ide the friend of the Marquis whom he had so successfully bled.

"Come outside a minute," he said.

The friend went.

"My memory is getting damn poor," declared the carpenter.

"How much do you want?"

"Oh, five hundred."

He got it. The trial proceeded.

One juror was, for no reason which they themselves could adequately
analyze, withdrawn by the Marquis's attorneys at the last minute. He
told one of them years after that, if he had been allowed to serve, he
would have "hung up the jury until some one had passed him ten
thousand." It was a close shave.

Two items in the testimony were notably significant. One was
contributed by the Marquis: "O'Donald and Luffsey discharged all the
barrels of their revolvers," he said, "and then began to shoot with
their rifles." The other item was contributed by Sheriff Harmon, who
arrested O'Donald and "Dutch Wannigan" immediately after the affray.
He testified "that the guns and pistols of the hunters were loaded
when handed to him."

The jury made no attempt to pick its way through contradictions such
as this, and returned to the court room after an absence of ten
minutes with a verdict of "not guilty."

[Illustration: The Bad Lands near Medora. Showing the house of the
Marquis de Mores.]

The Marquis's acquittal did not, it seems, mollify his bitterness
toward Roosevelt. He prided himself on his judgment, as he had once
informed Howard Eaton, but his judgment had a habit of basing its
conclusions on somewhat nebulous premises. Two or three bits of
circumstantial evidence had served to convince the Marquis definitely
that Roosevelt had been the impelling force behind the prosecution.
The fact that "Dutch Wannigan" was an employee of Roosevelt's, in
itself, not unnaturally, perhaps, stirred the Marquis's ire. When he
was told, however, that "Dutch Wannigan," before departing for the
trial at Mandan, had received money from Joe Ferris, his suspicions
appeared confirmed, for Joe was known to be Roosevelt's close friend,
and it was an open secret that Roosevelt was financing Joe's venture
in storekeeping. If his suspicions needed further confirmation, they
seemed to get it when a little, black-haired Irishman, named Jimmie
McShane, otherwise known as "Dynamite Jimmie," received a sum of money
from Joe Ferris and appeared at the trial as the first witness for the
prosecution. On the surface the case against Roosevelt was convincing,
and the Marquis evidently did not dip be