s on the
west-bound train yesterday, _en route_ to his ranch near
Little Missouri [ran the item in the next day's issue]. He
was feeling at his best, dressed in the careless style of
the country gentleman of leisure, and spoke freely on his
pleasant Dakota experience and politics in the East. He
purposes spending several weeks on his ranch, after which he
will return East.... Mr. Roosevelt believes that the young
men of our country should assume a spirit of independence in
politics. He would rather be forced to the shades of private
life with a short and honorable career than be given a life
tenure of political prominence as the slave of a party or
its masters.

Roosevelt brought his two backwoodsmen straight to the Maltese Cross.
The men from Maine were magnificent specimens of manhood. Sewall,
nearing forty, with tremendous shoulders a little stooped as though he
were accustomed to passing through doorways that were too low for him;
Dow, twenty-eight or twenty-nine, erect and clear-eyed. They looked on
the fantastic landscape with quiet wonderment.

"Well, Bill," remarked Roosevelt that night, "what do you think of the
country?"

"Why," answered the backwoodsman, "I like the country well enough. But
I don't believe that it's much of a cattle country."

"Bill," said Roosevelt vigorously, "you don't know anything about it.
Everybody says that it is."

Sewall laughed softly. "It's a fact that I don't know anything about
it," he said. "I realize that. But it's the way it looks to me, like
not much of a cattle country."

During Roosevelt's absence in the East, Merrifield and Sylvane had
returned from Iowa with a thousand head of yearlings and
"two-year-olds." A hundred head of the original herd, which had become
accustomed to the country, he had already set apart for the lower
ranch, and the day after his arrival he sent the two backwoodsmen
north with them, under the general and vociferous direction of a
certain Captain Robins. The next day, in company with a pleasant
Englishman who had accompanied him West, he rode up the river to
Lang's.

The ranch of the talkative Scotchman had suffered a joyous change
since Roosevelt's last visit. A week or two previous Gregor Lang's
wife had arrived from Ireland with her daughter and younger son, and a
visit at Yule, as Lang had called his ranch, was a different thing
from what it had been when it had been under m