who had been weak in body and subject to racking illnesses had in
these three years developed a constitution as tough and robust as an
Indian's. He had achieved something beside this. Living, talking,
working, facing danger, and suffering hardships with the Sewalls and
the Dows, the Ferrises and the Langs, and Merrifield and Packard and
Bill Dantz and Hell-Roaring Bill Jones, and countless other stalwart
citizens of the Bad Lands, he had come very close to the heart of the
"plain American." He loved the companions of his joys and labors, and
they in turn regarded him with an admiration and devotion which was
all the deeper because of the amazing fact that he had come from the
ranks of the "dudes."

They admired him for his courage and his feats of endurance, but,
being tender-hearted themselves, they loved him for his tenderness,
which had a way that they approved, of expressing itself, not in
words, but in deeds. Bill Sewall had a little girl of three, "a
forlorn little mite," as Roosevelt described her to "Bamie," and it
was Roosevelt who sent the word East which transported the child, that
had neither playmates nor toys, into a heaven of delight with picture
blocks and letter blocks, a little horse and a rag doll.

His warm human sympathy found expression in a dramatic manner a day or
two before his departure late that August for the Coeur d'Alenes. He
was rounding up some cattle with his men near Sentinel Butte, twenty
miles west of Medora, when word came that a cowpuncher named George
Frazier had been struck by lightning and killed, and that his body had
been taken to Medora. Frazier belonged to the "outfit" of the Marquis
de Mores, but he had worked for Roosevelt two years previous, digging
post-holes with George Myers in June, 1884. Roosevelt knew that the
man had no relatives in that part of the world, to see that a fitting
disposition of the body was made, and instantly expressed his
determination to take charge of the arrangements for the funeral.

"We will flag the next train and go to Medora," he said.

The next train, they knew, was "No. 2," the finest train running over
the road. It did not, on the surface, look probable that it would stop
at a desolate spot in the prairie to permit a handful of cowboys to
get on. "They won't stop here for nuthin'," one of the men insisted.
"By Godfrey, they'll have to stop!" Roosevelt retorted, and sent a man
down to the track to flag the train.

The engineer saw t