As he lay on the ground near by, after his watch, he liked to listen to the wild and not unmusical calls of the cowboys as they rode round the half-slumbering steers. There was something magical in the strange sound of it under the stars. Now and then a song would float through the clear air.
"The days that I was hard up,
I never shall forget.
The days that I was hard up—
I may be well off yet.
In days when I was hard up,
And wanted wood and fire,
I used to tie my shoes up
With little bits of wire."
It was a favorite song with the night-herders.
One night, early in the round-up, Roosevelt failed satisfactorily to identify the direction in which he was to go in order to reach the night-herd. It was a pitch-dark night, and he wandered about in it for hours on end, finding the cattle at last only when the sun rose. He was greeted with withering scorn by the injured cowpuncher who had been obliged to stand double guard because Roosevelt had failed to relieve him.
Sixteen hours of work left little time for social diversions, but even when they were full of sleep the cowboys would draw up around the camp-fire, to smoke and sing and "swap yarns" for an hour. There were only three musical instruments in the length and breadth of the Bad Lands, the Langs' piano, a violin which "Fiddling Joe" played at the dances over Bill Williams's saloon, and Howard Eaton's banjo. The banjo traveled in state in the mess-wagon of the "Custer Trail," and hour on hour, about the camp-fire on the round-up, Eaton would play to the dreamy delight of the weary men. The leading spirit of those evenings was Bill Dantz, who knew a hundred songs by heart, and could spin an actual happening into a yarn so thrilling and so elaborate in every detail that no one could tell precisely where the foundation of fact ended and the Arabian dome and minaret of iridescent fancy began.
Roosevelt found the cowboys excellent companions. They were a picturesque crew with their broad felt hats, their flannel shirts of various colors, overlaid with an enamel of dust and perspiration, baked by the Dakota sun, their bright silk handkerchiefs knotted round the neck, their woolly "shaps," their great silver spurs, their loosely hanging cartridge-belts, their ominous revolvers. Roosevelt was struck by the rough courtesy with which the men treated each other. There was very little quarreling or fighting, due, Roosevelt suspected, to the fact that all the men were armed; for, it seemed, that when a quarrel was likely to end fatally, men rather hesitated about embarking upon it. The moral tone of the round-up camp seemed to Roosevelt rather high. There was a real regard for truthfulness, a firm insistence on the sanctity of promises, and utter contempt for meanness and cowardice and dishonesty and hypocrisy and the disposition to shirk. The cowpuncher was a potential cattle-owner and good citizen, and if he went wild on occasion it was largely because he was so exuberantly young. In years he was generally a boy, often under twenty. But he did the work of a man, and he did it with singular conscientiousness and the spirit less of an employee than of a member of an order bound by vows, unspoken but accepted. He obeyed orders without hesitation, though it were to mount a bucking bronco or "head off" a stampede. He worked without complaint in a smother of dust and cattle fumes at temperatures ranging as high as 136 degrees; or, snow-blinded and frozen, he "rode line" for hours on end when the thermometer was fifty or more below zero. He was in constant peril of his life from the horns of milling cattle or the antics of a "mean" horse. Roosevelt was immensely drawn to the sinewy, hardy, and self-reliant adventurers; and they in turn liked him.
Life in the camps was boisterous and the language beggared description.
"With some of these fellows around here," Dr. Stickney, the Bad Lands' surgeon, once remarked, "profanity ceases to be a habit and becomes an art."
"That's right," assented Sylvane. "Some strangers will get the hang of it, but others never do. There was 'Deacon' Cummins, for instance. He'd say such a thing as 'damned calf.' You could tell he didn't know anything about it."
The practical jokes, moreover, which the cowboys played on each other were not such as to make life easy for the timid. "The boys played all kinds of tricks," remarked Merrifield long after; "sometimes they'd stick things under the horses' tails and play tricks of that kind an' there'd be a lot of hilarity to see the fellow get h'isted into the air; but they never bothered Mr. Roosevelt. He commanded everybody's respect."