miles or more to the south.

"The Marquis had observed," narrates the interviewer, "that the
divide on the top of the ridge between the Little Missouri and the
Missouri Rivers was almost a natural roadway that led directly toward
Deadwood. He gave this roadway needed artificial improvements, and
started the Deadwood and Medora stage-line. This is now diverting the
Deadwood trade to Medora, to the great advantage of both places."

Who, reading that sober piece of information, would have dreamed that
the stage-line in question was at the time nothing but a pious hope?

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 havi