eak his leg with the first shot "so as
to see what he'd do." I had not at all this feeling, and
fully realized that we were hunting dangerous game; still I
never made steadier shooting than at the grizzlies. I had
grand sport with the elk, too, and the woods fairly rang
with my shouting when I brought down my first lordly bull,
with great branching antlers; but after I had begun
bear-killing, other sport seemed tame.

So I have had good sport; and enough excitement and fatigue
to prevent overmuch thought; and, moreover, I have at last
been able to sleep well at night. But unless I was
bear-hunting all the time I am afraid I should soon get as
restless with this life as with the life at home.

XI

The rattlesnake bites you, the scorpion stings,
The mosquito delights you with buzzing wings;
The sand-burrs prevail, and so do the ants,
And those who sit down need half-soles on their pants.

_Cowboy song_

The day that Roosevelt started south on his journey to the mountains,
Sewall returned north down the river to rejoin his nephew. Will Dow
was watching the cattle on the plateau a few miles south of Elkhorn
Bottom, near the mouth of the defile which the cowboys called Shipka
Pass.

"You never looked so good to me," he said to Sewall that night, "as
you did when I saw your head coming up the Shipka Pass."

They worked together among the cattle for another two or three weeks.
They were on the best of terms with Captain Robins by this time, for
there was much to like and much to respect in the gruff, dark little
seafaring man, who had suffered shipwreck in more ways than one, and
was out on the plains because of a marriage that had gone on the
rocks. He was an excellent man with the horses, and good company about
a camp-fire, for somewhere he had picked up an education and was
well-informed. He gave the two tenderfeet a good training in the
rudiments of "cattle-punching," sending first one and then the other
off to distant round-ups to test their abilities among strangers.
Sewall proved unadaptable, for he was rather old to learn new tricks
so far removed from the activities that were familiar to him; but Dow
became a "cowhand" overnight.

Experience was not greatly mollifying Sewall's opinion of the region
in which his lot had been cast.

The sun when it shines clear [he wrote his brother Sam a