k was what was called "line riding." The ranchmen
cared little if their cattle grazed westward toward the Yellowstone;
it was a different matter, however, if they drifted east and southeast
to the granger country and the Sioux Reservation, where there were
flat, bare plains which offered neither food nor shelter, and where
thieves were many and difficult to apprehend. Along the line where the
broken ground of the Bad Lands met the prairie east of the Little
Missouri, the ranchmen, therefore, established a series of camps, from
each of which two cowboys, starting in opposite directions, patrolled
the invisible line halfway to the adjoining camps.

Bill Sewall gazed out over the bleak country with a homesick and
apprehensive heart.

As for our coming back [he wrote his brother in January],
you need not worry about that. As soon as I serve out my
time and my sentence expires I shall return. Am having a
good time and enjoy myself, should anywhere if I knew I
could not do any better and was obliged to, but this is just
about like being transported to Siberia, just about as cold,
barren and desolate and most as far out of the way. It was
hotter here last summer than it ever was at home and it has
been colder here this winter than it ever was at home, 50
and 65 below all one week. Don't see how the cattle live at
all and there is lots of them dieing. You can find them all
around where they lay nights in the bushes. The poor ones
will all go, I guess. They say they will die worse in the
spring. The fat strong ones will get through, I guess. Don't
know that any of our hundred have died yet, but I don't
believe this is a good country to raise cattle in.

Am afraid Theodore will not make so much as he has been led
to think he would. There are lots of bleeders here, but we
mean to fend them off from him as well as we can.

Roosevelt spent the coldest months in New York, working steadily on
his new book which was to be called "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman." On
the 8th of March he wrote Lodge, "I have just sent my last roll of
manuscript to the printers"; adding, "in a fortnight I shall go out
West." But he postponed his departure, held possibly by the lure of
the hunting-field; for on the 29th he rode with the Meadowbrook hounds
and was "in at the death." It was presumably in the first days of
April that he arrived at Medora. If tradit