hman saw the justice of the veteran's contentions and accepted
the situation, but the Marquis was aggrieved. Granville Stuart,
meanwhile, having successfully sidetracked the three musketeers,
proceeded silently to gather his clansmen.

VIII

All day long on the prairies I ride,
Not even a dog to trot by my side;
My fire I kindle with chips gathered round,
My coffee I boil without being ground.

I wash in a pool and wipe on a sack;
I carry my wardrobe all on my back;
For want of an oven I cook bread in a pot,
And sleep on the ground for want of a cot.

My ceiling is the sky, my floor is the grass,
My music is the lowing of the herds as they pass;
My books are the brooks, my sermons the stones,
My parson is a wolf on his pulpit of bones.

_Cowboy song_

Roosevelt's first weeks at the Maltese Cross proved one thing to him
beyond debate; that was, that the cabin seven miles south of Medora
was not the best place in the world to do literary work. The trail
south led directly through his dooryard, and loquacious cowpunchers
stopped at all hours to pass the time of day. It was, no doubt, all
"perfectly bully"; but you did not get much writing done, and even
your correspondence suffered.

Roosevelt had made up his mind, soon after his arrival early in the
month, to bring Sewall and Dow out from Maine, and on his return from
his solitary trip over the prairie after antelope, he set out to
locate a site for a ranch, where the two backwoodsmen might hold some
cattle and where at the same time he might find the solitude he needed
for his literary work. On one of his exploring expeditions down the
river, he met Howard Eaton riding south to the railroad from his V-Eye
Ranch at the mouth of the Big Beaver, to receive a train-load of
cattle. He told Eaton the object of his journeying, and Eaton, who
knew the country better possibly than any other man in the Bad Lands,
advised him to look at a bottom not more than five miles up the river
from his own ranch. Roosevelt rode there promptly. The trail led
almost due north, again and again crossing the Little Missouri which
wound in wide sigmoid curves, now between forbidding walls of
crumbling limestone and baked clay, now through green acres of
pasture-land, or silvery miles of level sagebrush.

The country was singularly beautiful. On his left, as he advanced,
grassy meadows sloped to a wide plateau, foll