better
things of life ought to stick together and not sink to the level of
common people."

"Now, Mrs. Ferris," remarked Merrifield indignantly, "ain't that a
ree-di-culous woman? Ain't she now?"

Mrs. Ferris laughed until the tears came to her eyes. "I think she
is," she admitted.

Merrifield carried the news triumphantly to the "boys," and the new
bride's standing was established. She became a sort of "honorary
member-once-removed" of the friendly order of cowpunchers, associated
with them by a dozen ties of human understanding, yet, by her sex,
removed to a special niche apart, where the most irresponsible did not
fail, drunk or sober, to do her deference. For her ears language was
washed and scrubbed. Men who appeared to have forgotten what shame
was, were ashamed to have Mrs. Ferris know how unashamed they could
be. Poor old Van Zander, whom every one in Billings County had seen
"stewed to the gills," pleaded with Joe not to tell Mrs. Ferris that
Joe had seen him drunk.

It became a custom, in anticipation of a "shivaree," to send round
word to Mrs. Ferris not to be afraid, the shooting was all in fun.

A woman would have been less than human who had failed to feel at home
in the midst of such evidences of warmth and friendly consideration.
Joe Ferris's store became more than ever the center of life in Medora,
as the wife whom Joe had brought from New Brunswick made his friends
her friends and made her home theirs also.

She had been in Medora less than a month when news came from Roosevelt
that he was getting ready to start West and would arrive on the Little
Missouri sometime about the middle of March. Joe's wife knew how to
get along with "boys" who were Joe's kind, but here was a different
sort of proposition confronting her. Here was a wealthy, and, in a
modest way, a noted, man coming to sleep under her roof and eat at her
table. The prospect appalled her. Possibly she had visions, for all
that Joe could say, of a sort of male Mrs. Cummins. "I was scairt to
death," she admitted later.

Roosevelt arrived on March 18th. His "city get-up" was slightly
distracting, for it had a perfection of style that Mrs. Joe was not
accustomed to; but his delight at his return to the Bad Lands was so
frank and so expressive that her anxiety began to dissolve in her
wonder at this vehement and attractive being who treated her like a
queen. He jumped in the air, clicking his heels together like a boy
let unexpectedly o