hot-headed, impulsive; in Miles City, in 1887, there was
the same vigor, the same drive but with them a poise which the younger
man had utterly lacked. On the first day of the meeting he made a
speech asking for the elimination, from a report which had been
submitted, of a passage condemning the Interstate Commerce Law. The
house was against him almost to a man, for the cattlemen considered
the law an abominable infringement of their rights.

In the midst of the discussion, a stockman named Pat Kelly, who was
incidentally the Democratic boss of Michigan, rose in his seat. "Can
any gentleman inform me," he inquired, "why the business of this
meeting should be held up by the talk of a broken-down New York State
politician?"

There was a moment's silence. The stockmen expected a storm. There was
none. Roosevelt took up the debate as though nothing had interrupted
it. The man from Michigan visibly "flattened out." Meanwhile,
Roosevelt won his point.

He spent most of that summer at Elkhorn Ranch.

Merrifield had, like Joe Ferris, gone East to New Brunswick for a
wife, and the bride, who, like Joe's wife, was a woman of education
and charm, brought new life to the deserted house on Elkhorn bottom.
But something was gone out of the air of the Bad Lands; the glow that
had burned in men's eyes had vanished. It had been a country of dreams
and it was now a country of ruins; and the magic of the old days could
not be re-created.

The cattle industry of the Bad Lands, for the time being, was dead;
and the pulses of the little town at the junction of the railroad and
the Little Missouri began to flutter fitfully and ominously. Only the
indomitable pluck of the Marquis and his deathless fecundity in
conceiving new schemes of unexampled magnitude kept it alive at all.
The Marquis's ability to create artificial respiration and to make the
dead take on the appearance of life never showed to better effect than
in that desolate year of 1887. His plan to slaughter cattle on the
range for consumption along the line of the Northern Pacific was to
all intents and purposes shattered by the autumn of 1885. But no one,
it appears, recognized that fact, least of all the Marquis. He changed
a detail here, a detail there; then, charged with a new enthusiasm, he
talked success to every reporter who came to interview him, flinging
huge figures about with an ease that a Rockefeller might envy; and the
newspapers from coast to coast called him o