uate navy
brought Roosevelt exuberantly to his side. Gorringe was a man of wide
interests and abilities, who managed, to a degree mysterious to a
layman, to combine his naval activities with the work of a consulting
engineer, the promotion of a shipyard, and the formation of a
syndicate to carry on a cattle business in Dakota. He had gained
international notice by his skill in bringing the obelisk known as
"Cleopatra's Needle" from Alexandria to New York, and had six months
previous flared before the public in front-page headlines by reason of
a sharp controversy with the Secretary of the Navy, which had resulted
in Gorringe's resignation.

Roosevelt had said that he wanted to shoot buffalo while there were
still buffalo left to shoot, and Gorringe had suggested that he go to
Little Missouri. That villainous gateway to the Bad Lands was, it
seems, the headquarters for a motley collection of guides and hunters,
some of them experts,[1] the majority of them frauds, who were
accustomed to take tourists and sportsmen for a fat price into the
heart of the fantastic and savage country. The region was noted for
game. It had been a great winter range for buffalo; and elk,
mountain-sheep, blacktail and whitetail deer, antelope and beaver were
plentiful; now and then even an occasional bear strayed to the river's
edge from God knows whence. Jake Maunders, with his sinister face, was
the center of information for tourists, steering the visitor in the
direction of game by day and of Bill Williams, Jess Hogue, and their
crew of gamblers and confidence men by night. Gorringe had planned to
go with Roosevelt himself, but at the last moment had been forced to
give up the trip. He advised Roosevelt to let one of the men
representing his own interests find him a guide, especially the
Vines, father and son.

[Footnote 1: Roosevelt tells, in his _Hunting Trips of a
Ranchman_, of the most notable of these, a former scout
and Indian fighter named "Vic" Smith, whose exploits
were prodigious.]

Roosevelt found that Vine, the father, was none other than the crusty
old party who had reluctantly admitted him at three o'clock that
morning to the Pyramid Park Hotel. The Captain, as he was called,
refused to admit that he knew any one who would undertake the
ungrateful business of "trundling a tenderfoot" on a buffalo hunt; and
suggested that Roosevelt consult his son Frank.

Frank Vine t