dier with a club."

It was characteristic of Roosevelt that, in spite of his detestation
of the race, he should have been meticulously fair to the individual
members of it who happened to cross his path. He made it a point, both
at the Maltese Cross and at Elkhorn, that the Indians who drifted in
and out at intervals should be treated as fairly as the whites,
neither wronging them himself nor allowing others to wrong them.

Mrs. Maddox, the maker of the famous buckskin shirt, who was an
extraordinary woman in more ways than one, had her own very individual
notions concerning the rights of the Indians. When Roosevelt stopped
at her shack one day, he found three Sioux Indians there, evidently
trustworthy, self-respecting men. Mrs. Maddox explained to him that
they had been resting there waiting for dinner, when a white man had
come along and tried to run off with their horses. The Indians had
caught the man, but, after retaking their horses and depriving him of
his gun, had let him go.

"I don't see why they let him go," she exclaimed. "I don't believe in
stealing Indians' horses any more than white folks', so I told 'em
they could go along and hang him, I'd never cheep! Anyhow I won't
charge them anything for their dinner," she concluded.

The psychology of the Indians was curious, and it took time
occasionally for their better qualities to reveal themselves. As
chairman of the Little Missouri Stock Association, Roosevelt on one
occasion recovered two horses which had been stolen from an old
Indian. The Indian took them, muttering something that sounded like
"Um, um," and without a word or a gesture of gratitude rode away with
his property. Roosevelt felt cheap, as though he had done a service
which had not been appreciated; but a few days later the old Indian
came to him and silently laid in his arms a hide bearing an elaborate
painting of the battle of the Little Big Horn.

The depredations of the Indians in the autumn of 1885 made concerted
action on the part of the cattlemen inevitable. The damage which the
fires did to the cattle ranges themselves was not extensive, for the
devastation was confined in the main to a strip of country about
eighteen miles on either side of the railroad's right of way, and the
ranches were situated from twenty-five to eighty miles from the track.
The real harm which the fires did was in the destruction of the
"drives" to the railroad. Driving cattle tended, under the best
conditio