struggled up the bank. Roosevelt had not even lost his glasses. He
laughed and waved his hand to Fisher, mounted and rode to Joe's store.
Having just risked his life in the wildest sort of adventure, it was
entirely characteristic of him that he should exercise the caution of
putting on a pair of dry socks.

Joe received him with mingled devotion and amazement. "Landsake, man!"
he cried, "weren't you afraid?"

"I was riding Manitou," Roosevelt responded quietly. "Just," exclaimed
Joe later, "as though Manitou was a steam engine." He bought a new
pair of socks, put them on, and proceeded on his journey.

Fisher saw him shortly after and accused him of being reckless.

"I suppose it might be considered reckless," Roosevelt admitted. "But
it was lots of fun."

Roosevelt spent his time alternately at the two ranches, writing
somewhat and correcting the proofs of his new book, but spending most
of his time in the saddle. The headquarters of his cattle business was
at the Maltese Cross where Sylvane Ferris and Merrifield were in
command. Elkhorn was, for the time being, merely a refuge and a
hunting-lodge where Sewall and Dow "ran" a few hundred cattle under
the general direction of the more experienced men of the other
"outfit."

* * * * *

[Illustration: Elkhorn ranch buildings from the river. Photograph by
Theodore Roosevelt.]

At the Maltese Cross there were now a half-dozen hands, Sylvane and
"our friend with the beaver-slide," as Merrifield, who was bald, was
known; George Myers, warm-hearted and honest as the day; Jack Reuter,
known as "Wannigan," with his stupendous memory and his Teutonic
appetite; and at intervals "old man" Thompson who was a teamster, and
a huge being named Hank Bennett. Roosevelt liked them all
immensely. They possessed to an extraordinary degree the qualities of
manhood which he deemed fundamental,--courage, integrity, hardiness,
self-reliance,--combining with those qualities a warmth, a humor, and
a humanness that opened his understanding to many things. He had come
in contact before with men whose opportunities in life had been less
than his, and who in the eyes of the world belonged to that great mass
of "common people" of whom Lincoln said that "the Lord surely loved
them since he made so many of them." But he had never lived with them,
day in, day out, slept with them, eaten out of the same dish with
them. The men of the cattle country, he found, as