It was rather funny business [Sewall wrote his brother subsequently] for one of the men was called a pretty hard ticket. He was also a shooting man. If he was in the bushes and saw us first he was liable to make it very unhealthy for us.
Roosevelt and Dow peered through the bushes. Beside a fire in a grove of young cottonwoods a solitary figure was sitting; his guns were on the ground at his side.
"Hands up!"
Roosevelt and Dow rushed in on the man, who was not slow to do as he was told. He was a halfwitted German named Wharfenberger, a tool of rogues more keen than he, whom Sewall later described as "an oldish man who drank so much poor whiskey that he had lost most of the manhood he ever possessed."
They searched the old man, taking his gun and his knives from him, and telling him that if he did exactly as he was told they would use him well; but if he disobeyed or tried to signal the other men, they would kill him instantly. Knowing something of the frontier, he was ready to believe that he would be given short shrift, and was thoroughly submissive.
Finnegan and the third man, a half-breed named Bernstead, had, it seems, gone hunting, believing themselves safe. Sewall guarded the German, while Roosevelt and Dow, crouching under the lee of a cutbank, prepared to greet the others.
The ground before them was as level as a floor, with no growth on it of any sort beside the short dead grass which would not have given cover to a rabbit. Beyond, to the east lay a wide stretch of level bottom covered with sagebrush as high as a man's waist, and beyond that was a fringe of bushes bordering a stretch of broken butte country. The wind had fallen. Save for the rush of the river, there was no sound.
Will and I [Sewall wrote his brother] kept watch and listened—our eyes are better than Roosevelt's, Will on the right and I on the left. R. was to rise up and tell them to hands up, Will and I both with double barrel guns loaded with Buck shot, and we were all going to shoot if they offered to raise a gun. It is rather savage work but it don't do to fool with such fellows. If there was any killing to be done we meant to do it ourselves.
About an hour before sunset they heard Finnegan and his companion crawling through the stunted bushes at the foot of the clay hill. The men started to go upstream.
"We are going to lose them," Roosevelt whispered; "they are not coming to camp."