ed cattle-car, moreover,
had a way of shrinking ten per cent in weight. It was more expensive,
furthermore, to ship a live steer than a dead one. Altogether, the
scheme appeared to the Marquis as a heaven-sent inspiration; and
cooler-headed business men than he accepted it as practical. The
cities along the Northern Pacific acclaimed it enthusiastically,
hoping that it meant cheaper beef; and presented the company that was
exploiting it with all the land it wanted.

The Marquis might have been forgiven if, in the midst of the cheering,
he had strutted a bit. But he did not strut. The newspapers spoke of
his "modest bearing" as he appeared in hotel corridors in Washington
and St. Paul and New York, with a lady whose hair was "Titan-red," as
the _Pioneer Press_ of St. Paul had it, and who, it was rumored, was a
better shot than the Marquis. He had great charm, and there was
something engaging in the perfection with which he played the _grand
seigneur_.

"How did you happen to go into this sort of business?" he was asked.

"I wanted something to do," he answered.

In view of the fact that before his first abattoir was in operation he
had spent upwards of three hundred thousand dollars, an impartial
observer might have remarked that his desire for activity was
expensive.

Unquestionably the Marquis had made an impression on the Northwest
country. The hints he threw out concerning friends in Paris who were
eager to invest five million dollars in Billings County were
sufficient to cause palpitation in more than one Dakota bosom. The
Marquis promised telephone lines up and down the river and other civic
improvements that were dazzling to the imagination and stimulating to
the price of building lots; and implanted firmly in the minds of the
inhabitants of Medora the idea that in ten years their city would
rival Omaha. Meanwhile, Little Missouri and the "boomtown" were
leading an existence which seemed to ricochet back and forth between
Acadian simplicity and the livid sophistication of a mining-camp.

"Sheriff Cuskelly made a business trip to Little Missouri," is the
gist of countless "Notes" in the Dickinson _Press_, "and reports
everything as lively at the town on the Little Muddy."

Lively it was; but its liveliness was not all thievery and violence.
"On November 5th," the Dickinson _Press_ announces, "the citizens of
Little Missouri opened a school." Whom they opened it for is dark as
the ancestry of Melchizedek. B