led
calves" with the best of them; he rode "the long circle"; he guarded
the day-herd and the night-herd and did the odd (and often perilous)
jobs of the cowpuncher with the same cool unconcern that characterized
the professional cowboy.

"Three-Seven" Bill Jones was on the round-up as foreman of the
"Three-Seven Ranch." ("There," as Howard Eaton remarked with
enthusiasm, "was a cowboy for your whiskers!") He was a large, grave,
taciturn man, capable of almost incredible feats of physical
endurance. Dantz overheard him, one day, discussing Roosevelt.

"That four-eyed maverick," remarked "Three-Seven" Bill, "has sand in
his craw a-plenty."

As with all other forms of work [Roosevelt wrote years
after], so on the round-up, a man of ordinary power, who
nevertheless does not shirk things merely because they are
disagreeable or irksome, soon earns his place. There were
crack riders and ropers, who, just because they felt such
overweening pride in their own prowess, were not really very
valuable men. Continually on the circles a cow or a calf
would get into some thick patch of bulberry bush and refuse
to come out; or when it was getting late we would pass some
bad lands that would probably not contain cattle, but might;
or a steer would turn fighting mad, or a calf grow tired and
want to lie down. If in such a case the man steadily
persists in doing the unattractive thing, and after two
hours of exasperation and harassment does finally get the
cow out, and keep her out, of the bulberry bushes, and
drives her to the wagon, or finds some animals that have
been passed by in the fourth or fifth patch of bad lands he
hunts through, or gets the calf up on his saddle and takes
it in anyhow, the foreman soon grows to treat him as having
his uses and as being an asset of worth in the round-up,
even though neither a fancy roper nor a fancy rider.[15]

[Footnote 15: _Autobiography._]

It was an active life,[16] and Roosevelt had no opportunity to
complain of restlessness. Breakfast came at three and dinner at eight
or nine or ten in the morning, at the conclusion sometimes of fifty
miles of breakneck riding. From ten to one, while the experts were
"cutting out the cows," Roosevelt was "on day-herd," as the phrase
went, riding slowly round and round the herd, turning back into it
any cattle that attempted to esca