owing the curve of the
river. The valley narrowed. He forded the stream. The trail rose
sharply between steep walls of olive and lavender that shut off the
sun; it wound through a narrow defile; then over a plateau, whence
blue seas of wild country stretched northward into the haze; then
sharply down again into a green bottom, walled on the west by buttes
scarred like the face of an old man. He forded the stream once more,
swung round a jutting hill, and found the end of the bottom-land in a
grove of cottonwoods under the shadow of high buttes. At the edge of
the river he came upon the interlocked antlers of two elk who had died
in combat. He determined that it was there that his "home-ranch"
should stand.

For three weeks Roosevelt was in the saddle every day from dawn till
night, riding, often in no company but his own, up and down the river,
restless and indefatigable. On one of his solitary rides he stopped at
Mrs. Maddox's hut to call for the buckskin suit he had ordered of her.
She was a woman of terrible vigor, and inspired in Roosevelt a kind of
awe which none of the "bad men" of the region had been able to make
him feel.

She invited him to dinner. While she was preparing the meal, he sat in
a corner of the cabin. He had a habit of carrying a book with him
wherever he went and he was reading, altogether absorbed, when
suddenly Mrs. Maddox stumbled over one of his feet.

"Take that damn foot away!" she cried in tones that meant business.[8]
Roosevelt took his foot away, "and all that was attached to it," as
one of his cowboy friends explained subsequently, waiting outside
until the call for dinner came. He ate the dinner quickly, wasting no
words, not caring to run any risk of stirring again the fury of Mrs.
Maddox.

[Footnote 8: "I am inclined to doubt the truth of this
story. Mrs. Maddox was a terror only to those who took
her wrong or tried to put it over her. Normally she was
a very pleasant woman with a good, strong sense of
humor. My impression is she took a liking to T. R. that
time I took him there to be measured for his suit. If
she ever spoke as above, she must have been on the
war-path about something else at the time."--_Lincoln
Lang._]

[Illustration: The Little Missouri just above Elkhorn.]

It was on another solitary ride, this time in pursuit of stray
horses,--the