did not have much longer to live, and that
violent exercise would be immediately fatal.

They returned to Lang's, Roosevelt remarking to himself that it was
"dogged that does it," and ready to hunt three weeks if necessary to
get his buffalo.

If Lang had any notion that the privations of the hunt had dampened
Roosevelt's enthusiasm for the frontier, Roosevelt himself speedily
dispelled it.

Roosevelt had, for a year or more, felt the itch to be a monarch of
acres. He had bought land at Oyster Bay, including an elevation known
to the neighbors as Sagamore Hill, where he was building a house; but
a view and a few acres of woodland could not satisfy his craving. He
wanted expanses to play with, large works to plan and execute,
subordinates to inspire and to direct. He had driven his uncles, who
were as intensely practical and thrifty as Dutch uncles should be, and
his sisters, who were, at least, very much more practical in money
matters than he was, nearly frantic the preceding summer by declaring
his intention to purchase a large farm adjoining the estate of his
brother-in-law, Douglas Robinson, in the Mohawk Valley; for his kin
knew, what he himself failed to recognize, that he was not made to be
a farmer and that he who loved to be in the center of the seething
world would explode, or burn himself out, in a countryside a night's
run from anywhere. They knew also that farming was not a spiritual
adventure, but a business, and that Theodore, with his generous habit
of giving away a few thousands here and a few thousands there, was not
exactly a business man. He had yielded to their abjurations; but his
hankering for acres had remained.

Here in Dakota were all the acres that any man could want, and they
were his for the asking.

To this vague craving to be monarch of all he surveyed (or nearly
all), another emotion which Roosevelt might have identified with
business acumen had during the past year been added. Together with a
Harvard classmate, Richard Trimble, he had become interested in a
ranching project known as the Teschmaker and Debillier Cattle Company,
which "ran" some thousands of head of cattle fifty or sixty miles
north of Cheyenne; and he had invested ten thousand dollars in it.
Commander Gorringe, seeking to finance the enterprise in which he was
involved, in the course of his hunting accounts doubtlessly spoke
glowingly to Roosevelt of the huge profits that awaited Eastern
dollars in the Bad Lands. R