345

XXVI Oysters and Ambitions 361

XXVII Emoluments and Rewards 374

The Duke of Chimney Butte

CHAPTER I

THE ALL-IN-ONE

Down through the Bad Lands the Little Missouri comes in long windings,
white, from a distance, as a frozen river between the ash-gray hills. At
its margin there are willows; on the small forelands, which flood in
June when the mountain waters are released, cottonwoods grow, leaning
toward the southwest like captives straining in their bonds, yearning in
their way for the sun and winds of kinder latitudes.

Rain comes to that land but seldom in the summer days; in winter the
wind sweeps the snow into rocky canons; buttes, with tops leveled by the
drift of the old, earth-making days, break the weary repetition of hill
beyond hill.

But to people who dwell in a land a long time and go about the business
of getting a living out of what it has to offer, its wonders are no
longer notable, its hardships no longer peculiar. So it was with the
people who lived in the Bad Lands at the time that we come among them on
the vehicle of this tale. To them it was only an ordinary country of
toil and disappointment, or of opportunity and profit, according to
their station and success.

To Jeremiah Lambert it seemed the land of hopelessness, the last
boundary of utter defeat as he labored over the uneven road at the end
of a blistering summer day, trundling his bicycle at his side. There was
a suit-case strapped to the handlebar of the bicycle, and in that
receptacle were the wares which this guileless peddler had come into
that land to sell. He had set out from Omaha full of enthusiasm and
youthful vigor, incited to the utmost degree of vending fervor by the
representations of the general agent for the little instrument which had
been the stepping-stone to greater things for many an ambitious young
man.

According to the agent, Lambert reflected, as he pushed his punctured,
lop-wheeled, disordered, and dejected bicycle along; there had been
none of the ambitious business climbers at hand to add his testimony to
the general agent's word.

Anyway, he had taken the agency, and the agent had taken his essential
twenty-two dollars and turned over to him one hundred of those notable
ladders to future greatness and affluence. Lambert had them there in his
imitation-leather suit-case--from which the rain had taken the last
deceptive gloss--minus seven which he had