, however, was
that, in the absence of organized government, the conservative
elements in the county had formed an offensive and defensive league
for mutual protection, as the by-laws ran, "against frauds and
swindlers, and to prevent the stealing, taking, and driving away of
horned cattle, sheep, horses, and other stock from the rightful owners
thereof."

It meant the beginning of the end of lawlessness in the Bad Lands.

XIV

I'll never come North again.
My home is the sunny South,
Where it's never mo' than forty below
An' the beans don't freeze in your mouth;
An' the snow ain't like white smoke,
An' the ground ain't like white iron;
An' the wind don't stray from Baffin's Bay
To join you on retirin'.

From _Medora Nights_

Roosevelt arrived in New York a day or two before Christmas with the
trophies of his hunt about him and his hunting costume in his "grip."
He settled down at his sister's house, at 422 Madison Avenue, where
his little girl Alice was living, and, with his characteristic energy
in utilizing every experience to the full, promptly began work on a
series of hunting sketches which should combine the thrill of
adventure with the precise observation of scientific natural history.
It is worth noting that, in order to provide a frontispiece for his
work, he solemnly dressed himself up in the buckskin shirt and the
rest of the elaborate costume he had described with such obvious
delight to his sister; and had himself photographed. There is
something hilariously funny in the visible records of that
performance. The imitation grass, not quite concealing the rug
beneath, the painted background, the theatrical (slightly patched)
rocks against which the cowboy leans gazing dreamily across an
imaginary prairie, the pose of the hunter with rifle ready and finger
on the trigger, grimly facing dangerous game which is not there--all
reveal a boyish delight in play-acting. For once his sense of humor
was in abeyance, but posterity is the richer for this glimpse of the
solemn boy in the heart of a powerful man.

[Illustration: Theodore Roosevelt (1884).]

Winter closed over the Bad Lands, bringing Arctic hardships. Even Bill
Sewall, who had been born and bred in the Maine woods, declared that
he had never known such cold. There was a theory, fostered by the real
estate agents, that you did not feel the cold which the thermometer
registere