the heaped-up piles of ice, rose the scarred
buttes, weather-worn into fantastic shapes and strangely blotched with
spots of brown and yellow, purple and red. Here and there the black
coal-veins that ran through them were aflame, gleaming weirdly through
the dusk as the three men made their camp that night.

The weather was cold and an icy wind blew in their faces.

"We're like to have it in our faces all day," remarked Will Dow
cheerfully, paddling at the bow.

"We can't, unless it's the crookedest wind in Dakota," answered
Sewall, who was steering.

They followed the river's course hither and thither in and out among
the crags, east and west, north and south.

"It _is_ the crookedest wind in Dakota," muttered Sewall to himself.

The thermometer dropped to zero, but there was firewood in plenty, and
they found prairie fowl and deer for their evening meals. Late the
third day, rounding a bend, they saw their boat moored against the
bank. Out of the bushes, a little way back, the smoke of a camp-fire
curled up through the frosty air.

"There's your boat!" cried Sewall, who had, in his own phrase, been
"looking sharp." "Get your guns ready. I'll handle the boat."

They flung off their heavy coats. Sewall was in the stern, steering
the boat toward shore. Dow was at Roosevelt's side in the bow.
Roosevelt saw the grim, eager look in their eyes, and his own eyes
gleamed.

He was the first ashore, leaping out of the boat as it touched the
shore ice and running up behind a clump of bushes, so as to cover the
landing of the others. Dow was beside him in an instant. Sewall was
fastening the boat.

It was rather funny business [Sewall wrote his brother
subsequently] for one of the men was called a pretty hard
ticket. He was also a shooting man. If he was in the bushes
and saw us first he was liable to make it very unhealthy for
us.

Roosevelt and Dow peered through the bushes. Beside a fire in a grove
of young cottonwoods a solitary figure was sitting; his guns were on
the ground at his side.

"Hands up!"

Roosevelt and Dow rushed in on the man, who was not slow to do as he
was told. He was a halfwitted German named Wharfenberger, a tool of
rogues more keen than he, whom Sewall later described as "an oldish
man who drank so much poor whiskey that he had lost most of the
manhood he ever possessed."

They searched the old man, taking his gun and his knives from him, and
telling him that