an for his rifle, but he was too late. The lion was
gone.

Merrifield's eyes were blazing and his remarks were not dissimilar.
"Now, whenever I hold up my hand," he concluded, "you stop still where
you are. Understand?"

Roosevelt, who would have knocked his ranch-partner down with
earnestness and conviction if he had thought Merrifield was in the
wrong, meekly bore the hunter's wrath, knowing that Merrifield was in
the right; and thereafter on the expedition obeyed orders with a
completeness that occasionally had its comic aspects. But Merrifield
had no more complaints to make.

They plodded on, day after day, seeing no human being. When at last
they did come upon a lonely rider, Roosevelt instantly pressed him
into service as a mail carrier, and wrote two letters.

The first was to his sister Anna.

I am writing this on an upturned water-keg, by our
canvas-covered wagon, while the men are making tea, and the
solemn old ponies are grazing round about me. I am going to
trust it to the tender mercies of a stray cowboy whom we
have just met, and who may or may not post it when he gets
to "Powderville," a delectable log hamlet some seventy miles
north of us.

We left the Little Missouri a week ago, and have been
traveling steadily some twenty or thirty miles a day ever
since, through a desolate, barren-looking and yet
picturesque country, part of the time rolling prairie and
part of the time broken, jagged Bad Lands. We have fared
sumptuously, as I have shot a number of prairie chickens,
sage hens and ducks, and a couple of fine bucks--besides
missing several of the latter that I ought to have killed.

Every morning we get up at dawn, and start off by six
o'clock or thereabouts, Merrifield and I riding off among
the hills or ravines after game, while the battered "prairie
schooner," with the two spare ponies led behind, is driven
slowly along by old Lebo, who is a perfect character. He is
a weazened, wiry old fellow, very garrulous, brought up on
the frontier, and a man who is never put out or disconcerted
by any possible combination of accidents. Of course we have
had the usual incidents of prairie travel happen to us. One
day we rode through a driving rainstorm, at one time
developing into a regular hurricane of hail and wind, which
nearly upset the wagon, drove the ponies almo