and was indignant, "flaring up," as Sewall
described it.

"They had no business to write to you," he exclaimed. "They should
have written to me."

"I guess," remarked Sewall quietly, "they knew you wouldn't write
about how you were getting on. You'd just say you were all right."

Roosevelt fumed and said no more about it. But the crisp air of the
Bad Lands gradually put all questions of his health out of mind. All
day long he lived in the open. He was not an enthusiast over the
hammer or the axe, and, while Sewall and Dow were completing the house
and building the corrals and the stables a hundred yards or more
westward, he renewed his acquaintance with the bizarre but fascinating
country. The horses which the men from Maine had missed the previous
autumn, and which Roosevelt had feared had been stolen, had been
reported "running wild" forty or fifty miles to the west. Sewall and
Dow had made one or two trips after them without success, for the
animals had come to enjoy their liberty and proved elusive. Roosevelt
determined to find them and bring them back. He went on three solitary
expeditions, but they proved barren of result. Incidentally, however,
they furnished him experiences which were worth many horses.

On one of these expeditions night overtook him not far from
Mingusville. That hot little community, under the inspiration of a
Frenchman named Pierre Wibaux, was rapidly becoming an important
cattle center. As a shipping point it had, by the close of 1884,
already attained notable proportions on the freight records of the
Northern Pacific. Medora, in all its glory, could not compete with it,
for the cattle trails through the Bad Lands were difficult, and space
was lacking on the small bottoms near the railroad to hold herds of
any size preparatory to shipping. About Mingusville all creation
stretched undulating to the hazy horizon. The great southern cattle
companies which had recently established themselves on the northern
range, Simpson's "Hash-Knife" brand, Towers and Gudgell's O. X. Ranch,
and the Berry, Boyce Company's "Three-Seven outfit," all drove their
cattle along the Beaver to Mingusville, and even Merrifield and
Sylvane preferred shipping their stock from there to driving it to the
more accessible, but also more congested, yards at Medora.

Civilization had not kept pace with commerce in the development of the
prairie "town." It was a lurid little place. Medora, in comparison to
it, might have