was being carried round
and round, and only the wise ones surmised that the shooting was a
volley fired over the "corpse" every time the "procession" passed the
bar.

All this was very diverting and did harm to nobody. Roosevelt himself,
no doubt, took huge satisfaction in it. But there were aspects of
Medora's disregard for the conventions which were rather more serious.
If you possessed anything of value, you carried it about with you if
you expected to find it when you wanted it. You studied the ways of
itinerant butchers with much attention, and if you had any cattle of
your own, you kept an eye on the comings and goings of everybody who
sold beef or veal. The annoying element in all this vigilance,
however, was that, even if you could point your finger at the man who
had robbed you, it did not profit you much unless you were ready to
shoot him. A traveling salesman, whose baggage had been looted in
Medora, swore out a warrant in Morton County, a hundred and fifty
miles to the east. The Morton County sheriff came to serve the
warrant, but the warrant remained in his pocket. He was "close-herded"
in the sagebrush across the track from the "depot" by the greater part
of the male population, on the general principle that an officer of
the law was out of place in Medora whatever his mission might be; and
put on board the next train going east.

In all the turmoil, the Marquis was in his element. He was never a
participant in the hilarity and he was never known to "take a drink"
except the wine he drank with his meals. He kept his distance and his
dignity. But he regarded the lawlessness merely as part of frontier
life, and took no steps to stop it. Roosevelt was too young and
untested a member of the community to exert any open influence during
those first weeks of his active life in the Bad Lands. It remained for
the ex-baseball player, the putative owner of a stage-line that
refused to materialize, to give the tempestuous little community its
first faint notion of the benefits of order.

[Illustration: A. T. Packard.]

[Illustration: Office of the "Bad Lands Cowboy".]

Packard, as editor of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_, had, in a manner
entirely out of proportion to his personal force, or the personal
force that any other man except the most notable might have brought
to bear, been a civilizing influence from the beginning. The train
that brought his presses from the East brought civilization with it, a
somewhat shy