They found their antelope on the way home. They found two antelopes, in fact, but Roosevelt, who had been as cool as an Indian an instant before, was so elated when he saw the first drop to his rifle that he was totally incapacitated from aiming at the second when that animal, evidently bewildered, began to run in circles scarcely twenty-five yards away. He had dropped his gun with a whoop, waving his arms over his head and crying, "I got him! I got him!"
"Shoot the other one!" Lincoln called.
Roosevelt burst into a laugh. "I can't," he called back. "Not to save my life."
They met at the side of the antelope. "This would not have seemed nearly so good if somebody had not been here to see it," Roosevelt exclaimed. "Do you know what I am going to do? I am going to make you a present of my shot-gun."
Lincoln, being only sixteen, did not know exactly what to make of the generosity of this jubilant young man. It struck him that Roosevelt, in the excitement of the moment, was giving away a thing of great value and might regret it on sober second thought. Lincoln replied that he could not accept the gift. It struck him that Roosevelt looked hurt for an instant.
They dressed the antelope together, Roosevelt taking the position of humble pupil. The next day he returned alone to the Maltese Cross.
He now entered with vigor into the life of a Dakota ranchman. The country was at its best in the clear June weather. The landscape in which the ranch-house was set had none of the forbidding desolateness of sharp bluff and scarred ravine that characterized the region surrounding Little Missouri. The door of the cabin looked out on a wide, semi-circular clearing covered with sagebrush, bordered on the east by a ring of buttes and grassy slopes, restful in their gray and green for eyes to gaze upon. Westward, not a quarter of a mile from the house, behind a hedge of cottonwoods, the river swung in a long circle at the foot of steep buttes crested with scoria. At the ends of the valley were glades of cottonwoods with grassy floors where deer hid among the buckbrush by day, or at dusk fed silently or, at the sound of a step, bounded, erect and beautiful, off into deeper shelter. In an almost impenetrable tangle of bullberry bushes, whose hither edge was barely one hundred yards from the ranch-house, two fawns spent their days. They were extraordinarily tame, and in the evenings Roosevelt could frequently see them from the door as they came out to feed. Walking on the flat after sunset, or riding home when night had fallen, he would run across them when it was too dark to make out anything but their flaunting white tails as they cantered out of the way.
Roosevelt, who never did things by halves, took up his new activities as though they constituted the goal of a lifetime spent in a search for the ultimate good. Ranch-life was altogether novel to him; at no point had his work or his play touched any phase of it. He had ridden to hounds and was a fair but by no means a "fancy" rider. His experience in the Meadowbrook Hunt, however, had scarcely prepared him adequately for combat with the four-legged children of Satan that "mewed their mighty youth" on the wild ranges of the Bad Lands.
"I have a perfect dread of bucking," he confided to an unseen public in a book which he began that summer, "and if I can help it I never get on a confirmed bucker." He could not always help it. Sylvane, who could ride anything in the Bad Lands, was wedded to the idea that any animal which by main force had been saddled and ridden was a "broke horse," and when Roosevelt would protest mildly concerning this or that particularly vicious animal, Sylvane would look at him in a grieved and altogether captivating way, saying, "Why, I call that a plumb gentle horse."
"When Sylvane says that a horse is 'plumb gentle,'" remarked Roosevelt, on one occasion, "then you want to look out."