oments of comfort after weeks of the rough
frontier existence. Cultivated Englishmen were constantly appearing at
the Langs', sent over by their fathers, for reasons sometimes
mysterious, to stay for a week or a year. Some of them proved very bad
cowboys, but all of them were delightful conversationalists. Their
efforts to enter into the life of the Bad Lands were not always
successful, and Hell-Roaring Bill Jones on one notable occasion, when
the son of a Scotch baronet undertook to criticize him for misconduct,
expressed his opinion of the scions of British aristocracy that
drifted into Medora, in terms that hovered and poised and struck like
birds of prey. Lincoln Lang, who was present, described Bill Jones's
discourse as "outside the pale of the worst I have ever heard uttered
by human mouth," which meant something in that particular place. But
Bill Jones was an Irishman, and he was not naturally tolerant of
idiosyncrasies of speech and manner. Roosevelt, on the whole, liked
the "younger sons," and they in turn regarded him with a kind of awe.
He was of their own class, and yet there was something in him which
stretched beyond the barriers which confined them, into regions where
they were lost and bewildered, but he was completely at home.

They all had delightful evenings together at Yule, with charades and
punning contests, and music on the piano which Lincoln Lang had
brought out through the gumbo against all the protests of nature. Mrs.
Lang was an admirable cook and a liberal and hospitable hostess, which
was an added reason for riding eighty miles.

To the Scotch family, exiled far up the Little Missouri, Roosevelt's
visits were notable events. "We enjoyed having him," said Lincoln Lang
long afterward, "more than anything else in the world."

[Illustration: Mrs. Lang.]

[Illustration: Gregor Lang.]

To Gregor Lang, Roosevelt's visits brought an opportunity for an
argument with an opponent worthy of his steel. The Scotchman's alert
intelligence pined sometimes, in those intellectually desolate
wastes, for exercise in the keen give-and-take of debate. The average
cowboy was not noted for his conversational powers, and Gregor Lang
clutched avidly at every possibility of talk. It was said of him that
he loved a good argument so much that it did not always make much
difference to him which side of the argument he took. On one occasion
he was spending the night at the Eatons', when the father of the four
"Eato