Who Shot Stencil?

[Wolfe, Skip]

Was it Benny Profane?  I've read some articles that make that assumption 
unequivocally.  Yet in the passages of Profane's pursuit of the alligator, 
the poor beast is described in pretty explicit detail (from Profane's point 
of view, of course, so it could be what he _believes_ he saw).  Is Pynchon 
playing with us again?  Does he want us to take the temporal association 
between the two events (Profane shoots -- Stencil gets shot) and apply _post 
hoc, ergo propter hoc_  reasoning to create  a connection between them?  If 
it _was_ Stencil who Profane shot, are there implications to having Profane 
mistake him for an alligator?  Or was Stencil just lurking nearby and hit by 
some stray buckshot?  This has always bothered me.

     Skip
     crw4 at nip1.em.cdc.gov