ROOSEVELT IN THE BAD LANDS - Hermann Hagedorn (best novels for students .TXT) 📗

porch of the store when she came and in his excited way carried the news to the boys. As soon as she left by the front steps, Merrifield bounded up by the back. His eyes were gleaming.

"Well, now, Mrs. Ferris," he cried, "how did you like her?"

Mrs. Ferris laughed.

"Well, what did she say?" Merrifield pursued impatiently.

"Why," remarked Mrs. Joe, "for one thing she says I mustn't trust any of you cowboys."

Merrifield burst into a hearty laugh. "That's her!" he cried. "That's her! What else did she say?"

"She told me how I ought to ride, and the kind of horse I ought to get, and--"

"Go on, Mrs. Ferris," cried Merrifield.

"Why, she says I never want to ride any horse that any of you cowboys give me, for you're all bad, and you haven't any consideration for a woman and you'd as lief see a woman throwed off and killed as not."

Merrifield's eyes sparkled in the attractive way they had when he was in a hilarious mood. "Say, did you ever hear the like of that? You'd think, to hear that woman talk, that we was nothing but murderers. What else did she say?"

"Well," remarked the new bride, "she said a good many things."

"You tell me, Mrs. Ferris," Merrifield urged.

"For one thing she said the cowboys was vulgar and didn't have any manners. And--oh, yes--she said that refined folks who knew the better things of life ought to stick together and not sink to the level of common people."

"Now, Mrs. Ferris," remarked Merrifield indignantly, "ain't that a ree-di-culous woman? Ain't she now?"

Mrs. Ferris laughed until the tears came to her eyes. "I think she is," she admitted.

Merrifield carried the news triumphantly to the "boys," and the new bride's standing was established. She became a sort of "honorary member-once-removed" of the friendly order of cowpunchers, associated with them by a dozen ties of human understanding, yet, by her sex, removed to a special niche apart, where the most irresponsible did not fail, drunk or sober, to do her deference. For her ears language was washed and scrubbed. Men who appeared to have forgotten what shame was, were ashamed to have Mrs. Ferris know how unashamed they could be. Poor old Van Zander, whom every one in Billings County had seen "stewed to the gills," pleaded with Joe not to tell Mrs. Ferris that Joe had seen him drunk.

It became a custom, in anticipation of a "shivaree," to send round word to Mrs. Ferris not to be afraid, the shooting was all in fun.

A woman would have been less than human who had failed to feel at home in the midst of such evidences of warmth and friendly consideration. Joe Ferris's store became more than ever the center of life in Medora, as the wife whom Joe had brought from New Brunswick made his friends her friends and made her home theirs also.

She had been in Medora less than a month when news came from Roosevelt that he was getting ready to start West and would arrive on the Little Missouri sometime about the middle of March. Joe's wife knew how to get along with "boys" who were Joe's kind, but here was a different sort of proposition confronting her. Here was a wealthy, and, in a modest way, a noted, man coming to sleep under her roof and eat at her table. The prospect appalled her. Possibly she had visions, for all that Joe could say, of a sort of male Mrs. Cummins. "I was scairt to death," she admitted later.

Roosevelt arrived on March 18th. His "city get-up" was slightly distracting, for it had a perfection of style that Mrs. Joe was not accustomed to; but his delight at his return to the Bad Lands was so frank and so expressive that her anxiety began to dissolve in her wonder at this vehement and attractive being who treated her like a queen. He jumped in the air, clicking his heels together like a boy let unexpectedly out of school, and at odd moments clapped Joe on the back, crying, "By George! By George!" with the relish of a cannibal reaching into the pot for a second joint.

She tried to treat him like the city man that he looked, but he promptly put a stop to that.

"Just use me like one of the boys, Mrs. Ferris," he said decisively. His words sounded sincere; but, being a shrewd-minded lady, she wondered, nevertheless.

She did not know him when he came down to breakfast next morning. Vanished was the "dude," and in his place stood a typical cowpuncher in shaps and flannel shirt and knotted handkerchief. And his clothes revealed that they had not been worn only indoors.

He gave an exclamation of delight as he entered the dining-room. "A white tablecloth in the Bad Lands! Joe, did you ever expect to see it?"

There was no more ice to break after that.

Chapater XXII

 

"Listen, gentle stranger, I'll read my pedigree: I'm known on handling tenderfeet and worser men than thee; The lions on the mountains, I've drove them to their lairs; The wild-cats are my playmates, and I've wrestled grizzly bears;

"The centipedes have tried and failed to mar my tough old hide, And rattlesnakes have bit me, and crawled away and died. I'm as wild as the wild horse that roams the boundless plains, The moss grows on my teeth and wild blood flows through my veins.

"I'm wild and woolly and full of fleas, And never been curried below the knees. Now, little stranger, if you'll give me your address,-- How would you like to go, by fast mail or express?"

Buckskin Joe

That spring of 1886 Roosevelt had a notable adventure. He arrived at Elkhorn on March 19th.

I got out here all right [he wrote his sister "Bamie" the following day] and was met at the station by my men; I was really heartily glad to see the great, stalwart, bearded fellows again, and they were as honestly pleased to see me. Joe Ferris is married, and his wife made me most comfortable the night I spent in town. Next morning snow covered the ground; we pushed down, in a rough four-in-hand (how our rig would have made the estimable Mrs. Blank open her eyes!) to this ranch which we reached long after sunset, the full moon flooding the landscape with light.

It was like coming home from a foreign country to see the Little Missouri once more, and the strangely fascinating desolation of the Bad Lands, and the home ranch and the "folks" from Maine and the loyal friends of the Maltese Cross. He had good friends in the East, but there was a warmth and a stalwart sincerity in the comradeship of these men and women which he had scarcely found elsewhere. Through the cold evenings of that early spring he loved to lie stretched at full length on the elk-hides and wolf-skins in front of the great fireplace, while the blazing logs crackled and roared, and Sewall and Dow and the "womenfolks" recounted the happenings of the season of his absence.

Spring came early that year and about the 20th of March a great ice-jam, which had formed at a bend far up the river, came slowly past Elkhorn, roaring and crunching and piling the ice high on both banks.

There has been an ice gorge right in front of the house [he wrote "Bamie"], the swelling mass of broken fragments having been pushed almost up to our doorstep. The current then broke through the middle, leaving on each side of the stream, for some miles, a bank of huge ice-floes, tumbled over each other in the wildest confusion. No horse could by any chance get across; we men have a boat, and even thus it is most laborious carrying it out to the water; we work like arctic explorers.

Early in the spring, Sewall and Dow had crossed the river to hunt for a few days in the rough hills to the east, and had killed four deer which they had hung in a tree to keep them from the coyotes. Roosevelt determined to go with his men to bring home the deer, but when, after infinite difficulty, they reached the thicket of dwarf cedars where the deer had been hung, they found nothing save scattered pieces of their carcasses, and roundabout the deeply marked footprints of a pair of cougars, or "mountain lions." The beasts had evidently been at work for some time and had eaten almost every scrap of flesh. Roosevelt and his men followed their tracks into a tangle of rocky hills, but, before they had come in sight of the quarry, dusk obscured the footprints and they returned home resolved to renew the pursuit at dawn. They tied their boat securely to a tree high up on the bank.

The next day Roosevelt made arrangements with a companion of many hunts, "old man" Tompkins, who was living in the shack which Captain Robins had occupied, to make a determined pursuit of the cougars; but when, the following morning, he was ready to start once more for the farther shore, his boat was gone. It was Bill Sewall who made the discovery. He was not a man easily excited, and he took a certain quiet satisfaction in sitting down to breakfast and saying nothing while Roosevelt held forth concerning the fate which was awaiting the mountain lions.

"I guess we won't go to-day," said Sewall, at length, munching the last of his breakfast.

"Why not?" Roosevelt demanded.

Sewall showed him a red woolen mitten with a leather palm which he had picked up on the ice, and the end of the rope by which the boat had been tied. It had been cut with a sharp knife. "Some one has gone off with the boat," he said.

Roosevelt had no doubt who had stolen the boat, for the thief or thieves could scarcely have come by land without being detected. There was only one other boat on the Little Missouri, and that was a small flat-bottom scow owned by three hard characters who lived in a shack twenty miles above Elkhorn. They were considered suspicious persons, and Roosevelt and his men had shrewdly surmised for some time that they were considering the advisability of "skipping the country" before the vigilantes got after them. On inquiry they found that the shack which the men had occupied was deserted.

The leader of the three was a stocky, ill-looking individual named Finnegan, with fiery red hair which fell to his shoulders, gaining for him the nickname "Redhead" Finnegan; a brick-red complexion, and an evil reputation. He was a surly, quarrelsome, unkempt creature, and when he came into a saloon with his stumbling gait (as he frequently did), self-respecting cowboys had a way of leaving him in full possession of the field, not because they feared him, but because they did not care to be seen in his presence. He boasted that he was "from Bitter Creek, where the farther up you went the worse people got," and he lived "at the fountain head." He had blown into Medora early in March and had promptly gone to Bill Williams's saloon and filled up on Bill Williams's peculiarly wicked brand of "conversation juice."

"Well, it laid him out all right enough," remarked Lincoln Lang,