full of the possibilities of disaster. He himself
might win through, and he might not. The thing was a gamble, in any
event. He could afford to take the risk. Sewall and Dow could not.

He had written "Bamie," earlier in the summer, that he was "curious to
see how the fall sales would come out." Dow's report completely
satisfied his curiosity.

He called the two men into his room. He told them that he too had been
"figuring up things." He would stand by his agreement, he said, if,
facing an uncertain outcome, they wished to remain. But, if they were
willing, he thought they had "better quit the business and go back."

Sewall and Dow did not hesitate. They said they would go back.

"I never wanted to fool away anybody else's money," Sewall added.
"Never had any of my own to fool away."

"How soon can you go?" asked Roosevelt.

Sewall turned and went into the kitchen "to ask the womenfolks." It
happened that three or four weeks previous the population of Elkhorn
had been increased by two. Baby sons had arrived in the same week in
the families of both Sewall and Dow. The ministrations of Dr. Stickney
had not been available, and the two mothers had survived because they
had the constitutions of frontierswomen rather than because they had
the benefit of the nursing of the termagant who was Jerry Tompkins's
wife. The babies--known to their families, and to the endless
succession of cowboys who came from near and far to inspect them, as
"the Bad Lands babies"--were just six weeks old.

"The womenfolks say they can go in three weeks," Sewall reported.

"Three weeks from to-day," answered Roosevelt, "we go."

And so the folks from Maine, who had made a rough and simple house in
the wilderness into a home, began to gather together their belongings
and pack up. Wise old Bill Sewall had been right.

"You'll come to feel different," he had said, two years before, when
Roosevelt had been lonely and despondent. "And then you won't want to
stay here."

Life, which for a while had seemed to Roosevelt so gray and dismal,
had, in fact, slowly taken on new color. At times he had imagined that
Dakota might satisfy him for a permanent residence, but that fancy,
born of grief and disappointment, had vanished in the radiance of a
new happiness. He had become engaged to Edith Carow, and he knew that
the world for him and for her was that busy world where his friends
were, and hers, and where he and she had been boy and girl together