Читать книгу Roosevelt in the Bad Lands - Hermann Hagedorn - Страница 10
II.
ОглавлениеIt rains here when it rains an' it's hot here when it's hot,
The real folks is real folks which city folks is not.
The dark is as the dark was before the stars was made;
The sun is as the sun was before God thought of shade;
An' the prairie an' the butte-tops an' the long winds, when they blow,
Is like the things what Adam knew on his birthday, long ago.
From Medora Nights
Joe in the buckboard and Roosevelt on his new acquisition started south at dawn.
The road to Lang's—or the trail rather, for it consisted of two wheel-tracks scarcely discernible on the prairie grass and only to be guessed at in the sagebrush—lay straight south across a succession of flats, now wide, now narrow, cut at frequent intervals by the winding, wood-fringed Little Missouri; a region of green slopes and rocky walls and stately pinnacles and luxuriant acres. Twenty miles south of the Maltese Cross, they topped a ridge of buttes and suddenly came upon what might well have seemed, in the hot mist of noonday, a billowy ocean, held by some magic in suspension. From the trail, which wound along a red slope of baked clay falling at a sharp angle into a witch's cauldron of clefts and savage abysses, the Bad Lands stretched southward to the uncertain horizon. The nearer slopes were like yellow shores jutting into lavender waters.
West of Middle Butte, that loomed like a purple island on their left, they took a short cut across the big Ox Bow from the mouth of Bullion Creek on the one side to the mouth of Spring Creek on the other, then followed the course of the Little Missouri southward once more. They met the old Fort Keogh trail where it crossed the river by the ruins of the stage station, and for three or four miles followed its deep ruts westward, then turned south again. They came at last to a crossing where the sunset glowed bright in their faces along the bed of a shallow creek that emptied into the Little Missouri. The creek was the Little Cannonball. In a cluster of hoary cottonwoods, fifty yards from the point where creek and river met, they found Lang's cabin.
Lang turned out to be stocky, blue-eyed, and aggressively Scotch, wearing spectacles and a pair of "mutton-chop" whiskers. He had himself just arrived, having come from town by the longer trail over the prairie to the west in order to avoid the uncertain river crossings which had a way of proving fatal to a heavily laden wagon. His welcome was hearty. With him was a boy of sixteen, fair-haired and blue-eyed, whom he introduced as his son Lincoln. The boy remembered ever after the earnestness of the tenderfoot's "Delighted to meet you."
Roosevelt talked with Gregor Lang until midnight. The Scotchman was a man of education with views of his own on life and politics, and if he was more than a little dogmatic, he was unquestionably sincere.
He had an interesting story to tell. A year or less ago Henry Gorringe, Abram S. Hewitt, of New York, and a noted London financier named Sir John Pender, who had been instrumental in laying the first successful Atlantic cable, had, in the course of a journey through the Northwest, become interested in the cattle business and, in May, 1883, bought the Cantonment buildings at Little Missouri with the object of making them the headquarters of a trading corporation which they called the Little Missouri Land and Stock Company. The details they left to the enterprising naval officer who had proposed the scheme. Gorringe had meanwhile struck up a friendship with Frank Vine. This was not unnatural, for Frank was the social center of Little Missouri and was immensely popular. What is almost incredible, however, is that, blinded evidently by Frank's social graces, he took the genial and slippery post-trader into the syndicate, and appointed him superintendent. It was possibly because he did not concur altogether in this selection that Pender sent Gregor Lang, who, owing to Lady Pender's scruples, was without employment, to report to Gorringe in New York and then proceed to Little Missouri.
What a somewhat precise Scotch Presbyterian thought of that gathering-place of the wicked, the Presbyterian himself did not see fit to divulge. He established himself at the Cantonment, set to work with European thoroughness to find out all there was to find out about the cattle business, and quietly studied the ways of Frank Vine. Those ways were altogether extraordinary. Where he had originally come from no one exactly knew. His father, whom the new superintendent promptly established as manager of the Pyramid Park Hotel, had been a Missouri steamboat captain and was regarded far and wide as a terror. He was, in fact, a walking arsenal. He had a way of collecting his bills with a cavalry saber, and once, during the course of a "spree," hearing that a great Irishman named Jack Sawyer had beaten up his son Frank, was seen emerging from the hotel in search of the oppressor of his offspring with a butcher-knife in his boot, a six-shooter at his belt, and a rifle in his hand. Frank himself was less of a buccaneer and was conspicuous because he was practically the only man in Little Missouri who did not carry arms. He was big-hearted and not without charm in his nonchalant disregard of the moralities, but there was no truth in him, and he was so foul-mouthed that he became the model for the youth of Little Missouri, the ideal of what a foul-mouthed reprobate should be.
"Frank was the darndest liar you ever knew," remarked, long after, a man who had authority on his side. "And, by jinx, if he wouldn't preface his worst lies with 'Now this is God's truth!'"
He had an older brother named Darius who was famous as "the champion beer-drinker of the West," having the engaging gift of being able to consume untold quantities without ever becoming drunk. In their way they were a notable family.
Gregor Lang, with the fortunes of his employer at heart, watched Frank's activities as storekeeper with interest. During the military régime, Frank had been post-trader, a berth which was an eminent article of barter on the shelves of congressional politicians and for which fitness seemed to consist in the ability to fill lonely soldiers with untold quantities of bad whiskey. Frank's "fitness," as the term was understood, was above question, but his bookkeeping, Lang found, was largely in his mind. When he received a shipment of goods he set the selling-price by multiplying the cost by two and adding the freight; which saved much calculating. Frank's notions of "mine" and "thine," Lang discovered, moreover, were elastic. His depredations were particularly heavy against a certain shipment of patent medicine called "Tolu Tonic," which he ordered in huge quantities at the company's expense and drank up himself. The secret was that Frank, who had inherited his father's proclivities, did not like the "Forty-Mile Red Eye" brand which Bill Williams concocted of sulphuric acid and cigar stumps mixed with evil gin and worse rum; and had found that "Tolu Tonic" was eighty per cent alcohol.
Seeing these matters, and other matters for which the term "irregularity" would have been only mildly descriptive, Gregor Lang sent Sir John a report which was not favorable to Frank Vine's régime. Sir John withdrew from the syndicate in disgust and ordered Lang to start a separate ranch for him; and Gorringe himself began to investigate the interesting ways of his superintendent. Why Lang was not murdered, he himself was unable to say.
Lang had made it his business to acquire all the information he could secure on every phase of the cattle industry, for Sir John was avid of statistics. Roosevelt asked question after question. The Scotchman answered them. Joe Ferris, Lincoln, and a bony Scotch Highlander named MacRossie, who lived with the Langs, had been asleep and snoring for three hours before Gregor Lang and his guest finally sought their bunks.
It was raining when they awoke next morning. Joe Ferris, who was willing to suffer discomfort in a good cause, but saw no reason for unnecessarily courting misery, suggested to Roosevelt that they wait until the weather cleared. Roosevelt insisted that they start the hunt. Joe recognized that he was dealing with a man who meant business, and made no further protest.
They left Lang's at six, crossing the Little Missouri and threading their way, mile after mile, eastward through narrow defiles and along tortuous divides. It was a wild region, bleak and terrible, where fantastic devil-carvings reared themselves from the sallow gray of eroded slopes, and the only green things were gnarled cedars that looked as though they had been born in horror and had grown up in whirlwinds.
The ground underfoot was wet and sticky; the rain continued all day long. Once, at a distance, they saw two or three blacktail deer, and a little later they came upon a single buck. They crept to within two hundred yards. Roosevelt fired, and missed. There was every reason why he should miss, for the distance was great and the rain made a clear aim impossible; but it happened that, as the deer bounded away, Joe Ferris fired at a venture, and brought him down. It was a shot in a thousand.
Roosevelt flung his gun on the ground. "By Godfrey!" he exclaimed. "I'd give anything in the world if I could shoot like that!"
His rage at himself was so evident that Joe, being tender-hearted, was almost sorry that he had shot so well.
They found no buffalo that day; and returned to Lang's after dusk, gumbo mud to the eyes.
Of the two, Ferris was the one, it happened, who wrapped himself in his buffalo robe immediately after supper and went to sleep. Roosevelt, apparently as fresh and vigorous as he had been when he started out in the morning, promptly set Gregor Lang to talking about cattle.
Lang, who had been starved for intellectual companionship, was glad to talk; and there was much to tell. It was a new country for cattle. Less than five years before, the Indians had still roamed free and unmolested over it. A few daring white hunters (carrying each his vial of poison with which to cheat the torture-stake, in case of capture) had invaded their hunting-grounds; then a few surveyors; then grading crews under military guard with their retinue of saloon-keepers and professional gamblers; then the gleaming rails; then the thundering and shrieking engines. Eastern sportsmen, finding game plentiful in the Bad Lands, came to the conclusion that where game could survive in winter and thrive in summer, cattle could do likewise, and began to send short-horned stock west over the railroad. A man named Wadsworth from Minnesota settled twenty miles down the river from Little Missouri; another named Simpson from Texas established the "Hash-Knife" brand sixty or seventy miles above. The Eatons and AD Huidekoper, all from Pittsburgh, Sir John Pender from England, Lord Nugent from Ireland, H. H. Gorringe from New York, came to hunt and remained in person or by proxy to raise cattle in the new-won prairies of western Dakota and eastern Montana. These were the first wave. Henry Boice from New Mexico, Gregor Lang from Scotland, Antoine de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Mores (very much from France)—these were the second; young men all, most under thirty, some under twenty-five, dare-devil adventurers with hot blood, seeing visions.
Roosevelt and Lang talked well into the night. The next morning it was still raining. Roosevelt declared that he would hunt, anyway. Joe protested, almost pathetically. Roosevelt was obdurate, and Joe, admiring the "tenderfoot" in spite of himself, submitted. They hunted all day and shot nothing, returning to the cabin after dark, covered with Dakota mud.
Again it was Joe who tumbled into his corner, and the "tenderfoot" who, after supper, fresh as a daisy, engaged his host in conversation. They talked cattle and America and politics; and again, cattle. The emphatic Scotchman was very much of an individual. The eyes behind the oval glasses were alert, intelligent, and not without a touch of defiance.
Gregor Lang was one of those Europeans to whom America comes as a great dream, long before they set foot on its soil. He felt sharply the appeal of free institutions, and had proved ready to fight and to suffer for his convictions. He had had considerable opportunity to do both, for he had been an enthusiastic liberal in an arch-conservative family, frankly expressing his distaste for any form of government, including the British, which admitted class distinctions and gave to the few at the expense of the many. His insistence on naming his son after the man who had been indirectly responsible for the closing of England's cotton-mills had almost disrupted his household.
He enjoyed talking politics, and found in Roosevelt, who was up to his eyes in politics in his own State, a companion to delight his soul. Lang was himself a good talker and not given as a rule to patient listening; but he listened to Theodore Roosevelt, somewhat because he wanted to, and somewhat because it was difficult for any one to do anything else in those days when Roosevelt once took the floor. Gregor Lang had known many reformers in his time, and some had been precise and meticulous and some had been fiery and eloquent, but none had possessed the overwhelming passion for public service that seemed to burn in this amazingly vigorous and gay-spirited American of twenty-four. Roosevelt denounced "boss rule" until the rafters rang, coupling his denunciation of corrupt politicians with denunciations of those "fireside moralists" who were forever crying against bad government yet raising not a finger to correct it. The honest were always in a majority, he contended, and, under the American Constitution, held in their hands the power to overcome the dishonest minority. It was the solemn duty of every American citizen, he declared, not only to vote, but to fight, if need be, for good government.
It was two in the morning before Gregor Lang and Theodore Roosevelt reluctantly retired to their bunks.
Roosevelt was up and about at dawn. It was still raining. Joe Ferris suggested mildly that they wait for better weather before plunging again into the sea of gumbo mud, but Roosevelt, who had not come to Dakota to twiddle his thumbs, insisted that they resume their hunt. They went and found nothing. The rain continued for a week.
"He nearly killed poor Joe," Lincoln remarked afterwards. "He would not stop for anything."
Every morning Joe entered his protest and Roosevelt overruled it, and every evening Joe rolled, nigh dead, into his buffalo robe and Roosevelt talked cattle and politics with Gregor Lang until one and two in the morning. Joe and the Highlander sawed wood, but the boy Lincoln in his bunk lay with wide eyes.
"It was in listening to those talks after supper in the old shack on the Cannonball," he said, a long time after, "that I first came to understand that the Lord made the earth for all of us and not for a chosen few."
Roosevelt, too, received inspiration from these nocturnal discussions, but it was an inspiration of another sort.
"Mr. Lang," he said suddenly one evening, "I am thinking seriously of going into the cattle business. Would you advise me to go into it?"
Gregor Lang was cautious. "I don't like to advise you in a matter of that kind," he answered. "I myself am prepared to follow it out to the end. I have every faith in it. If it's a question of my faith, I have full faith. As a business proposition, it is the best there is."
They said no more about the matter that night.
The weather cleared at last. Joe Ferris, who had started on the hunt with misgivings, had no misgivings whatever now. He confided in Lincoln, not without a touch of pride in his new acquaintance, that this was a new variety of tenderfoot, altogether a "plumb good sort."
They started out with new zest under the clear sky. They had, in their week's hunting, come across the fresh tracks of numerous buffalo, but had in no case secured a shot. The last great herd had, in fact, been exterminated six months before, and though the Ferrises and Merrifield had killed a half-dozen within a quarter-mile of the Maltese Cross early that summer, these had been merely a straggling remnant. The days when a hunter could stand and bombard a dull, panic-stricken herd, slaughtering hundreds without changing his position, were gone. In the spring of 1883 the buffalo had still roamed the prairies east and west of the Bad Lands in huge herds, but moving in herds they were as easy to shoot as a family cow and the profits even at three dollars a pelt were great. Game-butchers swarmed forth from Little Missouri and fifty other frontier "towns," slaughtering buffalo for their skins or for their tongues or for the mere lust of killing. The hides were piled high at every shipping point; the carcasses rotted in the sun. Three hundred thousand buffalo, driven north from the more settled plains of western Nebraska, and huddled in a territory covering not more than a hundred and fifty square miles, perished like cattle in a stockyard, almost overnight. It was one of the most stupendous and dramatic obliterations in history of a species betrayed by the sudden change of its environment.
Hunting buffalo on horseback had, even in the days of the great herds, been an altogether different matter from the methodical slaughter from a "stand," where a robe for every cartridge was not an unusual "bag," and where an experienced game-butcher could, without recourse to Baron Munchausen, boast an average of eighty per cent of "kills." There was always the possibility that the bison, driven to bay, might charge the sportsman who drove his horse close in for a sure shot. With the great herds destroyed, there was added to the danger and the privations of the wild country where the few remaining stragglers might be found, the zest and the arduousness of long searching. Roosevelt and Joe Ferris had had their full share of the latter.
They came on the fresh track of a buffalo two hours after their departure, that clear warm morning, from Lang's hospitable cabin. It was, for a time, easy to follow, where it crossed and recrossed a narrow creek-bottom, but became almost undiscernible as it struck off up the side of a winding coulee, where the soil, soaked as it had been by a week of September drizzle, was already baked hard by the hot sun. They rode for an hour cautiously up the ravine. Suddenly, as they passed the mouth of a side coulee, there was a plunge and crackle through the bushes at its head, and a shabby-looking old bull bison galloped out of it and plunged over a steep bank into a patch of broken ground which led around the base of a high butte. The bison was out of sight before they had time to fire. At the risk of their necks they sped their horses over the broken ground only to see the buffalo emerge from it at the farther end and with amazing agility climb up the side of a butte over a quarter of a mile away. With his shaggy mane and huge forequarters he had some of the impressiveness of a lion as he stood for an instant looking back at his pursuers. They followed him for miles, but caught no glimpse of him again.
They were now on the prairie far to the east of the river, a steaming, treeless region stretching in faint undulations north, east, and south, until it met the sky in the blurred distance. Here and there it was broken by a sunken water-course, dry in spite of a week of wet weather, or a low bluff or a cluster of small, round-topped buttes. The grass was burnt brown; the air was hot and still. The country had the monotony and the melancholy and more than a little of the beauty and the fascination of the sea.
They ate their meager lunch beside a miry pool, where a clump of cedars under a bluff gave a few square feet of shadow.
All afternoon they rode over the dreary prairie, but it was late before they caught another glimpse of game. Then, far off in the middle of a large plain, they saw three black specks.
The horses were slow beasts, and were tired besides and in no condition for running. Roosevelt and his mentor picketed them in a hollow, half a mile from the game, and started off on their hands and knees. Roosevelt blundered into a bed of cactus and filled his hands with the spines; but he came within a hundred and fifty feet or less of the buffalo. He drew up and fired. The bullet made the dust fly from the hide as it hit the body with a loud crack, but apparently did no particular harm. The three buffalo made off over a low rise with their tails in the air.
The hunters returned to their horses in disgust, and for seven or eight miles loped the jaded animals along at a brisk pace. Now and again they saw the quarry far ahead. Finally, when the sun had just set, they saw that all three had come to a stand in a gentle hollow. There was no cover anywhere. They determined, as a last desperate resort, to try to run them on their worn-out ponies.
The bison faced them for an instant, then turned and made off. With spurs and quirt, Roosevelt urged his tired pony forward. Night closed in and the full moon rose out of the black haze on the horizon. The pony plunged to within sixty or seventy yards of the wounded bull, and could gain no more. Joe Ferris, better mounted, forged ahead. The bull, seeing him coming, swerved. Roosevelt cut across and came almost up to him. The ground over which they were running was broken into holes and ditches, and the fagged horses floundered and pitched forward at every step.
At twenty feet, Roosevelt fired, but the pony was pitching like a launch in a storm, and he missed. He dashed in closer.
The Prairie At The Edge Of The Bad Lands.
"Broken Country"
The bull's tail went up and he wheeled suddenly and charged with lowered horns.
The pony, panic-stricken, spun round and tossed up his head, striking the rifle which Roosevelt was holding in both hands and knocking it violently against his forehead, cutting a deep gash. The blood poured into Roosevelt's eyes.
Ferris reined in his pony. "All right?" he called, evidently frightened.
"Don't mind me!" Roosevelt shouted, without turning an instant from the business in hand. "I'm all right."
For an instant it was a question whether Roosevelt would get the buffalo or the buffalo would get Roosevelt. But he swerved his horse, and the buffalo, plunging past, charged Ferris and followed him as he made off over the broken ground, uncomfortably close to the tired pony's tail. Roosevelt, half-blinded, tried to run in on him again, but his pony stopped, dead beat; and by no spurring could he force him out of a slow trot. Ferris, swerving suddenly and dismounting, fired, but the dim moonlight made accurate aim impossible, and the buffalo, to the utter chagrin of the hunters, lumbered off and vanished into the darkness. Roosevelt followed him for a short space afoot in hopeless and helpless wrath.
There was no possibility of returning to Lang's that night. They were not at all certain where they were, but they knew they were a long way from the mouth of the Little Cannonball. They determined to camp near by for the night.
They did not mount the exhausted horses, but led them, stumbling, foaming and sweating, while they hunted for water. It was an hour before they found a little mud-pool in a reedy hollow. They had drunk nothing for twelve hours and were parched with thirst, but the water of the pool was like thin jelly, slimy and nauseating, and they could drink only a mouthful. Supper consisted of a dry biscuit, previously baked by Lincoln under direction of his father, who insisted that the use of a certain kind of grease whose name is lost to history would keep the biscuits soft. They were hard as horn.[2] There was not a twig with which to make a fire, nor a bush to which they could fasten their horses. When they lay down to sleep, thirsty and famished, they had to tie their horses with the lariat to the saddles which were their pillows.
They did not go quickly to sleep. The horses were nervous, restless, alert, in spite of their fatigue, continually snorting or standing with their ears forward, peering out into the night, as though conscious of the presence of danger. Roosevelt remembered some half-breed Crees they had encountered the day before. It was quite possible that some roving bucks might come for their horses, and perhaps their scalps, for the Indians, who were still unsettled on their reservations, had a way of stealing off whenever they found a chance and doing what damage they could. Stories he had heard of various bands of horse-thieves that operated in the region between the Little Missouri and the Black Hills likewise returned to mind to plague him. The wilderness in which Roosevelt and Ferris had pitched their meager camp was in the very heart of the region infested by the bandits. They dozed fitfully, waking with a start whenever the sound of the grazing of the horses ceased for a moment, and they knew that the nervous animals were watching for the approach of a foe. It was late when at last they fell asleep.
They were rudely wakened at midnight by having their pillows whipped out from under their heads. They leapt to their feet. In the bright moonlight they saw the horses madly galloping off, with the saddles bounding and trailing behind them. Their first thought was that the horses had been stampeded by horse-thieves, and they threw themselves on the ground, crouching in the long grass with rifles ready.
There was no stir. At last, in the hollow they made out a shadowy, four-footed shape. It was a wolf who strode noiselessly to the low crest and disappeared.
They rose and went after the horses, taking the broad trail made by the saddles through the dewy grass.
Once Joe Ferris stopped. "Say, I ain't ever committed any crime deservin' that anything like this should happen!" he exclaimed plaintively. Then, turning straight to Roosevelt, evidently suspecting that he had a Jonah on his hands, he cried, in a voice in which wrath was mingled with comic despair, "Have you ever done anything to deserve this?"
"Joe," Roosevelt answered solemnly, "I never have."
"Then I can't understand," Joe remarked, "why we're runnin' in such luck."
Roosevelt grinned at him and chuckled, and Joe Ferris grinned and chuckled; and after that the savage attentions of an unkind fate did not seem so bad.
They found the horses sooner than they expected and led them back to camp. Utterly weary, they wrapped themselves in their blankets once more and went to sleep. But rest was not for them that night. At three in the morning a thin rain began to fall, and they awoke to find themselves lying in four inches of water. Joe Ferris expected lamentations. What he heard was, "By Godfrey, but this is fun!"
They cowered and shivered under their blankets until dawn. Then, soaked to the skin, they made breakfast of Lang's adamantine biscuits, mounted their horses, and were off, glad to bid good-bye to the inhospitable pool.
A fine, drizzling mist, punctuated at intervals by heavy downpours of rain, shrouded the desolate region and gathered them into a chilly desolation of its own. They traveled by compass. It was only after hours that the mist lifted, revealing the world about them, and, in the center of it, several black objects slowly crossing a piece of rolling country ahead. They were buffalo.
They picketed the horses, and crept forward on their hands and knees through the soft, muddy prairie soil. A shower of cold rain blew up-wind straight in their faces and made the teeth chatter behind their blue lips. The rain was blowing in Roosevelt's eyes as he pulled the trigger. He missed clean, and the whole band plunged into a hollow and were off.
What Joe Ferris said upon that occasion remains untold. It was "one of those misses," Roosevelt himself remarked afterwards, "which a man to his dying day always looks back upon with wonder and regret." In wet, sullen misery he returned with Joe to the horses.
The rain continued all day, and they spent another wretched night. They had lived for two days on nothing but biscuits and rainwater, and privation had thoroughly lost whatever charm it might have had for an adventurous young man in search of experience. The next morning brought sunlight and revived spirits, but it brought no change in their luck.
"Bad luck followed us," Joe Ferris remarked long after, "like a yellow dog follows a drunkard."
Joe's horse nearly stepped on a rattlesnake, and narrowly escaped being bitten; a steep bluff broke away under their ponies' hoofs, and sent them sliding and rolling to the bottom of a long slope, a pile of intermingled horses and men. Shortly after, Roosevelt's horse stepped into a hole and turned a complete somersault, pitching his rider a good ten feet; and he had scarcely recovered his composure and his seat in the saddle, when the earth gave way under his horse as though he had stepped on a trap-door, and let him down to his withers in soft, sticky mud. They hauled the frightened animal out by the lariat, with infinite labor. Altogether it was not a restful Sunday.
More than once Joe Ferris looked at Roosevelt quizzically, wondering when the pleasant "four-eyed tenderfoot" would begin to worry about catching cold and admit at last that the game was too much for him. But the "tenderfoot," it happened, had a dogged streak. He made no suggestion of "quitting."
"He could stand an awful lot of hard knocks," Joe explained later, "and he was always cheerful. You just couldn't knock him out of sorts. He was entertaining, too, and I liked to listen to him, though, on the whole, he wasn't much on the talk. He said that he wanted to get away from politics, so I didn't mention political matters; and he had books with him and would read at odd times."
Joe began to look upon his "tenderfoot" with a kind of awe, which was not diminished when Roosevelt, blowing up a rubber pillow which he carried with him, casually remarked one night that his doctors back East had told him that he did not have much longer to live, and that violent exercise would be immediately fatal.
They returned to Lang's, Roosevelt remarking to himself that it was "dogged that does it," and ready to hunt three weeks if necessary to get his buffalo.
If Lang had any notion that the privations of the hunt had dampened Roosevelt's enthusiasm for the frontier, Roosevelt himself speedily dispelled it.
Roosevelt had, for a year or more, felt the itch to be a monarch of acres. He had bought land at Oyster Bay, including an elevation known to the neighbors as Sagamore Hill, where he was building a house; but a view and a few acres of woodland could not satisfy his craving. He wanted expanses to play with, large works to plan and execute, subordinates to inspire and to direct. He had driven his uncles, who were as intensely practical and thrifty as Dutch uncles should be, and his sisters, who were, at least, very much more practical in money matters than he was, nearly frantic the preceding summer by declaring his intention to purchase a large farm adjoining the estate of his brother-in-law, Douglas Robinson, in the Mohawk Valley; for his kin knew, what he himself failed to recognize, that he was not made to be a farmer and that he who loved to be in the center of the seething world would explode, or burn himself out, in a countryside a night's run from anywhere. They knew also that farming was not a spiritual adventure, but a business, and that Theodore, with his generous habit of giving away a few thousands here and a few thousands there, was not exactly a business man. He had yielded to their abjurations; but his hankering for acres had remained.
Here in Dakota were all the acres that any man could want, and they were his for the asking.
To this vague craving to be monarch of all he surveyed (or nearly all), another emotion which Roosevelt might have identified with business acumen had during the past year been added. Together with a Harvard classmate, Richard Trimble, he had become interested in a ranching project known as the Teschmaker and Debillier Cattle Company, which "ran" some thousands of head of cattle fifty or sixty miles north of Cheyenne; and he had invested ten thousand dollars in it. Commander Gorringe, seeking to finance the enterprise in which he was involved, in the course of his hunting accounts doubtlessly spoke glowingly to Roosevelt of the huge profits that awaited Eastern dollars in the Bad Lands. Roosevelt, it appears, asked his uncle, James Roosevelt, his father's elder brother and head of the banking firm of Roosevelt and Son, whether he would advise him to invest a further sum of five thousand dollars in cattle in Dakota.
Uncle James, to whom, as investments, cattle ranches were in a class with gold mines, emphatically informed Theodore that he would not at all advise him to do anything of the kind. How deeply Roosevelt was impressed by this information subsequent events clearly indicate.
Roosevelt and Lang sat at the table long after Lincoln had cleared it that night. Joe and the Highlander were asleep, but Lincoln heard the two men talking and, years after, remembered the conversation of that momentous September night.
"Mr. Lang," said Roosevelt abruptly, "I have definitely decided to go into the cattle business. I want somebody to run cattle for me on shares or to take the management of my cattle under some arrangement to be worked out. Will you take charge of my cattle?"
The Scotchman, who was naturally deliberate, was not prepared to meet such precipitancy. He told Roosevelt that he appreciated his offer. "Unfortunately," he added reluctantly, "I am tied up with the other people."
Roosevelt's regret was evident. He asked Lang whether there was any one he would recommend. Without hesitation, Lang suggested Sylvane Ferris and Bill Merrifield. Early the next morning Lincoln Lang was dispatched to the Maltese Cross.
Meanwhile Roosevelt and Joe continued the pursuit of the elusive buffalo. But again luck was far from them. For two days they hunted in vain. When they returned to Lang's the second dusk, Sylvane and Merrifield were there waiting for them.
That evening, after supper, Roosevelt sat on a log outside Lang's cabin with the two ranchmen and asked them how much in their opinion it would cost adequately to stock a cattle-ranch.
"Depends what you want to do," answered Sylvane. "But my guess is, if you want to do it right, that it'll spoil the looks of forty thousand dollars."
"How much would you need right off?" Roosevelt went on.
"Oh, a third would make a start."
"Could you boys handle the cattle for me?"
"Why, yes," said Sylvane in his pleasant, quiet drawl, "I guess we could take care of 'em 'bout as well as the next man."
"Why, I guess so!" ejaculated Merrifield.
"Well, will you do it?"
"Now, that's another story," said Sylvane. "Merrifield here and me is under contract with Wadsworth and Halley. We've got a bunch of cattle with them on shares. I guess we'd like to do business with you right enough, Mr. Roosevelt, but there's nothing we can do until Wadsworth and Halley releases us."
"I'll buy those cattle."
"All right," remarked Sylvane. "Then the best thing for us to do is to go to Minnesota an' see those men an' get released from our contract. When that's fixed up, we can make any arrangements you've a mind to."
"That will suit me."
Roosevelt drew a checkbook from his pocket, and there, sitting on the log (oh, vision of Uncle James!) wrote a check, not for the contemplated five thousand dollars, but for fourteen, and handed it to Sylvane. Merrifield and Sylvane, he directed, were to purchase a few hundred head of cattle that fall in addition to the hundred and fifty head which they held on shares for Wadsworth.
"Don't you want a receipt?" asked Merrifield at last.
"Oh, that's all right," said Roosevelt. "If I didn't trust you men, I wouldn't go into business with you."
They shook hands all around; whereupon they dropped the subject from conversation and talked about game.
"We were sitting on a log," said Merrifield, many years later, "up at what we called Cannonball Creek. He handed us a check for fourteen thousand dollars, handed it right over to us on a verbal contract. He didn't have a scratch of a pen for it."
"All the security he had for his money," added Sylvane, "was our honesty."
The man from the East, with more than ordinary ability to read the faces of men, evidently thought that that was quite enough.
The next dawn Roosevelt did not go hunting as usual. All morning he sat over the table in the cabin with Lang and the two Canadians laboring over the contract which three of them were to sign in case his prospective partners were released from the obligation which for the time bound them. It was determined that Ferris and Merrifield should go at once to Minnesota to confer with Wadsworth and Halley. Roosevelt, meanwhile, would continue his buffalo hunt, remaining in the Bad Lands until he received word that the boys from the Maltese Cross were in a position to "complete the deal." The wheels of the new venture having thus, in defiance of Uncle James, been set in motion, Roosevelt parted from his new friends, and resumed the interrupted chase.
The red gods must have looked with favor on Roosevelt's adventurous spirit, for luck turned suddenly in his favor. Next morning he was skirting a ridge of broken buttes with Joe Ferris, near the upper waters of the Little Cannonball west of Lang's camp over the Montana line, when suddenly both ponies threw up their heads and snuffed the air, turning their muzzles toward a coulee that sloped gently toward the creek-bottom they were traversing. Roosevelt slipped off his pony and ran quickly but cautiously up the side of the ravine. In the soft soil at the bottom he saw the round prints of a bison's hoof.
He came upon the buffalo an instant later, grazing slowly up the valley. Both wind and shelter were good, and he ran close. The bull threw back his head and cocked his tail in the air.
Joe Ferris, who had followed close at Roosevelt's heels, pointed out a yellow spot on the buffalo, just back of the shoulder. "If you hit him there," he whispered, "you'll get him right through the heart."
It seemed to Joe that the Easterner was extraordinarily cool, as he aimed deliberately and fired. With amazing agility the buffalo bounded up the opposite side of the ravine, seemingly heedless of two more bullets aimed at his flank.
Joe was ready to throw up his hands in despair. But suddenly they saw blood pouring from the bison's mouth and nostrils. The great bull rushed to the ridge at a lumbering gallop, and disappeared.
They found him lying in the next gully, dead, as Joe Ferris remarked, "as Methusalem's cat."
Roosevelt, with all his intellectual maturity, was a good deal of a boy, and the Indian war-dance he executed around the prostrate buffalo left nothing in the way of delight unexpressed. Joe watched the performance open-mouthed.
"I never saw any one so enthused in my life," he said in after days, "and, by golly, I was enthused myself for more reasons than one. I was plumb tired out, and, besides, he was so eager to shoot his first buffalo that it somehow got into my blood; and I wanted to see him kill his first one as badly as he wanted to kill it."
Roosevelt, out of the gladness of his heart, then and there presented him with a hundred dollars; so there was another reason for Joe to be happy.
They returned to Lang's, chanting pæans of victory. Early next day Roosevelt returned with Joe to the place where they had left the buffalo and with endless labor skinned the huge beast and brought the head and slippery hide to camp.
The next morning Roosevelt took his departure.
Gregor Lang watched the mounted 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."[Back to Contents]
