where the buttes receded,
leaving a wide stretch of bottom-lands dominated by a solitary peak
known as Chimney Butte, and drew up in front of a log cabin.

Sylvane Ferris and Bill Merrifield were there and greeted Roosevelt
without noticeable enthusiasm. They admitted later that they thought
he was "just another Easterner," and they did not like his glasses at
all. They were both lithe, slender young fellows, wiry and burnt by
the sun, Sylvane twenty-four or thereabouts, Merrifield four years his
senior. Sylvane was shy with a boyish shyness that had a way of
slipping into good-natured grins; Merrifield, the shrewder and more
mature of the two, was by nature reserved and reticent. They did not
have much to say to the "dude" from New York until supper in the
dingy, one-room cabin of cottonwood logs, set on end, gave way to
cards, and in the excitement of "Old Sledge" the ice began to break. A
sudden fierce squawking from the direction of the chicken-shed,
abutting the cabin on the west, broke up the game and whatever
restraint remained; for they all piled out of the house together,
hunting the bobcat which had raided the roost. They did not find the
bobcat, but all sense of strangeness was gone when they returned to
the house, and settling down on bunks and boxes opened their lives to
each other.

The Ferrises and Merrifield were Canadians who had drifted west from
their home in New Brunswick and, coming out to the Dakota frontier two
years previous because the Northern Pacific Railroad carried emigrants
westward for nothing, had remained there because the return journey
cost five cents a mile. They worked the first summer as section hands.
Then, in the autumn, being backwoodsmen, they took a contract to cut
cordwood, and all that winter worked together up the river at Sawmill
Bottom, cutting timber. But Merrifield was an inveterate and skillful
hunter, and while Joe took to doing odd jobs, and Sylvane took to
driving mules at the Cantonment, Merrifield scoured the prairie for
buffalo and antelope and crept through the underbrush of countless
coulees for deer. For two years he furnished the Northern Pacific
dining-cars with venison at five cents a pound. He was a sure shot,
absolutely fearless, and with a debonair gayety that found occasional
expression in odd pranks. Once, riding through the prairie near the
railroad, and being thirsty and not relishing a drink of the alkali
water of the Little Missouri, he flagged an