e wrote, and he did not think that they
would hold it.

There the matter rested.

"You'd better be on the lookout," Roosevelt remarked to Sewall and
Dow, as he was making ready to return to the Maltese Cross. "There's
just a chance there may be trouble."

"I cal'late we can look out for ourselves," announced Bill with a
gleam in his eye.

IX

Young Dutch Van Zander, drunkard to the skin,
Flung wide the door and let the world come in--
The world, with daybreak on a thousand buttes!
"Say, is this heaven, Bill--or is it gin?"

_Bad Lands Rubaiyat_

Roosevelt returned to the upper ranch on August 11th.

Everything so far has gone along beautifully [he wrote to
his sister on the following day]. I had great fun in
bringing my two backwoods babies out here. Their absolute
astonishment and delight at everything they saw, and their
really very shrewd, and yet wonderfully simple remarks were
a perpetual delight to me.

I found the cattle all here and looking well; I have now got
some sixteen hundred head on the river. I mounted Sewall and
Dow on a couple of ponies (where they looked like the
pictures of discomfort, Sewall remarking that his only
previous experience in the equestrian line was when he "rode
logs"), and started them at once off down the river with a
hundred head of cattle, under the lead of one of my friends
out here, a grumpy old sea captain, who has had a rather
diversified life, trying his hand as sailor, buffalo hunter,
butcher, apothecary (_mirabile dictu_), and cowboy. Sewall
tried to spur his horse which began kicking and rolled over
with him into a wash-out.

Sewall, meanwhile, was also writing letters "to the folks back East,"
and the opinions he expressed about the Bad Lands were plain and
unvarnished.

It is a dirty country and very dirty people on an average
[he wrote his brother Samuel in Island Falls], but I think
it is healthy. The soil is sand or clay, all dust or all
mud. The river is the meanest apology for a frog-pond that I
ever saw. It is a queer country, you would like to see it,
but you would not like to live here long. The hills are
mostly of clay, the sides of some very steep and barren of
all vegetation. You would think cattle would starve there,
but all the cattle that have wintered h