lion
Creek on the one side to the mouth of Spring Creek on the other, then
followed the course of the Little Missouri southward once more. They
met the old Fort Keogh trail where it crossed the river by the ruins
of the stage station, and for three or four miles followed its deep
ruts westward, then turned south again. They came at last to a
crossing where the sunset glowed bright in their faces along the bed
of a shallow creek that emptied into the Little Missouri. The creek
was the Little Cannonball. In a cluster of hoary cottonwoods, fifty
yards from the point where creek and river met, they found Lang's
cabin.

Lang turned out to be stocky, blue-eyed, and aggressively Scotch,
wearing spectacles and a pair of "mutton-chop" whiskers. He had
himself just arrived, having come from town by the longer trail over
the prairie to the west in order to avoid the uncertain river
crossings which had a way of proving fatal to a heavily laden wagon.
His welcome was hearty. With him was a boy of sixteen, fair-haired and
blue-eyed, whom he introduced as his son Lincoln. The boy remembered
ever after the earnestness of the tenderfoot's "Delighted to meet
you."

* * * * *

Roosevelt talked with Gregor Lang until midnight. The Scotchman was a
man of education with views of his own on life and politics, and if he
was more than a little dogmatic, he was unquestionably sincere.

He had an interesting story to tell. A year or less ago Henry
Gorringe, Abram S. Hewitt, of New York, and a noted London financier
named Sir John Pender, who had been instrumental in laying the first
successful Atlantic cable, had, in the course of a journey through the
Northwest, become interested in the cattle business and, in May, 1883,
bought the Cantonment buildings at Little Missouri with the object of
making them the headquarters of a trading corporation which they
called the Little Missouri Land and Stock Company. The details they
left to the enterprising naval officer who had proposed the scheme.
Gorringe had meanwhile struck up a friendship with Frank Vine. This
was not unnatural, for Frank was the social center of Little Missouri
and was immensely popular. What is almost incredible, however, is
that, blinded evidently by Frank's social graces, he took the genial
and slippery post-trader into the syndicate, and appointed him
superintendent. It was possibly because he did not concur altogether
in this selection that Pe