e, they saw two or three blacktail deer, and a
little later they came upon a single buck. They crept to within two
hundred yards. Roosevelt fired, and missed. There was every reason why
he should miss, for the distance was great and the rain made a clear
aim impossible; but it happened that, as the deer bounded away, Joe
Ferris fired at a venture, and brought him down. It was a shot in a
thousand.

Roosevelt flung his gun on the ground. "By Godfrey!" he exclaimed.
"I'd give anything in the world if I could shoot like that!"

His rage at himself was so evident that Joe, being tender-hearted, was
almost sorry that he had shot so well.

They found no buffalo that day; and returned to Lang's after dusk,
gumbo mud to the eyes.

Of the two, Ferris was the one, it happened, who wrapped himself in
his buffalo robe immediately after supper and went to sleep.
Roosevelt, apparently as fresh and vigorous as he had been when he
started out in the morning, promptly set Gregor Lang to talking about
cattle.

Lang, who had been starved for intellectual companionship, was glad to
talk; and there was much to tell. It was a new country for cattle.
Less than five years before, the Indians had still roamed free and
unmolested over it. A few daring white hunters (carrying each his vial
of poison with which to cheat the torture-stake, in case of capture)
had invaded their hunting-grounds; then a few surveyors; then grading
crews under military guard with their retinue of saloon-keepers and
professional gamblers; then the gleaming rails; then the thundering
and shrieking engines. Eastern sportsmen, finding game plentiful in
the Bad Lands, came to the conclusion that where game could survive in
winter and thrive in summer, cattle could do likewise, and began to
send short-horned stock west over the railroad. A man named Wadsworth
from Minnesota settled twenty miles down the river from Little
Missouri; another named Simpson from Texas established the
"Hash-Knife" brand sixty or seventy miles above. The Eatons and A. D.
Huidekoper, all from Pittsburgh, Sir John Pender from England, Lord
Nugent from Ireland, H. H. Gorringe from New York, came to hunt and
remained in person or by proxy to raise cattle in the new-won prairies
of western Dakota and eastern Montana. These were the first wave.
Henry Boice from New Mexico, Gregor Lang from Scotland, Antoine de
Vallombrosa, Marquis de Mores (very much from France)--these were the
second; young men