Roosevelt,
in the excitement of the moment, was giving away a thing of great
value and might regret it on sober second thought. Lincoln replied
that he could not accept the gift. It struck him that Roosevelt looked
hurt for an instant.

They dressed the antelope together, Roosevelt taking the position of
humble pupil. The next day he returned alone to the Maltese Cross.

He now entered with vigor into the life of a Dakota ranchman. The
country was at its best in the clear June weather. The landscape in
which the ranch-house was set had none of the forbidding desolateness
of sharp bluff and scarred ravine that characterized the region
surrounding Little Missouri. The door of the cabin looked out on a
wide, semi-circular clearing covered with sagebrush, bordered on the
east by a ring of buttes and grassy slopes, restful in their gray and
green for eyes to gaze upon. Westward, not a quarter of a mile from
the house, behind a hedge of cottonwoods, the river swung in a long
circle at the foot of steep buttes crested with scoria. At the ends of
the valley were glades of cottonwoods with grassy floors where deer
hid among the buckbrush by day, or at dusk fed silently or, at the
sound of a step, bounded, erect and beautiful, off into deeper
shelter. In an almost impenetrable tangle of bullberry bushes, whose
hither edge was barely one hundred yards from the ranch-house, two
fawns spent their days. They were extraordinarily tame, and in the
evenings Roosevelt could frequently see them from the door as they
came out to feed. Walking on the flat after sunset, or riding home
when night had fallen, he would run across them when it was too dark
to make out anything but their flaunting white tails as they cantered
out of the way.

Roosevelt, who never did things by halves, took up his new activities
as though they constituted the goal of a lifetime spent in a search
for the ultimate good. Ranch-life was altogether novel to him; at no
point had his work or his play touched any phase of it. He had ridden
to hounds and was a fair but by no means a "fancy" rider. His
experience in the Meadowbrook Hunt, however, had scarcely prepared him
adequately for combat with the four-legged children of Satan that
"mewed their mighty youth" on the wild ranges of the Bad Lands.

"I have a perfect dread of bucking," he confided to an unseen public
in a book which he began that summer, "and if I can help it I never
get on a confirmed bucker." He co