d blankets, saddles and spurs.
Naturally, Maunders clung to him like a leech with his train of
lawbreakers about him.

The immunity which Maunders enjoyed and radiated over his followers
was only one factor of many in perpetuating the lawlessness for which
the Bad Lands had for years been famous. Geography favored the
criminal along the Little Missouri. Montana was a step or two to the
west, Wyoming was a haven of refuge to the southwest, Canada was
within easy reach to the north. A needle in a haystack, moreover, was
less difficult to lay one's finger upon than a "two-gun man" tucked
away in one of a thousand ravines, scarred with wash-outs and filled
with buckbrush, in the broken country west of Bullion Butte.

Western Dakota was sanctuary, and from every direction of the compass
knaves of varying degrees of iniquity and misguided ability came to
enjoy it. There was no law in the Bad Lands but "six-shooter law." The
days were reasonably orderly, for there were "jobs" for every one; but
the nights were wild. There was not much diversion of an uplifting
sort in Medora that June of 1884. There was not even an "op'ry house."
Butchers and cowboys, carpenters and laborers, adventurous young
college graduates and younger sons of English noblemen, drank and
gambled and shouted and "shot up the town together" with
"horse-rustlers" and faro-dealers and "bad men" with notches on their
guns. "Two-gun men" appeared from God-knows-whence, generally well
supplied with money, and disappeared, the Lord knew whither, appearing
elsewhere, possibly, with a band of horses whose brands had melted
away under the application of a red-hot frying-pan, or suffered a
sea-change at the touch of a "running iron." Again they came to
Medora, and again they disappeared. The horse-market was brisk at
Medora, though only the elect knew where it was or who bought and sold
or from what frantic owner, two hundred miles to the north or south,
the horses had been spirited away.

It was a gay life, as Packard remarked.

The "gayety" was obvious even to the most casual traveler whose train
stopped for three noisy minutes at the Medora "depot." "Dutch
Wannigan," when he remarked that "seeing the trains come in was all
the scenery we had," plumbed the depths of Medora's hunger "for
something to happen." A train (even a freight) came to stand for
excitement, not because of any diversion it brought of itself out of a
world of "dudes" and police-officers, but