should not be lost.

Roosevelt's journal for those days tells the story:

April 1. Captured the three boat-thieves.

April 2. Came on with our prisoners till hung up by ice-jam.

April 3. Hung up by ice.

April 4. Hung up by ice.

April 5. Worked down a couple of miles till again hung up by
ice.

April 6. Worked down a couple of miles again to tail of ice-jam.

Their provisions ran short. They went after game, but there was none
to be seen, no beast or bird, in that barren region. The addition to
their company had made severe inroads on their larder and it was not
long before they were all reduced to unleavened bread made with muddy
water. The days were utterly tedious, and were made only slightly more
bearable for Roosevelt by Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and Matthew
Arnold, interlarded with "The History of the James Brothers," which
the thieves quite properly carried among their belongings. And the
thieves had to be watched every minute, and the wind blew and chilled
them to the bone.

Roosevelt thought that it might be pleasant under certain
circumstances to be either a Dakota sheriff or an Arctic explorer. But
he did not find great joy in being both at the same time.

When the flour was nearly gone, Roosevelt and his men had a
consultation.

"We can't shoot them," said Roosevelt, "and we can't feed them. It
looks to me as though we'd have to let them go."

Sewall disagreed. "The flour'll last a day or two more," he said, "and
it's something to know that if we're punishing ourselves, we're
punishing the thieves also."

"Exactly!" cried Roosevelt. "We'll hold on to them!"

The next day Sewall, on foot, searched the surrounding region far and
wide for a ranch, and found none. The day after, Roosevelt and Dow
covered the country on the other side of the river, and at last came
on an outlying cow-camp of the Diamond C Ranch, where Roosevelt
secured a horse.

It was a wiry, rebellious beast.

"The boss ain't no bronco-buster," remarked Dow, apologetically, to
the cowboys.

But "the boss" managed to get on the horse and to stay on. Dow
returned to Sewall and the thieves, while Roosevelt rode fifteen miles
to a ranch at the edge of the Killdeer Mountains. There he secured
supplies and a prairie-schooner, hiring the ranchman himself, a rugged
old plainsman, to drive it to the camp by the ice-bound river. Sewall
and Dow, now thoroughly provisioned, remained with the boats