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and as fearless and as lawless as himself. The Little Missouri and Powder River districts are the theater of his operations. An Indian is Mr. Axelby's detestation. He kills him at sight if he can. He considers that Indians have no right to own ponies and he takes their ponies whenever he can. Mr. Axelby has repeatedly announced his determination not to be taken alive. The men of the frontier say he bears a charmed life, and the hairbreadth 'scapes of which they have made him the hero are numerous and of the wildest stamp. During the preceding February, Axelby and his band had had a clash with the Federal authorities, which had created an enormous sensation up and down the Little Missouri, but had settled nothing so far as the horse-thieves were concerned. In the Bad Lands the thieves became daily more pestiferous. Two brothers named Smith and two others called "Big Jack" and "Little Jack" conducted the major operations in Billings County. They had their cabin in a coulee west of the Big Ox Bow, forty miles south of Medora, in the wildest part of the Bad Lands, and "worked the country" from there north and south. They seldom stole from white men, recognizing the advisability of not irritating their neighbors too much, but drove off Indian ponies in herds. Their custom was to steal Sioux horses from one of the reservations, keep them in the Scoria Hills a month or more until all danger of pursuit was over, and then drive them north over the prairie between Belfield and Medora, through the Killdeer Mountains to the northeastern part of the Territory. There they would steal other horses from the Grosventres Indians, and drive them to their cache in the Scoria Hills whence they could emerge with them at their good pleasure and sell them at Pierre. There had been other "underground railways," but this had a charm of its own, for it "carried freight" both ways. Occasionally the thieves succeeded in selling horses to the identical Indians they had originally robbed. The efficiency of it all was in its way magnificent. Through the record of thievery up and down the river, that spring of 1884, the shadow of Jake Maunders slips in and out, making no noise and leaving no footprints. It was rumored that when a sheriff or a United States marshal from somewhere drifted into Medora, Maunders would ride south in the dead of night to the Big Ox Bow and give the thieves the warning; and ri
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