er with two of my men
in a boat we have built while indoors, after some
horse-thieves who took our boat the other night to get out
of the country with; but they have such a start we have very
little chance of catching them. I shall take Matthew Arnold
along; I have had no chance at all to read it as yet.

The next day he was writing to his sister "Bamie." He was evidently
convinced that she would worry about him if she knew the nature of the
adventure on which he was about to embark, for in his letter he
protests almost too much concerning the utterly unexciting nature of
his activities:

Since I wrote you life has settled down into its usual
monotonous course here. It is not as rough as I had
expected; I have clean sheets, the cooking is pretty good,
and above all I have a sitting-room with a great fireplace
and a rocking-chair, which I use as my study.

The walking is horrible; all slippery ice or else deep,
sticky mud; but as we are very short of meat I generally
spend three or four hours a day tramping round after
prairie chickens, and one day last week I shot a deer. The
rest of the time I read or else work at Benton, which is
making very slow progress; writing is to me intensely
irksome work.

In a day or two, when the weather gets a little milder, I
expect to start down the river in a boat, to go to Mandan;
the trip ought to take a week or ten days, more or less. It
will be good fun. My life on the ranch this summer is not
going to be an especially adventurous or exciting one; and
my work will be mainly one of supervision so that there will
be no especial hardship or labor.

I really enjoy being with the men out here; they could be
more exactly described as my retainers than as anything
else; and I am able to keep on admirable terms with them and
yet avoid the familiarity which would assuredly breed
contempt.

On the 30th of March the blizzard which had been raging a day or two
moderated, and Roosevelt, hoping a thaw had set in, determined to set
off after the thieves. They left Rowe as guard over the ranch and "the
womenfolks," and with their unwieldy but water-tight craft, laden with
two weeks' provision of flour, coffee, and bacon, started to drift
down the river.

The region through which they passed was bare and bleak and terrible.
On either side, beyond