nset by degrees softens and dies
away; while my days I spend generally alone, riding through
the lonely rolling prairie and broken lands.

If, on those solitary rides, Roosevelt gave much thought to politics,
it was doubtless not on any immediate benefit for himself on which his
mind dwelt. Sewall said, long afterward, that "Roosevelt was always
thinkin' of makin' the world better, instead of worse," and Merrifield
remembered that even in those early days the "Eastern tenderfoot" was
dreaming of the Presidency. It was a wholesome region to dream in.
Narrow notions could not live in the gusty air of the prairies, and
the Bad Lands were not conducive to sentimentalism.

X

The pine spoke, but the word he said was "Silence";
The aspen sang, but silence was her theme.
The wind was silence, restless; and the voices
Of the bright forest-creatures were as silence
Made vocal in the topsy-turvy of dream.

_Paradise Found_

Roosevelt started for the Big Horn Mountains on August 18th, but
Sewall, after all, did not go with him. Almost with tears, he begged
off. "I'd always dreamed of hunting through that Big Horn country," he
said long afterward. "I had picked that out as a happy hunting ground
for years and years, and I never wanted to go anywhere so much as I
wanted to go along with Theodore on that trip." But the memory of the
lonely look in Will Dow's face overcame the soft-hearted backwoodsman
at the last minute. He pointed out to Roosevelt that one man could not
well handle the logs for the new ranch-house and suggested that he be
allowed to rejoin Will Dow.

Early on the morning of the 18th, Roosevelt set his caravan in motion
for the long journey. For a hunting companion he had Merrifield and
for teamster and cook he had a French Canadian named Norman Lebo, who,
as Roosevelt subsequently remarked, to Lebo's indignation (for he
prided himself on his scholarship), "possessed a most extraordinary
stock of miscellaneous mis-information upon every conceivable
subject." He was a short, stocky, bearded man, a born wanderer, who
had left his family once for a week's hunting trip and remained away
three years, returning at last only to depart again, after a week, for
further Odyssean wanderings. "If I had the money," he had a way of
saying, "no two nights would ever see me in the same bed." It was
rumored that before Mrs. Lebo had permitted her erra