ed figure ride off beside the rattling
buckboard. "He is the most extraordinary man I have ever met," he said
to Lincoln. "I shall be surprised if the world does not hear from him
one of these days."

III

Some came for lungs, and some for jobs,
And some for booze at Big-mouth Bob's,
Some to punch cattle, some to shoot,
Some for a vision, some for loot;
Some for views and some for vice,
Some for faro, some for dice;
Some for the joy of a galloping hoof,
Some for the prairie's spacious roof,
Some to forget a face, a fan,
Some to plumb the heart of man;
Some to preach and some to blow,
Some to grab and some to grow,
Some in anger, some in pride,
Some to taste, before they died,
Life served hot and _a la cartee_--
And some to dodge a necktie-party.

From _Medora Nights_

Roosevelt remained in Little Missouri to wait for news from Merrifield
and Sylvane, who had departed for Minnesota a day or two previous.
Possibly it occurred to him that a few days in what was said to be the
worst "town" on the Northern Pacific might have their charm.

Roosevelt was enough of a boy rather to relish things that were
blood-curdling. Years after, a friend of Roosevelt's, who had himself
committed almost every crime in the register, remarked; in commenting
in a tone of injured morality on Roosevelt's frank regard for a
certain desperate character, that "Roosevelt had a weakness for
murderers." The reproach has a delightful suggestiveness. Whether it
was merited or not is a large question on which Roosevelt himself
might have discoursed with emphasis and humor. If he actually did
possess such a weakness, Little Missouri and the boom town were fully
able to satisfy it.

"Little Missouri was a terrible place," remarked, years after, a man
who had had occasion to study it. It was, in fact, "wild and woolly"
to an almost grotesque degree, and the boom town was if anything a
little cruder than its twin across the river. The men who had drifted
into Medora after the news was noised abroad that "a crazy Frenchman"
was making ready to scatter millions there, were, many of them,
outcasts of society, reckless, greedy, and conscienceless; fugitives
from justice with criminal records, and gunmen who lived by crooked
gambling and thievery of every sort. The best of those who had come
that summer to seek adventure and fortune on the banks of the Little
Missouri we