e had fallen upon the outlaws of Montana. At a cabin here, at a
deserted lumber-camp there, where the thieves, singly or in groups,
made their headquarters, the masked riders appeared and held their
grim proceedings. There was no temporizing, and little mercy. Justice
was to be done, and it was done with all the terrible relentlessness
that always characterizes a free citizen when he takes back, for a
moment, the powers he has delegated to a government which in a crisis
has proved impotent or unwilling to exercise them. A drumhead
court-martial might have seemed tedious and technical in comparison
with the sharp brevity of the trials under the ominous cottonwoods.

Out of the open country, where "Stuart's vigilantes" were swooping on
nest after nest of the thieves, riders came with stories that might
well have sent shudders down the backs even of innocent men. The
newspapers were filled with accounts of lifeless bodies left hanging
from countless cottonwoods in the wake of the raiders, tales of
battles in which the casualties were by no means all on one side, and
snatches of humor that was terrible against the background of black
tragedy. Some of the stories were false, some were fantastic
exaggerations of actual fact sifted through excited imaginations.
Those that were bare truth were in all conscience grim enough for the
most morbid mind. The yarns flew from mouth to mouth, from ranch to
ranch. Cowboys were hard to hold to their work. Now that a determined
man had shown the way, everybody wanted to have a part in the last
great round-up of the unruly. The excitement throughout the region was
intense. Here and there subsidiary bands were formed to "clean up the
stragglers." Thoughtful men began to have apprehensions that it might
prove more difficult to get the imp of outraged justice back into the
bottle than it had been to let him out.

The raiders skirted the Bad Lands on the north, pushing on east to the
Missouri, and for a time Medora's precious collection of desperadoes
remained undisturbed. There were rumors that Maunders was on the books
of Stuart's men, but under the wing of the Marquis he was well
protected, and that time, at least, no raiders came to interrupt his
divers and always profitable activities.

Roosevelt reached Medora with Sewall and Dow on July 31st. A reporter
of the _Pioneer_ interviewed him while the train was changing engines
at Mandan.

Theodore Roosevelt, the New York reformer, wa