Part 15

The Dickinson Press was blunt in its comment. "Stages are not running from Medora to Deadwood," it remarked editorially, "nor has the roadway ever been improved. The Marquis should put a curb on his too vivid imagination and confine himself a little more strictly to facts."

But facts were not the things on which a nature like de Mores's fed.

His sheep meanwhile, were dying by hundreds every week. Of the twelve thousand he had turned loose on the range during the preceding summer, half were dead by the middle of January. There were rumors that rivals of the Marquis had used poison.

The loss [declared a dispatch to the Minneapolis Journal] can be accounted for on no other ground. It is supposed that malicious motives prompted the deed, as the Marquis is known to have had enemies since the killing of Luffsey.

If the Marquis took any stock in these suspicions, his partners, the Haupt brothers, did not. They knew that it was a physical impossibility to poison six thousand sheep scattered over ten thousand square miles of snowbound landscape.

The Haupts were by this time thoroughly out of patience with de Mores. There was a stormy meeting of the directors of the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company in St. Paul, in the course of which the Haupt brothers told their distinguished senior partner exactly what they thought of his business ability; and suggested that the Company go into liquidation.

The Marquis jumped to his feet in a rage. "I won't let it go into liquidation," he cried. "My honor is at stake. I have told my friends in France that I would do so and so and so, that I would make money, a great deal of money. I must do it. Or where am I?"

The Haupts did not exactly know. They compromised with the Marquis by taking the bonds of the Company in exchange for their stock, and retired with inner jubilation at having been able to withdraw from a perilous situation with skins more or less intact.

The Marquis, as usual, secreted himself from the stern eyes of Experience, in the radiant emanations of a new dream. The Dickinson Press announced it promptly:

The Marquis de Mores has a novel enterprise under way, which he is confident will prove a success, it being a plan to raise 50,000 cabbages on his ranch at the Little Missouri, and have them ready for the market April 1. They will be raised under glass in some peculiar French manner, and when they have attained a certain size, will be transplanted into individual pots and forced rapidly by rich fertilizers, made from the offal of the slaughter-houses and for which preparation he owns the patent. Should the cabbages come out on time, he will try his hand on other kinds of vegetables, and should he succeed the citizens along the line will have an opportunity to get as early vegetables as those who live in the sunny South.

The cabbages were a dream which seems never to have materialized even to the point of being a source of expense, and history speaks no more of it.

The boys at the Chimney Butte, meanwhile, were hibernating, hunting as the spirit moved them and keeping a general eye on the stock. Of Roosevelt's three friends, Joe was the only one who was really busy. Joe, it happened, was no longer working for Frank Vine. He was now a storekeeper. It was all due to the fateful hundred dollars which he had loaned the unstable Johnny Nelson.

For Johnny Nelson, so far as Little Missouri was concerned, was no more. He had bought all his goods on credit from some commission house in St. Paul; but his payments, due mainly to the fact that his receipts all drifted sooner or later into the guileful hands of Jess Hogue, were infrequent and finally stopped altogether. Johnny received word that his creditor in St. Paul was coming to investigate him. He became frantic and confided the awful news to every one he met. Hogue, Bill Williams, Jake Maunders, and a group of their satellites, hearing the doleful recital in Bill Williams's saloon, told Johnny that the sheriff would unquestionably close up his store and take everything away from him.

"You give me the keys," said Jake Maunders, "and I'll see that the sheriff don't get your stuff."

Johnny in his innocence gave up the keys. That night Jake Maunders and his "gang" entered the store and completely cleaned it out. They did not leave a button or a shoestring. It was said afterwards that Jake Maunders did not have to buy a new suit of clothes for seven years, and even Williams's two tame bears wore ready-made coats from St. Paul.

Johnny Nelson went wailing to Katie, his betrothed.

"I've lost everything!" he cried. "I've lost all my goods and I can't get more. I've lost my reputation. I can't marry you. I've lost my reputation."

Katie was philosophic about it. "That's all right, Johnny," she said comfortingly, "I lost mine long ago."

At that, Johnny "skipped the country." And so it was that Joe Ferris, to save his hundred dollars attached Johnny's building and became storekeeper.

For Roosevelt, two thousand miles to the east, the winter was proving exciting. He had won his reelection to the Assembly with ease and had plunged into his work with a new vigor and a more solid self-reliance. He became the acknowledged leader of the progressive elements in the Legislature, the "cyclone member" at whom the reactionaries who were known as the "Black Horse Cavalry" sneered, but of whom, nevertheless, they were heartily afraid.

He "figured in the news," day in, day out, for the public, it seemed, was interested in this vigorous and emphatic young man from the "Silkstocking District" of New York. Roosevelt took his publicity with zest, for he was human and enjoyed the sensation of being counted with those who made the wheels go around. Meanwhile he worked all day and conversed half the night on a thousand topics which his ardor made thrilling. In society he was already somewhat of a lion; and he was only twenty-five years old.

Life was running, on the whole, very smoothly for Theodore Roosevelt when in January, 1884, he entered upon his third term in the Legislature. He was happily married, he had wealth, he had a notable book on the War of 1812 to his credit; he had, it seemed, a smooth course ahead of him, down pleasant roads to fame.

On February 12th, at ten o'clock in the morning, his wife gave birth to a daughter. At five o'clock the following morning his mother died. Six hours later his wife died.

He was stunned and dazed, but within a week after the infinitely pathetic double funeral he was back at his desk in the Assembly, ready to fling himself with every fiber of energy at his command into the fight for clean government. He supported civil service reform; he was chairman of a committee which investigated certain phases of New York City official life, and carried through the Legislature a bill taking from the Board of Aldermen the power to reject the Mayor's appointments. He was chairman and practically the only active member of another committee to investigate living conditions in the tenements of New York, and as spokesman of the worn and sad-looking foreigners who constituted the Cigar-Makers' Union, argued before Governor Cleveland for the passage of a bill to prohibit the manufacture of cigars in tenement-houses. His energy was boundless, it seemed, but the heart had gone out of him. He was restless, and thought longingly of the valley of the Little Missouri.

The news that came from the boys at Chimney Butte was favorable. The three hundred head of young cattle which Sylvane and Merrifield had bought in Iowa, were doing well in spite of a hard winter. Roosevelt, struck by Sylvane's enthusiastic report, backed by a painstaking account-sheet, wrote Sylvane telling him to buy a thousand or twelve hundred head more.

Sylvane's reply was characteristic and would have gratified Uncle James. "Don't put in any more money until you're sure we've scattered the other dollars right," he said in effect. "Better come out first and look around."

That struck Roosevelt as good advice, and he accepted it.

While Roosevelt was winning clear, meanwhile, of the tangles and snares in Albany, he was unconsciously being enmeshed in the web that was spinning at Medora.