Starr's fee was twenty dollars. Sylvane's railroad fare was five more. The total bill was thirty-five.
Roosevelt paid the bill. If he remarked that, taking lost time into consideration, it would have been cheaper, in the first place, to pay the Russian the forty dollars he demanded, there is no record of it. But the remark would not have been characteristic. The chances are that he thought Sylvane's encounter with the law worth every cent that it cost.[Back to Contents]
XVIII.
Somewhere on some faded page
I read about a Golden Age,
But gods and Caledonian hunts
Were nothing to what I knew once.
Here on these hills was hunting! Here
Antelope sprang and wary deer.
Here there were heroes! On these plains
Were drops afire from dragons' veins!
Here there was challenge, here defying,
Here was true living, here great dying!
Stormy winds and stormy souls,
Earthly wills with starry goals,
Battle—thunder—hoofs in flight—
Centaurs charging down the night!
Here there were feasts of song and story
And words of love and dreams of glory!
Here there were friends! Ah, night will fall
And clouds or the stars will cover all,
But I, when I go as a ghost again
To the gaunt, grim buttes, to the friendly plain
I know that for all that time can do
To scatter the faithful, estrange the true—
Quietly, in the lavender sage,
Will be waiting the friends of my golden age.
From Medora Nights
The wild riding, the mishaps, the feverish activity, the smell of the cattle, the dust, the tumult, the physical weariness, the comradeship, the closeness to life and death—to Roosevelt it was all magical and enticing. He loved the crisp morning air, the fantastic landscape, the limitless spaces, half blue and half gold. His spirit was sensitive to beauty, especially the beauty that lay open for all in the warm light of dawn and dusk under the wide vault of heaven; and the experiences that were merely the day's work to his companions to him were edged with the shimmer of spiritual adventure.
"We knew toil and hardship and hunger and thirst," Roosevelt wrote thirty years later, "and we saw men die violent deaths as they worked among the horses and cattle, or fought in evil feuds with one another; but we felt the beat of hardy life in our veins, and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living."
"It was a wonderful thing for Roosevelt," said Dr. Stickney. "He himself realized what a splendid thing it was for him to have been here at that time and to have had sufficient strength in his character to absorb it. He started out to get the fundamental truths as they were in this country and he never lost sight of that purpose all the time he was here."
To the joy of strenuous living was added, for Roosevelt, the satisfaction of knowing that the speculation in which he had risked so large a part of his fortune was apparently prospering. The cattle were looking well. Even pessimistic Bill Sewall admitted that, though he would not admit that he had changed his opinion of the region as a place for raising cattle.