lation to me," said Willis long afterward. "He was so
well posted on everything. He was the first man that I had ever met
that really knew anything. I had just been with a lot of roughnecks,
cowpunchers, horse-thieves, and that sort. Roosevelt would explain
things to me. He told me a lot of things."

Among other things, Roosevelt told Willis some of his experiences in
the New York Assembly. Huge sums had been offered him to divert him
from this course or that which certain interests regarded as dangerous
to their freedom of action. To Willis it was amazing that Roosevelt
should not have accepted what was offered to him, and he began to be
aware of certain standards of virtue and honor.

To Roosevelt the trip was a splendid adventure; to Willis it proved a
turning-point in his life.[23]

[Footnote 23: When Roosevelt came to Helena in 1911,
John Willis was one of the crowd that greeted him.
Willis clapped Roosevelt on the back familiarly. "I made
a man out of you," he cried. Quick as a flash, came
Roosevelt's retort: "Yes. John made a man out of me, but
I made a Christian out of John."]

Roosevelt returned to Elkhorn the middle of September, to find that
Sewall and Dow had come to a momentous decision. Dow had, during his
absence, taken a train-load of cattle to Chicago, and had found that
the best price he was able to secure for the hundreds of cattle he had
taken to the market there was less by ten dollars a head than the sum
it had cost to raise and transport them. Sewall and Dow had "figured
things over," and had come to the conclusion that the sooner they
terminated their contract with Roosevelt the less money he would lose.
They recognized that they themselves were safe enough, for by the
"one-sided trade," as Sewall called it, which Roosevelt had made with
them, they were to share in whatever profits there were, and in case
there were no profits were to receive wages. But neither of them
enjoyed the part he was playing in what seemed to both of them a piece
of hopeless business.

[Illustration: Ferris and Merrifield on the ruins of the first shack
at Elkhorn. It was this shack which Maunders claimed.]

[Illustration: Corrals at Elkhorn. Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt.]

Roosevelt himself had been wondering whether it was wise to allow the
two backwoodsmen to continue in an enterprise in which the future was
so clouded and