Roosevelt remained with Robins and the men from Maine for three days, varying his life in the saddle with a day on foot after grouse when the larder ran low. It was all joyous sport, which was lifted for a moment into the plane of adventure by a communication from the Marquis de Mores.
That gentleman wrote Roosevelt a letter informing him that he himself claimed the range on which Roosevelt had established himself.
Roosevelt's answer was brief and definite. He had found nothing but dead sheep on the range, he wrote, and he did not think that they would hold it.
"You'd better be on the lookout," Roosevelt remarked to Sewall and Dow, as he was making ready to return to the Maltese Cross. "There's just a chance there may be trouble."
"I cal'late we can look out for ourselves," announced Bill with a gleam in his eye.
Young Dutch Van Zander, drunkard to the skin, Flung wide the door and let the world come in-- The world, with daybreak on a thousand buttes! "Say, is this heaven, Bill--or is it gin?"
Roosevelt returned to the upper ranch on August 11th.
Everything so far has gone along beautifully [he wrote to his sister on the following day]. I had great fun in bringing my two backwoods babies out here. Their absolute astonishment and delight at everything they saw, and their really very shrewd, and yet wonderfully simple remarks were a perpetual delight to me.
I found the cattle all here and looking well; I have now got some sixteen hundred head on the river. I mounted Sewall and Dow on a couple of ponies (where they looked like the pictures of discomfort, Sewall remarking that his only previous experience in the equestrian line was when he "rode logs"), and started them at once off down the river with a hundred head of cattle, under the lead of one of my friends out here, a grumpy old sea captain, who has had a rather diversified life, trying his hand as sailor, buffalo hunter, butcher, apothecary (_mirabile dictu_), and cowboy. Sewall tried to spur his horse which began kicking and rolled over with him into a wash-out.
Sewall, meanwhile, was also writing letters "to the folks back East," and the opinions he expressed about the Bad Lands were plain and unvarnished.
It is a dirty country and very dirty people on an average [he wrote his brother Samuel in Island Falls], but I think it is healthy. The soil is sand or clay, all dust or all mud. The river is the meanest apology for a frog-pond that I ever saw. It is a queer country, you would like to see it, but you would not like to live here long. The hills are mostly of clay, the sides of some very steep and barren of all vegetation. You would think cattle would starve there, but all the cattle that have wintered here are fat now and they say here that cattle brought from any other part will improve in size and quality. Theodore thinks I will have more than $3000.00 in three years if nothing happens. He is going to put on a lot of cattle next year.
