escape from the devils which the old ones had hatched as they burst,
had its attractive side.

"The Medora Stage and Forwarding Company," the Dickinson _Press_
announced on May 16th, "is a total wreck." It was; and shortly after,
Van Driesche, most admirable of valets and now the Marquis's private
secretary, went with "Johnny" Goodall, foreman of the Marquis's ranch,
to Deadwood to salvage what they could from the rocks.

But two weeks later the Marquis had a new dream. The _Press_ announced
it; "The Marquis de Mores believes he has discovered kaoline, a clay
from which the finest pottery is made, near the town of Medora." The
inference is clear. If Medora could not rival Chicago, it might easily
rival Sevres or Copenhagen.

For all the Marquis's endeavors to outface fortune, however, and to
win success somewhere, somehow, beyond this valley of a hundred
failures, the Nemesis which every man creates out of his limitations
was drawing her net slowly and irresistibly about him. He had no
friends in Medora. His foreign ways and his alien attitude of mind
kept him, no doubt against his own desires, outside the warm circle of
that very human society. He was an aristocrat, and he did not
understand the democratic individualism of the men about him. "The
Marquis," as one of his associates later explained, "always had the
idea of being the head of something or other, and tried to run
everything he had anything to do with."

The Marquis loved the Bad Lands; there was no question about that. "I
like this country," he said to J. W. Foley, who became his
superintendent about this time, "because there is room to turn around
without stepping on the feet of others." The trouble was, however,
that with a man of the Marquis's qualities and limitations, the Desert
of Sahara would scarcely have been wide enough and unsettled enough to
keep him content with his own corner of it. He seemed fated to step on
other people's toes, possibly because at bottom he did not greatly
care if he did step on them when they got in the way.

"De Mores," said Lincoln Lang, "seemed to think that some sort of
divine right reposed in him to absorb the entire Little Missouri
country and everything in it."

He had king's blood in him, in fact, and the genealogy which he
solemnly revealed to Foley reached into an antiquity staggeringly
remote, and made Bourbons and Guelphs, Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs
appear by comparison as very shoddy parvenus. He claim