moment the wife of his employer had
come to the conclusion that it was wicked to manufacture a product
which, when taken in sufficient quantities, was instrumental in
sending people to hell; and had prevailed on her husband to close the
distillery. What Frank Vine said in describing Gregor Lang to
Roosevelt is lost to history. Frank had his own reason for not loving
Lang.

Ferris had a brother Sylvane, who was living with his partner, A. W.
Merrifield, in a cabin seven or eight miles south of Little Missouri,
and suggested that they spend the night with him. Late that afternoon,
Joe and his buckboard, laden to overflowing, picked Roosevelt up at
the hotel and started for the ford a hundred yards north of the
trestle. On the brink of the bluff they stopped. The hammer of
Roosevelt's Winchester was broken. In Ferris's opinion, moreover, the
Winchester itself was too light for buffalo, and Joe thought it might
be a good scheme to borrow a hammer and a buffalo-gun from Jake
Maunders.

Jake was at home. He was not a reassuring person to meet, nor one of
whom a cautious man would care to ask many favors. His face was
villainous and did not pretend to be anything else. He was glad to
lend the hammer and the gun, he said.

September days had a way of being baking hot along the Little
Missouri, and even in the late afternoon the air was usually like a
blast from a furnace. But the country which appeared stark and
dreadful under the straight noon sun, at dusk took on a magic more
enticing, it seemed, because it grew out of such forbidding
desolation. The buttes, protruding like buttresses from the ranges
that bordered the river, threw lengthening shadows across the grassy
draws. Each gnarled cedar in the ravines took on color and
personality. The blue of the sky grew soft and deep.

They climbed to the top of a butte where the road passed between gray
cliffs, then steeply down on the other side into the cool greenness of
a timbered bottom where the grass was high underfoot and the
cottonwoods murmured and twinkled overhead. They passed a log
ranch-house known as the "Custer Trail," in memory of the ill-fated
expedition which had camped in the adjacent flat seven years before.
Howard Eaton and his brothers lived there and kept open house for a
continuous stream of Eastern sportsmen. A mile beyond, they forded the
river; a quarter-mile farther on, they forded it again, passed through
a belt of cottonwoods into a level valley