He had written "Bamie," earlier in the summer, that he was "curious to see how the fall sales would come out." Dow's report completely satisfied his curiosity.
He called the two men into his room. He told them that he too had been "figuring up things." He would stand by his agreement, he said, if, facing an uncertain outcome, they wished to remain. But, if they were willing, he thought they had "better quit the business and go back."
Sewall and Dow did not hesitate. They said they would go back.
"I never wanted to fool away anybody else's money," Sewall added. "Never had any of my own to fool away."
"How soon can you go?" asked Roosevelt.
Sewall turned and went into the kitchen "to ask the womenfolks." It happened that three or four weeks previous the population of Elkhorn had been increased by two. Baby sons had arrived in the same week in the families of both Sewall and Dow. The ministrations of Dr. Stickney had not been available, and the two mothers had survived because they had the constitutions of frontierswomen rather than because they had the benefit of the nursing of the termagant who was Jerry Tompkins's wife. The babies—known to their families, and to the endless succession of cowboys who came from near and far to inspect them, as "the Bad Lands babies"—were just six weeks old.
"The womenfolks say they can go in three weeks," Sewall reported.
"Three weeks from to-day," answered Roosevelt, "we go."
And so the folks from Maine, who had made a rough and simple house in the wilderness into a home, began to gather together their belongings and pack up. Wise old Bill Sewall had been right.
"You'll come to feel different," he had said, two years before, when Roosevelt had been lonely and despondent. "And then you won't want to stay here."