Bill Williams's saloon, and Howard Eaton's banjo. The
banjo traveled in state in the mess-wagon of the "Custer Trail," and
hour on hour, about the camp-fire on the round-up, Eaton would play to
the dreamy delight of the weary men. The leading spirit of those
evenings was Bill Dantz, who knew a hundred songs by heart, and could
spin an actual happening into a yarn so thrilling and so elaborate in
every detail that no one could tell precisely where the foundation of
fact ended and the Arabian dome and minaret of iridescent fancy began.

Roosevelt found the cowboys excellent companions. They were a
picturesque crew with their broad felt hats, their flannel shirts of
various colors, overlaid with an enamel of dust and perspiration,
baked by the Dakota sun, their bright silk handkerchiefs knotted
round the neck, their woolly "shaps," their great silver spurs, their
loosely hanging cartridge-belts, their ominous revolvers. Roosevelt
was struck by the rough courtesy with which the men treated each
other. There was very little quarreling or fighting, due, Roosevelt
suspected, to the fact that all the men were armed; for, it seemed,
that when a quarrel was likely to end fatally, men rather hesitated
about embarking upon it. The moral tone of the round-up camp seemed to
Roosevelt rather high. There was a real regard for truthfulness, a
firm insistence on the sanctity of promises, and utter contempt for
meanness and cowardice and dishonesty and hypocrisy and the
disposition to shirk. The cowpuncher was a potential cattle-owner and
good citizen, and if he went wild on occasion it was largely because
he was so exuberantly young. In years he was generally a boy, often
under twenty. But he did the work of a man, and he did it with
singular conscientiousness and the spirit less of an employee than of
a member of an order bound by vows, unspoken but accepted. He obeyed
orders without hesitation, though it were to mount a bucking bronco or
"head off" a stampede. He worked without complaint in a smother of
dust and cattle fumes at temperatures ranging as high as 136 degrees;
or, snow-blinded and frozen, he "rode line" for hours on end when the
thermometer was fifty or more below zero. He was in constant peril of
his life from the horns of milling cattle or the antics of a "mean"
horse. Roosevelt was immensely drawn to the sinewy, hardy, and
self-reliant adventurers; and they in turn liked him.

Life in the camps was boisterous and the la