e asked for an extra saddle horse.

The three declared they did not have an extra saddle horse.

Roosevelt pleaded. The three Canadians thereupon became suspicious and
announced more firmly than before that they did not have an extra
saddle horse.

Roosevelt protested fervidly that he could not possibly sit still in a
buckboard, driving fifty miles.

"By gosh, he wanted that saddle horse so bad," said Joe a long time
after, "that we were afraid to let him have it. Why, we didn't know
him from Job's off ox. We didn't know but what he'd ride away with it.
But, say, he wanted that horse so blamed bad, that when he see we
weren't going to let him have it, he offered to buy it for cash."

That proposal sounded reasonable to three cautious frontiersmen, and,
before they all turned into their bunks that night, Roosevelt had
acquired a buckskin mare named Nell, and therewith his first physical
hold on the Bad Lands.

II

It rains here when it rains an' it's hot here when it's hot,
The real folks is real folks which city folks is not.
The dark is as the dark was before the stars was made;
The sun is as the sun was before God thought of shade;
An' the prairie an' the butte-tops an' the long winds, when they blow,
Is like the things what Adam knew on his birthday, long ago.

From _Medora Nights_

Joe in the buckboard and Roosevelt on his new acquisition started
south at dawn.

The road to Lang's--or the trail rather, for it consisted of two
wheel-tracks scarcely discernible on the prairie grass and only to be
guessed at in the sagebrush--lay straight south across a succession of
flats, now wide, now narrow, cut at frequent intervals by the winding,
wood-fringed Little Missouri; a region of green slopes and rocky walls
and stately pinnacles and luxuriant acres. Twenty miles south of the
Maltese Cross, they topped a ridge of buttes and suddenly came upon
what might well have seemed, in the hot mist of noonday, a billowy
ocean, held by some magic in suspension. From the trail, which wound
along a red slope of baked clay falling at a sharp angle into a
witch's cauldron of clefts and savage abysses, the Bad Lands stretched
southward to the uncertain horizon. The nearer slopes were like yellow
shores jutting into lavender waters.

West of Middle Butte, that loomed like a purple island on their left,
they took a short cut across the big Ox Bow from the mouth of Bul