e time, had an equable temper which nothing apparently could ruffle,
and a good heart to which no one in trouble ever seemed to appeal in
vain. Mrs. McGeeney was a very "Lady of the Lamp" when any one was
sick. Even Maunders had his graces. Roosevelt could not have lived
among them a week without experiencing a new understanding of the
inconsistencies that battle with each other in the making of men's
lives.

IV

No, he was not like other men.
He fought at Acre (what's the date?),
Died, and somehow got born again
Seven hundred years too late.

It wasn't that he hitched his wagon
To stars too wild to heed his will--
He was just old Sir Smite-the-dragon
Pretending he was J. J. Hill.

And always when the talk was cattle
And rates and prices, selling, buying,
I reckon he was dreaming battle,
And, somewhere, grandly dying.

From _Medora Nights_

The inhabitants of "Little Misery" who regarded law as a potential
ball-and-chain were doing a thriving business by one crooked means or
another and looked with uneasiness upon the coming of the cattlemen.
There were wails and threats that autumn in Bill Williams's saloon
over "stuck-up tenderfeet, shassayin' 'round, drivin' in cattle and
chasin' out game."

"Maunders disliked Roosevelt from the first," said Bill Dantz. "He had
no personal grudge against him, but he disliked him for what he
represented. Maunders had prospered under the loose and lawless
customs of the Northwest, and he shied at any man who he thought might
try to interfere with them."

The coming of the Marquis de Mores six months previous had served
greatly to heighten Maunders's personal prestige and to strengthen
the lawless elements. For the Marquis was attracted by Jake's evident
power, and, while he drew the crafty schemer into his inner counsels,
was himself drawn into a subtle net that was yet to entangle both men
in forces stronger than either.

When one day in March, 1883, a striking young Frenchman, who said he
was a nobleman, came to Little Missouri with a plan ready-made to
build a community there to rival Omaha, and a business that would
startle America's foremost financiers, the citizens of the wicked
little frontier settlement, who thought that they knew all the
possibilities of "tenderfeet" and "pilgrims" and "how-do-you-do-boys,"
admitted in some bewilderment that they had been mistaken. The
Frenchma