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.

[Illustration: The ford of the Little Missouri near the Maltese Cross.]

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
st