ng 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 "