to start once more for the
farther shore, his boat was gone. It was Bill Sewall who made the
discovery. He was not a man easily excited, and he took a certain
quiet satisfaction in sitting down to breakfast and saying nothing
while Roosevelt held forth concerning the fate which was awaiting the
mountain lions.

"I guess we won't go to-day," said Sewall, at length, munching the
last of his breakfast.

"Why not?" Roosevelt demanded.

Sewall showed him a red woolen mitten with a leather palm which he had
picked up on the ice, and the end of the rope by which the boat had
been tied. It had been cut with a sharp knife. "Some one has gone off
with the boat," he said.

Roosevelt had no doubt who had stolen the boat, for the thief or
thieves could scarcely have come by land without being detected. There
was only one other boat on the Little Missouri, and that was a small
flat-bottom scow owned by three hard characters who lived in a shack
twenty miles above Elkhorn. They were considered suspicious persons,
and Roosevelt and his men had shrewdly surmised for some time that
they were considering the advisability of "skipping the country"
before the vigilantes got after them. On inquiry they found that the
shack which the men had occupied was deserted.

The leader of the three was a stocky, ill-looking individual named
Finnegan, with fiery red hair which fell to his shoulders, gaining for
him the nickname "Redhead" Finnegan; a brick-red complexion, and an
evil reputation. He was a surly, quarrelsome, unkempt creature, and
when he came into a saloon with his stumbling gait (as he frequently
did), self-respecting cowboys had a way of leaving him in full
possession of the field, not because they feared him, but because they
did not care to be seen in his presence. He boasted that he was "from
Bitter Creek, where the farther up you went the worse people got," and
he lived "at the fountain head." He had blown into Medora early in
March and had promptly gone to Bill Williams's saloon and filled up on
Bill Williams's peculiarly wicked brand of "conversation juice."

"Well, it laid him out all right enough," remarked Lincoln Lang,
telling about it in after years. "I can testify to that, since I was
right there and saw the whole thing. Johnny Goodall, who was some
practical joker at that time, went into the bar and saw Finnegan lying
on the floor. He got some help and moved him to the billiard table.
Then Goodall sent to the barber