the West.

Winter now settled down on the Bad Lands in earnest. There was little
snow, but the cold was fierce in its intensity. By day, the plains and
buttes were dazzling to the eye under the clear weather; by night, the
trees cracked and groaned from the strain of the biting frost. Even
the stars seemed to snap and glitter. The river lay fixed in its
shining bed of glistening white, "like a huge bent bar of blue steel."
Wolves and lynxes traveled up and down it at night as though it were a
highway.

Winter was the ranchman's "slack season"; but Roosevelt found,
nevertheless, that there was work to be done even at that time of year
to test a man's fiber. Activities, which in the ordinary Eastern
winter would have been merely the casual incidents of the day's work,
took on some of the character of Arctic exploration in a country where
the thermometer had a way of going fifty degrees below zero, and for
two weeks on end never rose above a point of ten below. It was not
always altogether pleasant to be out of doors; but wood had to be
chopped, and coal had to be brought in by the wagon-load. Roosevelt
had a mine on his own ranch some three or four miles south of Chimney
Butte. It was a vein of soft lignite laid bare in the side of a clay
bluff by the corrosive action of the water, carving, through the
centuries, the bed of the Little Missouri. He and his men brought the
coal in the ranch-wagon over the frozen bed of the river. The wheels
of the wagon creaked and sang in the bitter cold, as they ground
through the powdery snow.

The cattle, moreover, had to be carefully watched, for many of them
were slow in learning to "rustle for themselves," as the phrase went.
A part of every day at least was spent in the saddle by one or the
other or all of the men who constituted the Chimney Butte outfit. In
spite of their great fur coats and caps and gauntlets, in spite of
heavy underclothing and flannel-lined boots, it was not often that one
or the other of them, returning from a ride, did not have a touch of
the frost somewhere about him. When the wind was at his back,
Roosevelt found it was not bad to gallop along through the white
weather, but when he had to face it, riding over a plain or a plateau,
it was a different matter, for the blast cut through him like a keen
knife, and the thickest furs seemed only so much paper. The cattle
were obviously unhappy, standing humped up under the bushes, except
for an hour or two at