Chapter VIII: Introduction (3)

He finished his letter and decided to take it to the "depot" and ask the telegraph operator to mail it on the east-bound train that passed through Little Missouri at three. He opened the door. The night was black, and a blast of icy wind greeted him. He changed his mind.

The next afternoon he was riding up the river to the Maltese Cross when he heard hoofs behind him. A minute later the object of his artistic efforts of the night before joined him and for an hour loped along at his side. He was not slow in discovering that the man was pumping him. It occurred to him that turn-about was fair play, and he told him all the man wanted to know.

"So you're a newspaper feller," remarked the man at length. "That's damn funny. But I guess it's so if you say so. You see," he added, "Frank Vine he said you was a deputy-sheriff on the lookout for a horse-thief."

Packard felt his hair rise under his hat.

"Where was you going last night when you started to go out?"

"To the telegraph-office."

"I made up my mind you was going to telegraph."

"I was just going to mail a letter."

"Well, if you'd gone I'd have killed you."

Packard gasped a little. Frank Vine was a joker with a vengeance. They rode on, talking of lighter matters.[4]

[Footnote 4: A year later, Packard, as Chief of Police,
officiated at what was euphemistically known as a
"necktie party" at which his companion of that ride was
the guest of honor.]

Packard had come to the Bad Lands with the idea of spending the winter in the open, hunting, but he was a newspaper man from top to toe and in the back of his mind there was a notion that it would be a good deal of a lark, and possibly a not unprofitable venture, to start a weekly newspaper in the Marquis de Mores's budding metropolis. He had, at the tender age of thirteen, been managing editor of a country newspaper, owned by his father, and ever since had been drawn again and again back into the "game" by that lure which few men who yield to it are ever after able to resist.

He broached the matter to the Marquis. That gentleman was patronizing, but agreed that a special organ might prove of value to his Company. He offered to finance the undertaking.

Packard remarked that evidently the Marquis did not understand. If he started a paper it would be an organ for nobody. He intended to finance it himself and run it to please himself. All he wanted was a building.

The Marquis, a little miffed, agreed to rent him a building north of his general store in return for a weekly advertisement for the Company. Packard ordered his type and his presses and betook himself to the solitude of the wintry buttes to think of a name for his paper. His battle was half won when he came back with the name of _The Bad Lands Cowboy_.

His first issue came out early in February, 1884. It was greeted with interest even by so mighty a contemporary as the New York _Herald_.

We hail with pleasure the birth of a new Dakota paper, _The
Bad Lands Cowboy_ [runs the note of welcome]. The _Cowboy_
is really a neat little journal, with lots to read in it,
and the American press has every reason to be proud of
its new baby. We are quite sure it will live to be a credit
to the family. The _Cowboy_ evidently means business. It
says in the introductory notice to its first number that it
intends to be the leading cattle paper of the Northwest, and
adds that it is not published for fun, but for $2 a year.

All the autumn and winter Medora and her rival across the river had been feverishly competing for supremacy. But Little Missouri, though she built ever so busily, in such a contest had not a chance in the world. For the Little Missouri Land and Stock Company, which was its only hope, was moribund, and the Marquis was playing, in a sense, with loaded dice. He spoke persuasively to the officials of the Northern Pacific and before the winter was well advanced the stop for express trains was on the eastern side of the river, and Little Missouri, protest as she would, belonged to the past. When the _Cowboy_ appeared for the first time, Medora was in the full blaze of national fame, having "broken into the front page" of the New York _Sun_. For the Marquis was bubbling over with pride and confidence, and the tales he told a credulous interviewer filled a column. A few were based on fact, a few were builded on the nebulous foundation of hope, and a few were sheer romance. The most conspicuous case of romance was a story of the stage-line from Medora to the prosperous and wild little mining town of Deadwood, two hundred miles or more to the south.

"The Marquis had observed," narrates the interviewer, "that the divide on the top of the ridge between the Little Missouri and the Missouri Rivers was almost a natural roadway that led directly toward Deadwood. He gave this roadway needed artificial improvements, and started the Deadwood and Medora stage-line. This is now diverting the Deadwood trade to Medora, to the great advantage of both places."

Who, reading that sober piece of information, would have dreamed that the stage-line in question was at the time nothing but a pious hope?

The Dickinson _Press_ was blunt in its comment. "Stages are not running from Medora to Deadwood," it remarked editorially, "nor has the roadway ever been improved. The Marquis should put a curb on his too vivid imagination and confine himself a little more strictly to facts."

But facts were not the things on which a nature like de Mores's fed.

His sheep meanwhile, were dying by hundreds every week. Of the twelve thousand he had turned loose on the range during the preceding summer, half were dead by the middle of January. There were rumors that rivals of the Marquis had used poison.

The loss [declared a dispatch to the _Minneapolis Journal_]
can be accounted for on no other ground. It is supposed that
malicious motives prompted the deed, as the Marquis is known
to have had enemies since the killing of Luffsey.

If the Marquis took any stock in these suspicions, his partners, the Haupt brothers, did not. They knew that it was a physical impossibility to poison six thousand sheep scattered over ten thousand square miles of snowbound landscape.

The Haupts were by this time thoroughly out of patience with de Mores. There was a stormy meeting of the directors of the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company in St. Paul, in the course of which the Haupt brothers told their distinguished senior partner exactly what they thought of his business ability; and suggested that the Company go into liquidation.

The Marquis jumped to his feet in a rage. "I won't let it go into liquidation," he cried. "My honor is at stake. I have told my friends in France that I would do so and so and so, that I would make money, a great deal of money. I must do it. Or where am I?"

The Haupts did not exactly know. They compromised with the Marquis by taking the bonds of the Company in exchange for their stock, and retired with inner jubilation at having been able to withdraw from a perilous situation with skins more or less intact.

The Marquis, as usual, secreted himself from the stern eyes of Experience, in the radiant emanations of a new dream. The Dickinson _Press_ announced it promptly:

The Marquis de Mores has a novel enterprise under way, which
he is confident will prove a success, it being a plan to
raise 50,000 cabbages on his ranch at the Little Missouri,
and have them ready for the market April 1. They will be
raised under glass in some peculiar French manner, and when
they have attained a certain size, will be transplanted into
individual pots and forced rapidly by rich fertilizers, made
from the offal of the slaughter-houses and for which
preparation he owns the patent. Should the cabbages come out
on time, he will try his hand on other kinds of vegetables,
and should he succeed the citizens along the line will have
an opportunity to get as early vegetables as those who live
in the sunny South.

The cabbages were a dream which seems never to have materialized even to the point of being a source of expense, and history speaks no more of it.

The boys at the Chimney Butte, meanwhile, were hibernating, hunting as the spirit moved them and keeping a general eye on the stock. Of Roosevelt's three friends, Joe was the only one who was really busy. Joe, it happened, was no longer working for Frank Vine. He was now a storekeeper. It was all due to the fateful hundred dollars which he had loaned the unstable Johnny Nelson.

For Johnny Nelson, so far as Little Missouri was concerned, was no more. He had bought all his goods on credit from some commission house in St. Paul; but his payments, due mainly to the fact that his receipts all drifted sooner or later into the guileful hands of Jess Hogue, were infrequent and finally stopped altogether. Johnny received word that his creditor in St. Paul was coming to investigate him. He became frantic and confided the awful news to every one he met. Hogue, Bill Williams, Jake Maunders, and a group of their satellites, hearing the doleful recital in Bill Williams's saloon, told Johnny that the sheriff would unquestionably close up his store and take everything away from him.

"You give me the keys," said Jake Maunders, "and I'll see that the sheriff don't get your stuff."

Johnny in his innocence gave up the keys. That night Jake Maunders and his "gang" entered the store and completely cleaned it out. They did not leave a button or a shoestring. It was said afterwards that Jake Maunders did not have to buy a new suit of clothes for seven years, and even Williams's two tame bears wore ready-made coats from St. Paul.

Johnny Nelson went wailing to Katie, his betrothed.

"I've lost everything!" he cried. "I've lost all my goods and I can't get more. I've lost my reputation. I can't marry you. I've lost my reputation."

Katie was philosophic about it. "That's all right, Johnny," she said comfortingly, "I lost mine long ago."

At that, Johnny "skipped the country." And so it was that Joe Ferris, to save his hundred dollars attached Johnny's building and became storekeeper.

For Roosevelt, two thousand miles to the east, the winter was proving exciting. He had won his reëlection to the Assembly with ease and had plunged into his work with a new vigor and a more solid self-reliance. He became the acknowledged leader of the progressive elements in the Legislature, the "cyclone member" at whom the reactionaries who were known as the "Black Horse Cavalry" sneered, but of whom, nevertheless, they were heartily afraid.

He "figured in the news," day in, day out, for the public, it seemed, was interested in this vigorous and emphatic young man from the "Silkstocking District" of New York. Roosevelt took his publicity with zest, for he was human and enjoyed the sensation of being counted with those who made the wheels go around. Meanwhile he worked all day and conversed half the night on a thousand topics which his ardor made thrilling. In society he was already somewhat of a lion; and he was only twenty-five years old.

Life was running, on the whole, very smoothly for Theodore Roosevelt when in January, 1884, he entered upon his third term in the Legislature. He was happily married, he had wealth, he had a notable book on the War of 1812 to his credit; he had, it seemed, a smooth course ahead of him, down pleasant roads to fame.

On February 12th, at ten o'clock in the morning, his wife gave birth to a daughter. At five o'clock the following morning his mother died. Six hours later his wife died.

He was stunned and dazed, but within a week after the infinitely pathetic double funeral he was back at his desk in the Assembly, ready to fling himself with every fiber of energy at his command into the fight for clean government. He supported civil service reform; he was chairman of a committee which investigated certain phases of New York City official life, and carried through the Legislature a bill taking from the Board of Aldermen the power to reject the Mayor's appointments. He was chairman and practically the only active member of another committee to investigate living conditions in the tenements of New York, and as spokesman of the worn and sad-looking foreigners who constituted the Cigar-Makers' Union, argued before Governor Cleveland for the passage of a bill to prohibit the manufacture of cigars in tenement-houses. His energy was boundless, it seemed, but the heart had gone out of him. He was restless, and thought longingly of the valley of the Little Missouri.

The news that came from the boys at Chimney Butte was favorable. The three hundred head of young cattle which Sylvane and Merrifield had bought in Iowa, were doing well in spite of a hard winter. Roosevelt, struck by Sylvane's enthusiastic report, backed by a painstaking account-sheet, wrote Sylvane telling him to buy a thousand or twelve hundred head more.

Sylvane's reply was characteristic and would have gratified Uncle James. "Don't put in any more money until you're sure we've scattered the other dollars right," he said in effect. "Better come out first and look around."

That struck Roosevelt as good advice, and he accepted it.

While Roosevelt was winning clear, meanwhile, of the tangles and snares in Albany, he was unconsciously being enmeshed in the web that was spinning at Medora.

It came about this way. The Marquis, who had many likable qualities, did not possess among them any strict regard for the rights of others. He had a curious obsession, in fact, that in the Bad Lands there were no rights but his; and with that point of view had directed his superintendent, a man named Matthews, to drive fifteen hundred head of cattle over on an unusually fine piece of bottom-land northwestward across the river from the Maltese Cross, which, by all the laws of the range, belonged to the "Roosevelt outfit." Matthews declared that the Marquis intended to hold the bottom permanently for fattening beef-cattle, and to build a cabin there.

"You'll have to move those cattle by daylight," said Merrifield, "or we'll move them for you. You can take your choice."

"I've got my orders from the Marquis to keep the cattle here," answered Matthews. "That's all there is to it. They'll stay here."

It was late at night, but Sylvane and Merrifield rode to Medora taking a neighboring cowboy named Pete Marlow along as witness, "for the Marquis is a hard man to deal with," remarked Merrifield. To Pete it was all the gayest sort of adventure. He confided the object of the nocturnal expedition to the first man he came upon.

The Marquis was not at his home. The boys were told that he might still be at his office, though the time was nearing midnight.

Meanwhile Pete's news had spread. From the base of Graveyard Butte, Jake Hainsley, the superintendent of the coal mine, who dearly loved a fight, came running with a rifle in his hand. "I've got forty men myself," he cried, "and I've Winchesters for every mother's son of 'em, and if you need help you just let me know and we'll back you all right, we will."

The Marquis was in his office in Medora next to the new Company store, working with Van Driesche, his valet and secretary. He asked what the three men wanted of him at that hour in the night. Merrifield explained the situation.

They told him: "We want you to write an order to move those cattle at daylight."

"If I refuse?"

Sylvane and Merrifield had thoroughly discussed the question what they would do in case the Marquis refused. They would take tin pans and stampede the herd. They were under no illusions concerning the probabilities in case they took that means of ridding themselves of the unwelcome herd. There would be shooting, of course.

"Why, Marquis," said Merrifield, "if Matthews don't move those cattle, I guess there's nothing to it but what we'll have to move them ourselves."

The Marquis had not lived a year in the Bad Lands without learning something. In a more conciliatory mood he endeavored to find ground for a compromise. But "the boys" were not inclined to compromise with a man who was patently in the wrong. Finally, the Marquis offered them fifteen hundred dollars on the condition that they would allow him to use the piece of bottom-land for three weeks.

It was on its face a munificent offer; but Merrifield and Sylvane knew that the Marquis's "three weeks" might not terminate after twenty-one days. They knew something else. "After we had made our statement," Merrifield explained later, "no matter how much he had offered us we would not have accepted it. We knew there'd be no living with a man like the Marquis if you made statements and then backed down for any price."

_Never draw your gun_, ran a saying of the frontier, _unless you mean to shoot_.

"Marquis," said Merrifield, "we've made our statement once for all. If you don't see fit to write that order there won't be any more talk. We will move the cattle ourselves."

The Marquis was courteous and even friendly. "I am sorry you cannot do this for me," he said; but he issued the order. Merrifield and Sylvane themselves carried it to the offending superintendent. Matthews was furious; but he moved the cattle at dawn. The whole affair did not serve to improve the relations between the groups which the killing of Riley Luffsey had originally crystallized.

Roosevelt probably remained unaware of the interesting complications that were being woven for him in the hot-hearted frontier community of which he was now a part; for Merrifield and Sylvane, as correspondents, were laconic, not being given to spreading themselves out on paper. His work in the Assembly and the pre-convention campaign for presidential candidates completely absorbed his energies. He was eager that a reform candidate should be named by the Republicans, vigorously opposing both Blaine and Arthur, himself preferring Senator Edmunds of Vermont. He fought hard and up to a certain point successfully, for at the State Republican Convention held in Utica in April he thoroughly trounced the Old Guard, who were seeking to send a delegation to Chicago favorable to Arthur, and was himself elected head of the delegates at large, popularly known as the "Big Four."

He had, meanwhile, made up his mind that, however the dice might fall at the convention, he would henceforth make his home, for a part of the year at least, in the Bad Lands. He had two friends in Maine, backwoodsmen mighty with the axe, and born to the privations of the frontier, whom he decided to take with him if he could. One was "Bill" Sewall, a stalwart viking at the end of his thirties, who had been his guide on frequent occasions when as a boy in college he had sought health and good hunting on the waters of Lake Mattawamkeag; the other was Sewall's nephew, Wilmot Dow. He flung out the suggestion to them, and they rose to it like hungry trout; for they had adventurous spirits.

The Republican National Convention met in Chicago in the first days of June. Roosevelt, supported by his friend Henry Cabot Lodge and a group of civil service reformers that included George William Curtis and Carl Schurz, led the fight for Edmunds. But the convention wanted Blaine, the "Plumed Knight"; and the convention got Blaine.

Roosevelt raged, but refused to follow Curtis and Schurz, who hinted darkly at "bolting the ticket." He took the first train to Dakota, sick at heart, to think things over.

V

He wears a big hat and big spurs and all that,
And leggins of fancy fringed leather;
He takes pride in his boots and the pistol he shoots
And he's happy in all kinds of weather;
He's fond of his horse, it's a broncho, of course,
For oh, he can ride like the devil;
He is old for his years and he always appears
Like a fellow who's lived on the level;
He can sing, he can cook, yet his eyes have the look
Of a man that to fear is a stranger;
Yes, his cool, quiet nerve will always subserve
For his wild life of duty and danger.
He gets little to eat, and he guys tenderfeet,
And for fashion, oh well! he's not in it;
But he'll rope a gay steer when he gets on its ear
At the rate of two-forty a minute.

_Cowboy song_

Blaine was nominated on June 7th. On the 8th Roosevelt was already in St. Paul, on his way to the Bad Lands. A reporter of the _Pioneer Press_ interviewed him and has left this description of him as he appeared fresh from the battle at Chicago:

He is short and slight and with rather an ordinary
appearance, although his frame is wiry and his flashing eyes
and rapid, nervous gestures betoken a hidden strength. He is
not at all an ideal Harvard alumnus, for he lacks that
ingrained conceit and grace of manner that a residence at
Cambridge insures. Although of the old Knickerbocker stock,
his manner and carriage is awkward and not at all
impressive.

He arrived in Medora on the evening of the 9th. The Ferrises and Merrifield were at the "depot" to meet him. They all adjourned to Packard's printing-office, since that was the only place in town of a semi-public character which was not at that hour in possession of a noisy aggregation of Medora's thirstiest citizens.

The office of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_, which stood under a gnarled cottonwood-tree north of the Marquis's store, was a one-room frame building which served as the editor's parlor, bedroom, and bath, as well as his printing-office and his editorial sanctum. It was built of perpendicular boards which let in the wintry blasts in spite of the two-inch strips which covered the joints on the outside. It had, in fact, originally served as the Marquis's blacksmith shop, and the addition of a wooden floor had not altogether converted it into a habitable dwelling, proof against Dakota weather. On this particular June night the thermometer was in the thirties and a cannon stove glowed red from a steady application of lignite.

A half-dozen voices greeted Roosevelt with pleas for the latest news of the "great Republican round-up." Roosevelt was not loath to unburden his soul. For an hour he told of the battles and the manipulations of the convention, of the stubborn fight against an impending nomination which he had known would be a fatal mistake, but which the majority seemed to be bound to make.

Packard told about it years afterward. "He gave us such a swinging description of the stirring scenes of the convention that the eyes of the boys were fairly popping out of their heads. But it was when he told how Roscoe Conkling attempted to dominate the situation and override the wishes of a large portion of the New York delegation that the fire really began to flash in his eyes. I can see him now as plainly as I did then, as he straightened up, his doubled fist in the air, his teeth glittering, and his eyes squinting in something that was far from a smile as he jerked out the words, 'By Godfrey! I will not be dictated to!'"

Roosevelt rode to the Maltese Cross next morning. The old stockade shack, with the dirt floor and dirt roof, had, as he had suggested, been converted into a stable, and a simple but substantial one-and-a-half story log cabin had been built with a shingle roof and a cellar, both luxuries in the Bad Lands. An alcove off the one large room on the main floor was set aside for Roosevelt's use as combined bedroom and study; the other men were quartered in the loft above. East of the ranch-house beside a patch of kitchen-garden, stood the strongly made circular horse-corral, with a snubbing-post in the middle, and at some distance from it the larger cow-corral for the branding of the cattle. Between them stood the cowsheds and the hayricks.

The ranch-buildings belonged to Sylvane Ferris and Merrifield. In buying out the Maltese Cross, Roosevelt had bought only cattle and horses; not buildings or land. The ranges on which his cattle grazed were owned by the Northern Pacific Railroad, and by the Government. It was the custom for ranchmen to claim for grazing purposes a certain stretch of land north, east, south, and west of the bottom on which the home ranch stood.

"You claim so much land each way," Sylvane explained to a tenderfoot a long time after, "according to how many cattle you have. For instance, if you have one hundred head of cattle, you don't require very much range; if you have a thousand head, you need so much more. There wouldn't be any sense of one man trying to crowd his cattle onto your range and starve out both outfits. So each man claims as much land as he needs. Of course, that doesn't mean that the other fellow doesn't get over on your range--that's the reason we brand our cattle; it simply means that a certain given number of cattle will have a certain given amount of grazing land. Our cattle may be on the other fellow's range and some of his may be on our range, but he'll claim so much land each way and we'll claim so much land each way, and then it doesn't make any difference if they do get on each other's territory, so long as there is enough grazing for the two outfits."

The range claimed by the "Maltese Cross outfit" extended northward to the river-crossing above Eaton's "Custer Trail Ranch," and southward to the crossing just below what was known as "Sloping Bottom," covering a territory that had a frontage of four miles on both sides of the river and extended back on each side for thirty miles to the heads of the creeks which emptied into the Little Missouri.

The cattle, Roosevelt found, were looking sleek and well-fed. He had lost about twenty-five head during the winter, partly from the cold, partly from the attacks of wolves. There were, he discovered, a hundred and fifty fine calves.

A new cowpuncher had been added to the Maltese Cross outfit, he found, since the preceding autumn. It was George Myers, whom he had met on the ride down the river from Lang's. Roosevelt had purchased five hundred dollars' worth of barbed wire and George was digging post-holes. He was a boyish and attractive individual whom the _wanderlust_ had driven westward from his home in Wisconsin. His honesty fairly leaped at you out of his direct, clear eyes.

Roosevelt spent two days contemplating his new possessions. At the end of the second he had reached a decision, and he announced it promptly. He told Sylvane and Merrifield to get ready to ride to Lang's with him the next day for the purpose of drawing up a new contract. He had determined to make cattle-raising his "regular business" and intended, at once (in riotous defiance of Uncle James!), to put a thousand head more on the range.

The Langs were situated seven miles nearer civilization than they had been on Roosevelt's previous visit, and were living in a dugout built against a square elevation that looked like a low fortress or the "barrow" of some dead Viking chief. They were building a ranch-house in anticipation of the coming of Mrs. Lang and two children, a girl of eighteen or nineteen and a son a half-dozen years younger than Lincoln. The dugout was already overcrowded with three or four carpenters who were at work on the house, and Gregor Lang suggested that they ride five miles up the river to a cabin of his on what was known as "Sagebrush Bottom," where he and Lincoln had spent the winter. They had moved out of the shack on the Little Cannonball for two reasons. One was that a large cattle outfit from New Mexico, named the Berry-Boyce Cattle Company, had started a ranch, known as the "Three Seven," not half a mile down the river; the other was that Gregor Lang was by disposition not one who was able to learn from the experience of others. For it happened that, a few weeks after Roosevelt's departure in September, a skunk had invaded the cabin and made itself comfortable under one of the bunks. Lincoln and the Highlander were in favor of diplomacy in dealing with the invader. But Gregor Lang reached for a pitchfork. They pleaded with him, without effect. The skunk retaliated in his own fashion; and shortly after, they moved forever out of the cabin on the Little Cannonball.

Roosevelt, who recognized Gregor Lang's limitations, recognized also that the Scotchman was a good business man. He set him to work next morning drawing up a new contract. It called for further investment on his part of twenty-six thousand dollars to cover the purchase of a thousand head or more of cattle. Merrifield and Sylvane signed it and returned promptly to the Maltese Cross.

Roosevelt remained behind. "Lincoln," he said, "there are two things I want to do. I want to get an antelope, and I want to get a buckskin suit."

Lincoln thought that he could help him to both. Some twenty miles to the east lived a woman named Mrs. Maddox who had acquired some fame in the region by the vigorous way in which she had handled the old reprobate who was her husband; and by her skill in making buckskin shirts. She was a dead shot, and it was said of her that even "Calamity Jane," Deadwood's "first lady," was forced "to yield the palm to Mrs. Maddox when it came to the use of a vocabulary which adequately searched every nook and cranny of a man's life from birth to ultimate damnation."

They found her in her desolate, little mud-roofed hut on Sand Creek, a mile south of the old Keogh trail. She was living alone, having recently dismissed her husband in summary fashion. It seems that he was a worthless devil, who, under the stimulus of some whiskey he had obtained from an outfit of Missouri "bull-whackers" who were driving freight to Deadwood, had picked a quarrel with his wife and attempted to beat her. She knocked him down with a stove-lid lifter and the "bull-whackers" bore him off, leaving the lady in full possession of the ranch. She now had a man named Crow Joe working for her, a slab-sided, shifty-eyed ne'er-do-well, who was suspected of stealing horses on occasion.

She measured Roosevelt for his suit[5] and gave him and Lincoln a dinner that they remembered. A vigorous personality spoke out of her every action. Roosevelt regarded her with mingled amusement and awe.

[Footnote 5: The buckskin suit which was still doing
service thirty years later, was made under the
supervision of Mrs. Maddox by her niece, now Mrs.
Olmstead, of Medora.]

They found their antelope on the way home. They found two antelopes, in fact, but Roosevelt, who had been as cool as an Indian an instant before, was so elated when he saw the first drop to his rifle that he was totally incapacitated from aiming at the second when that animal, evidently bewildered, began to run in circles scarcely twenty-five yards away. He had dropped his gun with a whoop, waving his arms over his head and crying, "I got him! I got him!"

"Shoot the other one!" Lincoln called.

Roosevelt burst into a laugh. "I can't," he called back. "Not to save my life."

They met at the side of the antelope. "This would not have seemed nearly so good if somebody had not been here to see it," Roosevelt exclaimed. "Do you know what I am going to do? I am going to make you a present of my shot-gun."

Lincoln, being only sixteen, did not know exactly what to make of the generosity of this jubilant young man. It struck him that Roosevelt, in the excitement of the moment, was giving away a thing of great value and might regret it on sober second thought. Lincoln replied that he could not accept the gift. It struck him that Roosevelt looked hurt for an instant.

They dressed the antelope together, Roosevelt taking the position of humble pupil. The next day he returned alone to the Maltese Cross.

He now entered with vigor into the life of a Dakota ranchman. The country was at its best in the clear June weather. The landscape in which the ranch-house was set had none of the forbidding desolateness of sharp bluff and scarred ravine that characterized the region surrounding Little Missouri. The door of the cabin looked out on a wide, semi-circular clearing covered with sagebrush, bordered on the east by a ring of buttes and grassy slopes, restful in their gray and green for eyes to gaze upon. Westward, not a quarter of a mile from the house, behind a hedge of cottonwoods, the river swung in a long circle at the foot of steep buttes crested with scoria. At the ends of the valley were glades of cottonwoods with grassy floors where deer hid among the buckbrush by day, or at dusk fed silently or, at the sound of a step, bounded, erect and beautiful, off into deeper shelter. In an almost impenetrable tangle of bullberry bushes, whose hither edge was barely one hundred yards from the ranch-house, two fawns spent their days. They were extraordinarily tame, and in the evenings Roosevelt could frequently see them from the door as they came out to feed. Walking on the flat after sunset, or riding home when night had fallen, he would run across them when it was too dark to make out anything but their flaunting white tails as they cantered out of the way.

Roosevelt, who never did things by halves, took up his new activities as though they constituted the goal of a lifetime spent in a search for the ultimate good. Ranch-life was altogether novel to him; at no point had his work or his play touched any phase of it. He had ridden to hounds and was a fair but by no means a "fancy" rider. His experience in the Meadowbrook Hunt, however, had scarcely prepared him adequately for combat with the four-legged children of Satan that "mewed their mighty youth" on the wild ranges of the Bad Lands.

"I have a perfect dread of bucking," he confided to an unseen public in a book which he began that summer, "and if I can help it I never get on a confirmed bucker." He could not always help it. Sylvane, who could ride anything in the Bad Lands, was wedded to the idea that any animal which by main force had been saddled and ridden was a "broke horse," and when Roosevelt would protest mildly concerning this or that particularly vicious animal, Sylvane would look at him in a grieved and altogether captivating way, saying, "Why, I call that a plumb gentle horse."

"When Sylvane says that a horse is 'plumb gentle,'" remarked Roosevelt, on one occasion, "then you want to look out."

Sylvane and Merrifield were to start for the East to purchase the additional cattle on the 18th of June, and Roosevelt had determined to set forth on the same day for a solitary camping-trip on the prairie. Into the three or four intervening days he crowded all the experiences they would hold.

He managed to persuade Sylvane, somewhat against that individual's personal judgment (for Sylvane was suspicious of "dudes"), that he actually intended "to carry his own pack." Sylvane found, to his surprise, that the "dude" learnt quickly. He showed Roosevelt once how to saddle his horse, and thereafter Roosevelt saddled his horses himself. Sylvane was relieved in spirit, and began to look with new eyes on the "four-eyed tenderfoot" who was entrusting a fortune to his care.

There was no general round-up in the valley of the Little Missouri that spring of 1884, for the cattle had not had the opportunity to wander to any great distance, having been on the range, most of them, only a few months. The different "outfits," however, held their own round-ups, at each of which a few hundred cattle might be gathered from the immediate vicinity, the calves "cut out" and roped and branded, and turned loose again to wander undisturbed until the "beef round-up" in the fall.

At each of these round-ups, which might take place on any of a dozen bottoms up or down the river, the Maltese Cross "outfit" had to be represented, and Sylvane and Merrifield and George Myers were kept busy picking up their "strays." Roosevelt rode with them, as "boss" and at the same time as apprentice. It gave him an opportunity to get acquainted with his own men and with the cowpunchers of half a dozen other "outfits." He found the work stirring and the men singularly human and attractive. They were free and reckless spirits, who did not much care, it seemed, whether they lived or died; profane youngsters, who treated him with respect in spite of his appearance because they respected the men with whom he had associated himself. They came from all parts of the Union and spoke a language all their own.

"We'll throw over an' camp to-night at the mouth o' Knutson Creek," might run the round-up captain's orders. "Nighthawk'll be corralin' the cavvy in the mornin' 'fore the white crow squeals, so we kin be cuttin' the day-herd on the bed-groun'. We'll make a side-cut o' the mavericks an' auction 'em off pronto soon's we git through."

All that was ordinary conversation. When an occasion arose which seemed to demand a special effort, the talk around the "chuck-wagon" was so riddled with slang from all corners of the earth, so full of startling imagery, that a stranger might stare, bewildered, unable to extract a particle of meaning. And through it blazed such a continual shower of oaths, that were themselves sparks of satanic poetry, that, in the phrase of one contemplative cowpuncher, "absodarnnlutely had to be parted in the middle to hold an extra one."

It was to ears attuned to this rich and racy music that Roosevelt came with the soft accents of his Harvard English. The cowboys bore up, showing the tenderfoot the frigid courtesy they kept for "dudes" who happened to be in company, which made it impolite or inexpedient to attempt "to make the sucker dance."

It happened, however, that Roosevelt broke the camel's back. Some cows which had been rounded up with their calves made a sudden bolt out of the herd. Roosevelt attempted to head them back, but the wily cattle eluded him.

"Hasten forward quickly there!" Roosevelt shouted to one of his men.

The bounds of formal courtesy could not withstand that. There was a roar of delight from the cowpunchers, and, instantly, the phrase became a part of the vocabulary of the Bad Lands. That day, and on many days thereafter when "Get a git on yuh!" grew stale and "Head off them cattle!" seemed done to death, he heard a cowpuncher shout, in a piping voice, "Hasten forward quickly there!"

Roosevelt, in fact, was in those first days considered somewhat of a joke. Beside Gregor Lang, forty miles to the south, he was the only man in the Bad Lands who wore glasses. Lang's glasses, moreover, were small and oval; Roosevelt's were large and round, making him, in the opinion of the cowpunchers, look very much like a curiously nervous and emphatic owl. They called him "Four Eyes," and spoke without too much respect, of "Roosenfelder."

Merrifield rode to town with him one day and stopped at the Marquis's company store to see a man named Fisher, who had succeeded Edgar Haupt as local superintendent of the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company, asking Fisher as he was departing whether he did not want to meet Roosevelt. Fisher had heard of the "four-eyed dude from New York" and heard something of his political reforming. He went outdoors with Merrifield, distinctly curious.

Roosevelt was on horseback chatting with a group of cowboys, and the impression he made on Fisher was not such as to remove the natural prejudice of youth against "reformers" of any sort. What Fisher saw was "a slim, anæmic-looking young fellow dressed in the exaggerated style which new-comers on the frontier affected, and which was considered indisputable evidence of the rank tenderfoot." If any further proof of Roosevelt's status was needed, the great round glasses supplied it. Fisher made up his mind that he knew all he needed to know about the new owner of the Maltese Cross.

No doubt he expressed his opinions to Merrifield. The taciturn hunter did not dispute his conclusions, but a day or two after he dropped in on Fisher again and said, "Get your horse and we'll take the young fellow over the old Sully Trail and try out his nerve. We'll let on that we're going for a little hunt."

Fisher agreed with glee in his heart. He knew the Sully Trail. It ran mainly along the sides of precipitous buttes, southeast of Medora, and, being old and little used, had almost lost the little semblance it might originally have had of a path where four-footed creatures might pick their way with reasonable security. A recent rain had made the clay as slippery as asphalt in a drizzle.

It occurred to Fisher that it was as truly wicked a trail as he had ever seen. Merrifield led the way; Fisher maneuvered for last place and secured it. In the most perilous places there was always something about his saddle which needed adjustment, and he took care not to remount until the danger was behind them. Roosevelt did not dismount for any reason. He followed where Merrifield led, without comment.

They came at last to a grassy slope that dipped at an angle of forty-five degrees to a dry creek-bed. "There goes a deer!" shouted Merrifield suddenly and started down the slope as fast as his horse could go. Roosevelt followed at the same speed. He and Merrifield arrived at the bottom at the identical moment; but with a difference. Roosevelt was still on his horse, but Merrifield and his pony had parted company about a hundred yards above the creek-bed and rolled the rest of the way. Fisher, who was conservative by nature, arrived in due course.

Roosevelt pretended to be greatly annoyed. "Now see what you've done, Merrifield," he exclaimed as that individual, none the worse for his tumble, drew himself to his feet. "That deer is in Montana by this time." Then he burst into laughter.

A suspicion took root in Fisher's mind that Merrifield had intended the hazardous performance as much for Fisher's education as for Roosevelt's. He was quite ready to admit that his first impression had been imperfect. Meanwhile, he wondered whether the joke was on himself or on Merrifield. Certainly it was not on the tenderfoot.

Roosevelt enjoyed it all with the relish of a gourmand at a feast cooked by the gods.

Theodore Roosevelt, the young New York reformer [remarked
the _Bad Lands Cowboy_], made us a very pleasant call Monday
in full cowboy regalia. New York will certainly lose him for
a time at least, as he is perfectly charmed with our free
Western life and is now figuring on a trip into the Big Horn
country.

In a letter to his sister Anna, written from Medora, the middle of June, we have Roosevelt's own record of his reactions to his first experiences as an actual ranchman. "Bamie" or "Bye," as he affectionately called her, was living in New York. She had taken his motherless little Alice under her protecting wing, and, since the disasters of February, had been half a mother to him also.

Well, I have been having a glorious time here [he writes],
and am well hardened now (I have just come in from spending
thirteen hours in the saddle). For every day I have been
here I have had my hands full. First and foremost, the
cattle have done well, and I regard the outlook for making
the business a success as being _very_ hopeful. I shall buy
a thousand more cattle and shall make it my regular
business. In the autumn I shall bring out Sewall and Dow and
put them on a ranch with very few cattle to start with, and
in the course of a couple of years give them quite a little
herd also.

I have never been in better health than on this trip. I am
in the saddle all day long either taking part in the
round-up of the cattle, or else hunting antelope (I got one
the other day; another good head for our famous hall). I am
really attached to my two "factors," Ferris and Merrifield,
they are very fine men.

The country is growing on me, more and more; it has a
curious, fantastic beauty of its own; and as I own six or
eight horses I have a fresh one every day and ride on a lope
all day long. How sound I do sleep at night now! There is
not much game, however; the cattlemen have crowded it out
and only a few antelope and deer remain. I have shot a few
jackrabbits and curlews, with the rifle; and I also killed
eight rattlesnakes.

To-morrow my two men go East for the cattle; and I will
start out alone to try my hand at finding my way over the
prairie by myself. I intend to take a two months' trip in
the fall, for hunting; and may, as politics look now, stay
away over Election day; so I shall return now very soon,
probably leaving here in a week.

On the following day Ferris and Merrifield started for the East, and Roosevelt set out on his solitary hunting trip, half to test out his own qualities as a frontiersman and half to replenish the larder.

For the last week I have been fulfilling a boyish ambition
of mine [he wrote to "Bamie" after his return to the
Maltese Cross]; that is, I have been playing at frontier
hunter in good earnest, having been off entirely alone, with
my horse and rifle, on the prairie. I wanted to see if I
could not do perfectly well without a guide, and I succeeded
beyond my expectations. I shot a couple of antelope and a
deer--and missed a great many more. I felt as absolutely
free as a man could feel; as you know, I do not mind
loneliness; and I enjoyed the trip to the utmost. The only
disagreeable incident was one day when it rained. Otherwise
the weather was lovely, and every night I would lie wrapped
up in my blanket looking at the stars till I fell asleep, in
the cool air. The country has widely different aspects in
different places; one day I could canter hour after hour
over the level green grass, or through miles of wild-rose
thickets, all in bloom; on the next I would be amidst the
savage desolation of the Bad Lands, with their dreary
plateaus, fantastically shaped buttes, and deep, winding
canyons. I enjoyed the trip greatly, and have never been in
better health.

George Myers was holding the fort at the Maltese Cross, building his four-mile fence, keeping an eye on the horses and cattle and acting as general factotum and cook. He was successful in everything except his cooking. Even that was excellent, except for an occasional and unaccountable lapse; but those lapses were dire.

It happened that, on the day of his return to the semi-civilization of the Maltese Cross, Roosevelt intimated to George Myers that baking-powder biscuits would be altogether welcome. George was rather proud of his biscuits and set to work with energy, adding an extra bit of baking powder from the can on the shelf beside the stove to be sure that they would be light. The biscuits went into the oven looking as perfect as any biscuits which George had ever created. They came out a rich, emerald green.

Roosevelt and George Myers stared at them, wondering what imp in the oven had worked a diabolical transformation. But investigation proved that there was no imp involved. It was merely that Sylvane or Merrifield, before departing, had casually dumped soda into the baking-powder can.

Evidently Roosevelt thereupon decided that if accidents of that sort were liable to happen to George, he had better take charge of the culinary department himself. George was off on the range the following morning, and Roosevelt, who had stayed home to write letters, filled a kettle with dry rice, poured on what looked like a reasonable amount of water, and set it on the oven to cook. Somewhat to his surprise, the rice began to swell, brimming over on the stove. He dipped out what seemed to him a sufficient quantity, and returned to his work. The smell of burning rice informed him that there was trouble in the wind. The kettle, he found, was brimming over again. He dipped out more rice. All morning long he was dipping out rice. By the time George returned, every bowl in the cabin, including the wash-basin, was filled with half-cooked rice.

Roosevelt handed the control of the kitchen back to George Myers.

VI

Once long ago an ocean lapped this hill,
And where those vultures sail, ships sailed at will;
Queer fishes cruised about without a harbor--
I will maintain there's queer fish round here still.

_The Bad Lands Rubáiyat_

Through the long days of that soft, green June, Roosevelt was making himself at home in his new and strange surroundings. A carpenter, whose name was the same as his trade, built him a bookcase out of scraps of lumber, and on the shelves of it he assembled old friends--Parkman and Irving and Hawthorne and Cooper and Lowell, "Ike Marvel's breezy pages and the quaint, pathetic character-sketches of the Southern writers--Cable, Craddock, Macon, Joel Chandler Harris, and sweet Sherwood Bonner." Wherever he went he carried some book or other about him, solid books as a rule, though he was not averse on occasion to what one cowpuncher, who later became superintendent of education in Medora, and is therefore to be regarded as an authority, reproachfully described as "trash." He consumed the "trash," it seems, after a session of composition, which was laborious to him, and which set him to stalking to and fro over the floor of the cabin and up and down through the sagebrush behind it.

He read and wrote in odd minutes, as his body required now and then a respite from the outdoor activities that filled his days; but in that first deep quaffing of the new life, the intervals out of the saddle were brief and given mainly to meals and sleep. As he plunged into books to extract from them whatever facts or philosophy they might hold which he needed to enrich his personality and his usefulness, so he plunged into the life of the Bad Lands seeking to comprehend the emotions and the mental processes, the personalities and the social conditions that made it what it was. With a warm humanity on which the shackles of social prejudice already hung loose, he moved with open eyes and an open heart among the men and women whom the winds of chance had blown together in the valley of the Little Missouri.

They were an interesting and a diverse lot. Closest to the Maltese Cross, in point of situation, were the Eatons, who had established themselves two years previously at an old stage station, five miles south of Little Missouri, on what had been the first mail route between Fort Abraham Lincoln and Fort Keogh. Custer had passed that way on his last, ill-fated expedition, and the ranch bore the name of the Custer Trail in memory of the little army that had camped beside it one night on the way to the Little Big Horn. The two-room shack of cottonwood logs and a dirt roof, which had been the station, was inhabited by calves and chickens who were kept in bounds by the stockade which only a little while before had served to keep the Indians at a distance.