"I don't think you have any idea how much stock comes over the Northern Pacific," Eaton remarked.
"It doesn't matter!" cried the Marquis. "My father-in-law has ten million dollars and can borrow ten million dollars more. I've got old Armour and the rest of them matched dollar for dollar."
Eaton said to himself that unquestionably the Marquis's views were "large."
"Do you think I am impractical?" the Marquis went on. "I am not impractical. My plan is altogether feasible. I do not merely think this. I know. My intuition tells me so. I pride myself on having a natural intuition. It takes me only a few seconds to understand a situation that other men have to puzzle over for hours. I seem to see every side of a question at once. I assure you, I am gifted in this way. I have wonderful insight."
But Eaton said to himself, "I wonder if the Marquis isn't raising his sights too high?"
The Marquis formed the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company with two brothers named Haupt as his partners and guides; and plunged into his dream as a boy into a woodland pool. But it did not take him long to discover that the water was cold. Frank Vine offered to sell out the Little Missouri Land and Cattle Company to him for twenty-five thousand dollars, and when the Marquis, discovering that Frank had nothing to sell except a hazy title to a group of ramshackle buildings, refused to buy, Frank's employers intimated to the Marquis that there was no room for the de Mores enterprises in Little Missouri. The Marquis responded by buying what was known as Valentine scrip, or soldiers' rights, to the flat on the other side of the river and six square miles around it, with the determination of literally wiping Little Missouri off the map. On April Fool's Day, 1883—auspicious date!—he pitched his tent in the sagebrush and founded the town of Medora.
The population of Little Missouri did not exhibit any noticeable warmth toward him or his dream. The hunters did not like "dudes" of any sort, but foreign "dudes" were particularly objectionable to them. His plans, moreover, struck at the heart of their free and untrammeled existence. As long as they could live by what their guns brought down, they were independent of the machinery of civilization. The coming of cattle and sheep meant the flight of antelope and deer. Hunters, to live, would have to buy and sell like common folk. That meant stores and banks, and these in time meant laws and police-officers; and police-officers meant the collapse of Paradise. It was all wrong.
The Marquis recognized that he had stepped in where, previously, angels had feared to tread. It occurred to him that it would be the part of wisdom to conciliate Little Missouri's hostile population. He began with the only man who, in that unstable community, looked solid, and appealed to Gregor Lang, suggesting a union of forces. Lang, who did not like the grandiose Frenchman, bluntly refused to entertain the idea.
"I am sorry," said the Marquis with a sincerity which was attractive and disarming. "I desire to be friends with every man."
The Marquis's efforts to win supporters were not altogether without success, for the liveryman, Jerry Paddock, became his foreman, and Jake Maunders, evidently seeing in the noble Frenchman one of those gifts from the patron saint of crooked men which come to a knave only once in a lifetime, attached himself to him and became his closest adviser. Maunders, as one who had known him well remarked long afterwards, "was too crooked to sleep in a roundhouse." Whether he set about deliberately to secure a hold on the Marquis, which the Marquis could never shake off, is a secret locked away with Maunders underground. If he did, he was more successful than wiser men have been in their endeavors. Insidiously he drew the Marquis into a quarrel, in which he himself was involved, with a hunter named Frank O'Donald and his two friends, John Reuter, known as "Dutch Wannigan," and Riley Luffsey. He was a crafty Iago, and the Marquis, born in a rose-garden and brought up in a hot-house, was guileless and trusting. Incidentally, the Marquis was "land hungry" and not altogether tactful in regarding the rights of others. Maunders carried blood-curdling tales from the Marquis to O'Donald and back again, until, as Howard Eaton remarked, "every one got nervous."