.
Roosevelt with the thieves started for the nearest jail, which was at
Dickinson.

It was a desolate two days' journey through a bleak waste of burnt,
blackened prairie, and over rivers so rough with ice that they had to
take the wagon apart to cross. Roosevelt did not dare abate his watch
over the thieves for an instant, for they knew they were drawing close
to jail and might conceivably make a desperate break any minute. He
could not trust the driver. There was nothing for it but to pack the
men into the wagon and to walk behind with the Winchester.

Hour after hour he trudged through the ankle-deep mud, hungry, cold,
and utterly fatigued, but possessed by the dogged resolution to carry
the thing through, whatever the cost. They put up at the squalid hut
of a frontier granger overnight, but Roosevelt, weary as he was, did
not dare to sleep. He crowded the prisoners into the upper bunk and
sat against the cabin door all night, with the Winchester across his
knees.

Roosevelt's journal gives the stages of his progress.

April 7. Worked down to C Diamond Ranch. Two prairie chickens.

April 8. Rode to Killdeer Mountains to arrange for a wagon
which I hired.

April 9. Walked captives to Killdeer Mountains.

April 10. Drove captives in wagon to Captain Brown's ranch.

"What I can't make out," said the ranchman from the Killdeers, with a
puzzled expression on his deeply wrinkled, tough old face, which
Sewall said "looked like the instep of an old boot that had lain out
in the weather for years,"--"what I can't make out is why you make all
this fuss instead of hanging 'em offhand."

Roosevelt grinned, and the following evening, after a
three-hundred-mile journey, deposited three men who had defied the
laws of Dakota in the jail at Dickinson.

He was not a vision of beauty as he emerged from the jail to find a
place to scrape off two weeks' accumulation of Dakota mud. His feet
were in bad shape from the long march through the gumbo, and he asked
the first man he met where he could find a physician. By a curious
coincidence the man he addressed happened to be the only physician
within a hundred and fifty miles in any direction. It was Dr.
Stickney.

They had heard of each other, and Roosevelt was glad, for more reasons
than one, to follow him to his office. For the quiet man with the
twinkling eyes, who combined the courage and the humanness of a
cowpuncher with the unselfish devotion of