shop for a hair clipper, and proceeded
to operate in the following manner: first he clipped off one side of
Finnegan's beard and moustache, and after that removed his long curls
on one side, being careful to leave a stair pattern all up the side of
his head. He concluded operations by removing the fringes upon one
side of his buckskin shirt. Next morning Finnegan sobered up and when
he saw himself in the looking-glass he went bersark."

"His heart got bad," Bill Dantz remarked, taking up the narrative. "He
laid down in a fringe of brush near the Marquis's store, where he
could command a clear view of the town, and began to pump lead into
everything in sight."

The first shot was aimed at the office of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_.
Whether or not "Redhead" Finnegan had it in for the stern moralist who
insisted that drunken criminals should be punished, not only for their
crimes, but also for their drunkenness, is a question on which the
records are dark. Fisher was shaving in Packard's office and the shot
broke the mirror in front of him. Packard, who was on horseback on the
bluff behind Medora, saw Fisher dash out of the shack, and rushed to
the scene of conflict. His horse had knocked Finnegan senseless
before the desperado knew that the Chief of Police was on his trail.
When Finnegan came to he was in a box-car, under lock and seal. But a
friend released him, and the man from Bitter Creek made his way down
the river to his cabin.

The population of Medora had not relished Finnegan's bombardment, and
suggestions concerning a possible "necktie party" began to make
themselves heard. Finnegan evidently decided that the time had come
for him, and the men who lived with him in his ill-kept shack, to
leave the country. Travel by horse or foot was impossible. The boat
they owned was a miserable, leaky affair. The Elkhorn skiff had
evidently appeared to Finnegan and Company in the nature of a godsend.

[Illustration: Wilmot Dow and Theodore Roosevelt (1886).]

[Illustration: The piazza at Elkhorn. Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt.]

Roosevelt's anger boiled up at the theft of the boat and he ran to
saddle Manitou. But Sewall restrained him, pointing out that if the
country was impassable for the horses of the thieves, it was no less
impassable for the horses of the pursuers. He declared that he and Dow
could build a flat-bottomed boat in three days. Roosevelt told him to
go ahead. With the saddle band--his forty or fifty cow-