grass in the Black Hills was so rich that they quickly grew and fattened to their present size.
Paha Sapa smiles at this, but Doane Robinson earnestly continues his note taking. When he finally looks up, he blinks at the approaching Needles formations as if he’s forgotten they were in the Black Hills. The late-December sun is bright but weak, the shadows from the rock columns tenuous. Robinson taps his fountain pen against his lower lip.
—So who raced on the Race Track if people weren’t yet in the Hills?
Paha Sapa shifts gears to go down a grade. The Nash’s clutch does not engage until the driver’s boot is almost against the drafty floorboards. Someday, Paha Sapa knows, the Needles Highway will be paved, but now it is a mass of frozen deep ruts that could high-end Mr. Robinson’s Nash in a second if the narrow wheels slide off the high ridges.
—The story goes that the winged and four-legged creatures of the world were competing to rule the world. They came close to warring to decide this, but finally decided to hold a Great Race around Wamakaognaka e’cantge.
Robinson pauses in his note taking. When he speaks, his breath hangs in the air a moment as if the Breathing Cave were breathing here, only here their breath is also icing up the inside of the windshield and already-frosted side windows.
—Wamakaognaka e’cantge—that means “Center of the Universe,” doesn’t it, Billy?
—Among other things. I prefer to hear it as “the heart of everything that is.” But it all means Paha Sapa—the Black Hills.
—So the four-leggeds and the flying creatures agreed to decide who would rule the world based on a race around the Black Hills?
The pen scratches. There is no other traffic on the road this New Year’s Eve day. Beyond the thrust of the Needles, Paha Sapa can see the highest and most sacred mountain in the Black Hills, Evil Spirit Hill, which the wasichu have renamed Harney Peak to honor a famous Indian killer, and beyond Evil Spirit Hill, the long granite ridgeline of the Six Grandfathers, where he had his Vision forty-seven years earlier.
—Yes. There are different versions of the story, but in the one my grandfather told me, the flying creatures put on magic colors to help them win the race. Thus the crow first painted himself black, the magpie used white earth and charcoal to make himself wakan—
—Holy. Sacred.
—Yes. The meadowlark trusted in yellow to allow him to win. So the four-leggeds and the two-leggeds, who were all flying creatures then but who agreed to keep their feet on the ground for this Great Race, rushed ’round and ’round the Black Hills a hundred, a thousand times, wearing down the ground there into today’s Race Track. The buffalo and deer were the fastest of the four-leggeds, and the bloody froth that poured from their mouths and noses stained the rock red almost all the way around. They raced through days and nights and weeks and moons.
—Who won?
—Magpie and Crow won, running on behalf of all two-leggeds, including us people who hadn’t yet crawled up through the Breathing Cave. And by then the Race Track was as wide and deep and red rimmed as you see it now. Actually, my grandfather had another name for the red-rimmed oval that surrounds the Wamakaognaka e’cantge.
—What was that, Billy?
—Winyaˇn shan.
—Odd. For all my years recording Sioux words, I’ve never encountered that one. What does it mean, Billy?
—Cunt.
Doane Robinson screws the top on his fountain pen, removes his glasses, and cleans them with the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his thick wool suitcoat. Paha Sapa can see the line of red along the historian’s cheekbone and is sorry that he’s embarrassed the older man.
—Pull over here, please. At that turnout at the base of that column.
Paha Sapa stops the Nash. The dirt road here winds among the Needles—freestanding pillars of granite, some a hundred feet and more tall but most rising forty or fifty feet—and this turnout is to allow motorists to admire this particular fat finger of stone that rises immediately next to the shoulder of the road.
Robinson is fumbling with his new-styled door handle.
—Shall we get out, Billy?
—The wind’s come up, Mr. Robinson. It’s cold out there.
—Come, come. We’re only young once. I want to show you something.
It is colder than Paha Sapa guessed. This part of the narrow road has been cut along the ridgeline, and there are no high peaks in the way to block the freezing wind blasting across the Hills from the northwest. Paha Sapa buttons his black-and-red wool coat and notices the blue-black storm clouds along the horizon far to the northwest. There will be a blizzard rolling in by midnight on this New Year’s Eve. He calculates the time it will take to get Robinson back to his home and to ride back to his own home near Deadwood on the motorcycle. It will not be a night when he wants to be on that narrow, winding mountain road in a blizzard in the dark—especially since the motorcycle has no headlight.
Doane Robinson is gesturing to the Needle column.
—You’ve noticed, Billy, that there are dozens upon dozens—scores!—of these pinnacles within the newly established park.
—Yes.
—And you know of the Black Hills and Yellowstone Highway?
—The Black and Yellow Trail. Sure. We followed the painted bumblebee posts out of Rapid City and up into the Hills.
Paha Sapa thinks of the crude dirt—only occasional gravel—mainauto road that now cuts east and west across South Dakota and that the wasichu grace with the proud name of “highway.” The black-and-yellow-striped roadside posts stretch across the prairie seemingly to infinity.
—The highway connects Chicago to Yellowstone Park and was meant to bring tourists to the West, Billy. South Dakota’s future will depend upon tourism, mark my words. If the economy stays this good, everyone in America will own a car someday and everyone will want to leave those crowded warrens in the eastern and midwestern cities and come out to see the West.
Paha Sapa pulls his collar up against the freezing wind battling them. Doane Robinson’s blush has been replaced with patches of red and white on his cheeks and nose, and Paha Sapa realizes he’ll have to get the historian back in the idling car soon before the intellectual allows himself to get frostbitten. The man’s not even wearing gloves on this subzero day. When an especially vicious gust threatens to tumble Robinson off the frozen dirt of the road down into the underbrush at the base of the granite column, Paha Sapa steadies him with a strong grip on his upper arm.
—Have you ever been to Chicago, Billy?
—Yes. Once.
Paha Sapa can still see Mr. Ferris’s great Wheel rising above the White City at night in 1893, everything bathed in radiance by the thousands of electric lights. The authorities of the Chicago Columbian Exposition had decided that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show lacked the proper dignity to be a recognized part of the Fair, so Mr. Cody had set up his show just outside the fairgrounds proper, thus drawing huge crowds while not having to share the profits with the Fair organizers. But the White City, with its huge Electricity Building and Machinery Building—the entire Court of Honor illuminated by those hundreds of electrical streetlights and spotlights through the bustling night—was one of the most amazing things the twenty-eight-year-old Paha Sapa had ever seen.
—You have? Well, you can imagine then why the denizens of that overcrowded town are waiting and wanting to travel west and to breathe our clean air and to see our amazing sights. But South Dakota needs an attraction!
—An attraction?
—Yes, yes. It occurred to me only a few weeks ago that while Yellowstone Park has its geysers and its grizzly bears and its hot springs, certainly enough to bring someone out along the Black and Yellow Highway from Chicago or points farther east, the only attraction that our fair state has to offer the intrepid voyager is the park here in the Black Hills… and all the Hills have to offer are… well… hills.
Paha Sapa can only stare at the state historian. Mr. Robinson’s eyes are watering from the cold and his nose is running copiously. Every time a new gust hits them, only Paha Sapa’s firm grip keeps the larger and older man from being blown down the hill and into the lodgepole pines and Douglas firs that cluster between the bases of the Needles columns. Paha Sapa can see from the shadows thrown that it’s getting late—they will have to leave soon if he has any chance of getting to Deadwood before full darkness falls and the blizzard arrives. The air now smells of the approaching snow.
Robinson extends his free arm and opens his bare fingers in the direction of the granite spire.
—And then it struck me, Billy. Voilà! Sculptures!
—Sculptures?
Paha Sapa can hear how idiotic his repetition sounds, even though he rarely cares how he sounds in so un-nuanced a language as English.
—These spires would be perfect for carving, Billy. I am quite sure that granite is the finest of all carving stone. So a couple of days ago, I wrote this letter to the foremost sculptor in America… perhaps in the world!
Robinson fumbles in his inner pocket, under his blowing topcoat and wind-ballooned suitcoat, and comes out with a carbon copy of a typewriter-typed letter. A gust rips the flimsy paper out of Robinson’s right hand, and only a lightning-fast lunge by Paha Sapa keeps the letter from disappearing forever into the forest.
—We should read this and talk in the car, Mr. Robinson.
—Quite right, Billy. Quite right. I don’t believe I can feel the tips of my ears or nose!
Back in the Nash, Paha Sapa tries to turn up the car’s primitive heater, but it’s already putting out what little heat from the engine it deigns to share. He unfurls the now-crumpled letter over the top of the broad steering wheel and reads:
December 28, 1923
Mr. Lorado Taft 6016 Ellis Avenue Chicago, Illinois
My Dear Mr. Taft:
South Dakota has developed a wonderful state park in the Black Hills. I enclose a brochure illustrating some features of it. On the front cover you will observe some pinnacles—we call them needles—situated high upon the flank of Harney Peak. The tops of those shown are more than 6300 feet above sea level. These needles are of granite.
Having in mind your “Big Injun,” it has occurred to me that some of these pinnacles would lend themselves to massive sculpture, and I write to ask if in your judgment human figures might be carved from some of them as they stand. I am thinking of some notable Sioux such as Red Cloud, who lived and died in the shadow of those peaks. If one was found practicable, perhaps others would ultimately follow.
Pinnacles could be found immediately above the highway shown, that stand fully one hundred feet in the clear, above pedestals hundreds of feet in height, as seen from the other points of vantage.
This granite is of rather coarse texture, but it is durable. There are also in the vicinity great blank walls upon which groups in relief could be executed advantageously.
The needles shown are only suggestive of the field, many others are trimmer—only a few feet in diameter—and exceedingly showy.
I shall be pleased to hear from you, and if it appears practicable we can, perhaps, induce you to come and look us over.
Faithfully, Doane Robinson
PAHA SAPA DRIVES THEM BACK toward Rapid City as fast as the Nash’s skinny tires will carry them on the frozen roads. He doesn’t ask Mr. Robinson if Lorado Taft, the sculptor, has responded to the letter yet, since there has hardly been time for that. He drives in silence except for the banging four-cylinder engine and the loud but heatless burr of the heater fan.
—What do you think, Billy?
Paha Sapa likes Doane Robinson; he likes the man’s gentleness and learning and sincere interest, however poorly focused, in the history of Paha Sapa’s people. And he loves Doane Robinson’s library and the new look at the universe it has given him. But at that moment, he also thinks that if Robinson had shown him the letter to the sculptor before he mailed it, Paha Sapa would have used the simple bone-handled jackknife with the five-inch blade now in his pocket to cut the writer-historian’s throat, leaving his body in the woods along the Needles Highway and his Nash in a ravine somewhere many miles away in the Black Hills.
—Billy? What do you think of the idea? Do you think Red Cloud would be the choice for the first Sioux leader to be carved into one of the pinnacles? Did you know Red Cloud?
Makhpiya Luta, Red Cloud, was famous for his victory in the Battle of the Hundred Slain, but all that fighting had ended by the time Paha Sapa was two summers old. Paha Sapa knew old Red Cloud primarily as an agency Indian, someone who had surrendered the plains and lands of the last Natural Free Human Beings, and Paha Sapa was near the Red Cloud Agency at Camp Robinson in 1877 when a jealous nephew of Red Cloud’s betrayed Crazy Horse, bringing him back to the fort to be murdered. Red Cloud outlived all the real warrior chiefs—Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse—dying as an old, old man only fourteen years earlier in 1909.
—I didn’t really know Red Cloud.
—What about Crazy Horse, then, Billy? Do you think it would be appropriate if Mr. Taft sculpted a huge statue of T’ašunka Witko here in the Hills?
Paha Sapa grunts. Here on the east side of the ridgelines, the evening shadows are growing quickly and he has to drive extra carefully to keep the Nash from breaking an axle in one of the deep, frozen ruts. How can he tell this gentle man that Crazy Horse would have preferred to pull his own guts out through a hole in his belly—or to slaughter Doane Robinson’s entire extended family—rather than allow the wasichus who betrayed and killed him to carve a likeness of him into Paha Sapa granite? He takes a breath.
—You remember, Mr. Robinson, that Crazy Horse never allowed any of the frontier photographers to take a photograph of him.
—Ah, you’re right, of course, Billy. He was obviously afraid of the camera “capturing his soul,” as some of the Plains Indians feared. But I’m quite sure that a sculpture created by a great artist would not have offended T’ašunka Witko’s sensibilities in that way.
Paha Sapa knows beyond any doubt that Crazy Horse had no fear of a camera “capturing his soul.” The warrior simply would never give his enemy the satisfaction of capturing even an image of him.
—What about Sitting Bull, then, Billy? Do you think the Lakota would be honored if there was a monumental sculpture of Tatanka Iyotake here in the Hills?
The highway is especially churned up into ridges and gulleys here, a Badlands in miniature, and Paha Sapa stays silent as he bounces the Nash across the least threatening patch of frozen road and shoulder. He remembers the time, only nine years after the rubbing out of Long Hair at the Little Big Horn, when Sitting Bull traveled east with Bill Cody’s Wild West Show—this was eight years before Paha Sapa went to Chicago with the same troupe—and was so impressed by the numbers and power of the wasichus and by the size of their cities and the speed of their railroads. But Paha Sapa spoke to a missionary who had known Tatanka Iyotake upon his return to the agency, and Sitting Bull had said to the white holy man—The white people are wicked. I want you to teach my people to read and write, but they must not become white people in their ways of living and of thinking; it is too bad a life. I could not let them do it. I myself would rather die an Indian than live a white man.
Paha Sapa finds it difficult to breathe. There is a wild pounding on the inside of his rib cage and a pressure of pain in his skull that blurs his vision. Another man might think it was a heart attack or stroke happening to him, but Paha Sapa knows that it is the ghost of Long Hair gibbering and capering within him, pounding to get out. Does Long Hair hear these words through Paha Sapa’s ears, see the Needles columns through Paha Sapa’s eyes, and imagine the large sculptures of the Lakota men mentioned—Robinson has certainly not mentioned Custer for one of the sculptures—by seeing into Paha Sapa’s mind?
Paha Sapa does not know. He has asked himself similar questions many times, but although the ghost speaks to him nightly, he has no clear idea as to whether Long Hair sees and hears through him or shares his thoughts the way that Paha Sapa is cursed to suffer Long Hair’s.
—Did you know Sitting Bull, Billy?
Doane Robinson sounds concerned, perhaps embarrassed, as if he is worried that he has offended the Lakota man he knows as Billy Slow Horse.
—I knew him slightly, Mr. Robinson.
Paha Sapa makes his voice as friendly as he is able to.
—I saw Sitting Bull from time to time, but I was, of course, only a boy when he fought and then surrendered and then was killed by the Indian policemen who came to arrest him.
THE WIWANYAG WACHIPI SUN DANCE at Deer Medicine Rocks two weeks before they killed Long Hair lasted only two days.
The older boys and young men who had come for their manhood ceremony lay down at the base of the tall waga chun now bedecked with paint and poles and braided tethers. The boys and young men had been similarly painted by Limps-a-Lot and the other holy men, and did not move or cry out as the wičasa wakan then cut strips out of their chests or backs so that loops of rawhide could be pushed in under the strong chest or back muscles and tied off, usually to a small bit of wood. These loops were then tied to the long braids running up to the top of the waga chun.
Then the young men, streaming blood on their painted chests and backs, would stand and begin their dancing and chanting, leaning back from or toward the sacred tree so that their bodies were often suspended totally by the rawhide and horn under their muscles. And always they stared at the sun as they danced and chanted. Sometimes they danced the full two days. More often, they would dance and leap until the pain caused them to fall unconscious or—if they were lucky and Wakan Tanka smiled on them—until the rawhide and horn ripped through their powerful chest or back muscles and freed them.
Sitting Bull had danced this way many times before in his youth, but now, as Paha Sapa and Limps-a-Lot and two thousand others watched in this summer of 1876, he stripped naked to the waist and walked to the waga chun and sat with his scarred back against the sacred tree. Paha Sapa remembers noticing that there was a tiny hole in the sole of one of Sitting Bull’s old but beautifully beaded moccasins.
Sitting Bull’s friend Jumping Bull approached the chief chanting, knelt next to the man of forty-two winters, and used a steel awl to lift the skin on Sitting Bull’s lower arm. Taking care not to slice into muscle, Jumping Bull cut away a square of skin the size of the nail on Paha Sapa’s little finger. Then he cut another. Jumping Bull worked his way up Sitting Bull’s right arm, cutting fifty such squares.
And during this, ignoring the streaming blood and never reacting to the pain, Sitting Bull chanted his prayers, asking for mercy for his people and for victory in the coming battle with the wasichus.
The cutting of the flesh from Sitting Bull’s right arm, Paha Sapa remembers—thinking of the time now in Wasicun terms—took about forty-five minutes. Then Jumping Bull began cutting fifty more squares of flesh from Sitting Bull’s left arm.
When Jumping Bull was finished with the slow cutting, when there was more red blood than ceremonial paint flowing down Sitting Bull’s arms onto his belly and loincloth and legs and spattering the ground all around the waga chun, Sitting Bull stood and—still chanting and praying—danced all the rest of that long June day and all through that night of the full moon and halfway through the next humid, sweltering, cloudless, fly-buzzing day.
Sitting Bull’s old friend Black Moon caught him when the chief was finally ready to faint. And then Sitting Bull whispered to Black Moon, and Black Moon stood and shouted to the waiting thousands—
—Sitting Bull wishes me to tell you all that he just heard a voice saying unto him, “I give you these because they have no ears,” and Sitting Bull looked up and saw, above him and above us all, soldiers and some of our Natural Free Human Beings and our allies on horseback, and many of the wasichus were falling like grasshoppers and their heads were down and their hats were falling off. The wasichus were falling right into our camp!
And Paha Sapa remembers the cheering that had gone up from the camp at hearing this vision.
The bluecoat soldiers had no ears in Sitting Bull’s vision, they knew, because the Wasicun had refused to hear that the Lakota and Cheyenne wished only to be left alone and that the Lakota refused to sell their beloved Black Hills. The women would drive their sewing awls through the eardrums of dead wasichu on the battlefield to open those ears.
And then the wiwanyag wachipi ended after only two days and after Sitting Bull’s triumphant vision, and the thousands there moved southwest a few miles to the larger campground on the Greasy Grass, where Long Hair and his Seventh Cavalry wasichu soldiers would attack them and where Paha Sapa would become infected with Long Hair’s ghost.
PAHA SAPA DROPS OFF THE HISTORIAN and the Nash just after dark. It is already snowing lightly but consistently. Doane Robinson follows Paha Sapa up the front walk to where Paha Sapa is pulling his oversize leather jacket, leather gloves, leather helmet, and goggles from the sidecar. Snowflakes fly horizontally beneath the glowing streetlamp above them.
—Billy, the weather looks bad. Stay the night here. That road up to Deadwood is terrible even in the daylight and when it’s dry. It may not be passable in half an hour, even for a motorcar.
—It’ll be all right, Mr. Robinson. I have other places to stay along the way—if I have to.
—Well, it’s a very handsome motorcycle. I’ve never really looked at it carefully before. American made?
—Yes. A Harley-Davidson J, made in 1916.
—At least it has a headlight.
—It does. The first of its kind to have one. Its beam is a little weak and shaky and, unfortunately, it’s broken right now. I keep meaning to fix it.
—Stay with us tonight, Billy.
Paha Sapa throws his leg over the saddle. The motorcycle is a beautiful machine—long, sleek, painted light blue with the HARLEY-DAVIDSON lettering in reddish-orange script. Over the nonworking headlight is a stubby horn that works quite well. The intake manifold is curved, a piece of true sculpture in Paha Sapa’s judgment, and feeds the reliable sixty-one-cubic-inch F-head V-twin engine. It is the first of its make to have a modern kick-starter. There’s a plush leather passenger seat attached over the rear wheel (although no back for it), and though the sidecar is detachable, Paha Sapa keeps it on as a carryall for his tools and gear.
He reaches behind the engine and uses his key to switch on the magneto. Three kicks and the engine roars to life. Paha Sapa throttles it up and then down so he can hear the historian.
—Billy, it’s beautiful! Have you owned it long?
—It’s not mine. It’s my son’s. He gave it to me to keep for him until he came back from the War.
Doane Robinson is shivering from the cold. He rubs his cheek.
—But the War has been over for… Oh, my. Oh, dear.
—Good night, Mr. Robinson. Please let me know if Mr. Lorado Taft writes you back.