Roosevelt in the Bad Lands Part 4

"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_!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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 G.o.ds 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 b.u.t.tes 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 c.o.c.ked 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 paeans 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."

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 s.p.a.cious 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 were 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Roosevelt in 1883.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 was all there was to it." The truth remains that the friends Jake chose were all characters only a little less shady than himself.

Most prominent of these were the precious pair who "operated" Bill Williams's saloon. Bill Williams was a Welshman who had drifted into Little Missouri while the railroad was being built, and, recognizing that the men who made money in frontier settlements were the men who sold whiskey, had opened a saloon to serve liquid refreshment in various vicious forms to the grading crews and soldiers.

"He always reminded me of a red fox," said Lincoln Lang long after, "for, besides having a marked carroty complexion, there was a cunning leer in his face which seemed, as it were, to show indistinctly through the transparency of the manufactured grin with which he sought to cover it. When he got mad over something or other and swept the grin aside, I do not think that an uglier countenance ever existed on earth or in h.e.l.l. He was rather short of stature, bullet-headed and bull-necked, with a sloping forehead and a somewhat underslung chin.

His nose was red and bulbous, his eyes narrow-set beneath bushy red eyebrows. He had a heavy red moustache not altogether concealing an abnormally long mouth, and through it at times, when he smiled, his teeth showed like fangs."

He was a man of natural shrewdness, a moneymaker, a gambler, and like Maunders (it was rumored) a brander of cattle that were not his. But he was not without a certain attractive quality, and when he was slightly drunk he was brilliant. He was deathly afraid of being alone, and had a habit on those infrequent occasions when his bar was for the moment deserted, of setting the chairs in orderly rows as in a chapel, and then preaching to them solemnly on the relative merits of King Solomon and Hiram, King of Tyre.

His partner, Jess Hogue, was the brains of the nefarious trio, a dark, raw-boned brute with an ugly, square-jawed, domineering face, a bellow like a bull's, and all the crookedness of Bill Williams without his redeeming wit. His record of achievement covered a broader field than that of either of his a.s.sociates, for it began with a sub-contract on the New York water system, involved him with the United States Government in connection with a certain "phantom mail route" between Bismarck and Miles City, and started him on the road to affluence with the acquisition of twenty-eight army mules which, with the aid of Bill Williams and the skillful use of the peculiar type of intelligence with which they both seemed to be endowed, he had secured at less than cost from Fort Abraham Lincoln at Mandan.

a.s.sociated with Williams, Hogue, and Maunders, in their various ventures, was a man of thirty-eight or forty named Paddock, with florid cheeks, and a long, dark moustache and goatee that made him look something like Buffalo Bill and something like Simon Legree. He conducted the local livery-stable with much profit, for his rates were what was known to the trade as "fancy," and shared with Maunders whatever glory there was in being one of the most feared men in Little Missouri. Like Maunders, he had his defenders; and he had a pleasant-faced wife who gave mute tribute to a side of Jerry Paddock which he did not reveal to the world.