try to get away, you'll be all right.
If you try anything we'll shoot you."

This was language which the thieves understood, and they accepted the
situation. Sewall took an old double-barrel ten-gauge Parker shot-gun
and stood guard.

Dow was a little uneasy about the gun.

"The right-hand barrel goes off very easily," he warned Sewall. "It's
gone off with me several times when I did not mean it to, and if you
are going to cover the men with it you better be careful."

"I'll be careful," remarked Sewall in his deliberate fashion, "but if
it happens to go off, it will make more difference to them than it
will to me."

They camped that night where they were. Having captured their men,
they were somewhat in a quandary how to keep them. The cold was so
intense that to tie them tightly hand and foot meant in all likelihood
freezing both hands and feet off during the night; there was no use
tying them at all, moreover, unless they tied them tightly enough to
stop in part the circulation. Roosevelt took away everything from the
thieves that might have done service as a weapon, and corded his
harvest in some bedding well out of reach of the thieves.

"Take off your boots!" he ordered.

It had occurred to him that bare feet would make any thought of flight
through that cactus country extremely uninviting. The men surrendered
their boots. Roosevelt gave them a buffalo robe in return and the
prisoners crawled under it, thoroughly cowed.

Captors and captives started downstream in the two boats the next
morning. The cold was bitter. Toward the end of the day they were
stopped by a small ice-jam which moved forward slowly only to stop
them again. They ran the boats ashore to investigate, and found that
the great Ox-Bow jam, which had moved past Elkhorn a week ago, had
come to a halt and now effectually barred their way. They could not
possibly paddle upstream against the current; they could not go on
foot, for to do so would have meant the sacrifice of all their
equipment. They determined to follow the slow-moving mass of ice, and
hope, meanwhile, for a thaw.

They continued to hope; day after weary day they watched in vain for
signs of the thaw that would not come, breaking camp in the morning
on one barren point, only to pitch camp again in the evening on
another, guarding the prisoners every instant, for the trouble they
were costing made the captors even more determined that, whatever was
lost, Finnegan and Company