re men who cared little for their personal safety, courting
danger wherever it beckoned, careless of life and limb, reticent of
speech and swift of action, light-hearted and altogether human. They
were the adventurous and unfettered spirits of hundreds of communities
whom the restrictions of respectable society had galled. Here they
were, elbowing each other in a little corner of sagebrush country
where there was little to do and much whiskey to drink; and the hand
of the law was light and far away.

[Illustration: Roosevelt in 1883.]

[Illustration: Medora in the winter of 1883-84. The office and
company-store of the Marquis de Mores.]

Somewhere, hundreds of miles to the south, there was a United States
marshal; somewhere a hundred and fifty miles to the east there was a
sheriff. Neither Medora nor Little Missouri had any representative
of the law whatsoever, no government or even a shadow of
government. The feuds that arose were settled by the parties involved
in the ancient manner of Cain.

Of the heterogeneous aggregation of desperate men that made up the
population of the frontier settlement, Jake Maunders, the man who had
lent Roosevelt a hammer and a buffalo-gun, was, by all odds, the most
prominent and the least trustworthy.

He had been one of the first to settle at Little Missouri, and for a
while had lived in the open as a hunter. But the influx of tourists
and "floaters" had indicated to him a less arduous form of labor. He
guided "tenderfeet," charging exorbitant rates; he gambled
(cautiously); whenever a hunter left the Bad Lands, abandoning his
shack, Maunders claimed it with the surrounding country, and, when a
settler took up land near by, demanded five hundred dollars for his
rights. A man whom he owed three thousand dollars had been opportunely
kicked into oblivion by a horse in a manner that was mysterious to men
who knew the ways of horses. He had shot MacNab, the Scotchman, in
cold blood, as he came across the sagebrush flat from Bill Williams's
saloon, kneeling at the corner of his shack with his rifle on his
knee. Another murder was laid directly at his door. But the forces of
law were remote from Little Missouri, and Jake Maunders not only
lived, but flourished.

His enemies said he was "the sneakiest man in town, always figuring on
somebody else doing the dirty work for him, and him reap the
benefits"; but his friends said that "once Jake was your friend, he
was your friend, and that w