Roosevelt and George Myers stared at them, wondering what imp in the oven had worked a diabolical transformation. But investigation proved that there was no imp involved. It was merely that Sylvane or Merrifield, before departing, had casually dumped soda into the baking-powder can.
Evidently Roosevelt thereupon decided that if accidents of that sort were liable to happen to George, he had better take charge of the culinary department himself. George was off on the range the following morning, and Roosevelt, who had stayed home to write letters, filled a kettle with dry rice, poured on what looked like a reasonable amount of water, and set it on the oven to cook. Somewhat to his surprise, the rice began to swell, brimming over on the stove. He dipped out what seemed to him a sufficient quantity, and returned to his work. The smell of burning rice informed him that there was trouble in the wind. The kettle, he found, was brimming over again. He dipped out more rice. All morning long he was dipping out rice. By the time George returned, every bowl in the cabin, including the wash-basin, was filled with half-cooked rice.
Roosevelt handed the control of the kitchen back to George Myers.[Back to Contents]
VI.
Once long ago an ocean lapped this hill,
And where those vultures sail, ships sailed at will;
Queer fishes cruised about without a harbor—
I will maintain there's queer fish round here still.
The Bad Lands Rubáiyat
Through the long days of that soft, green June, Roosevelt was making himself at home in his new and strange surroundings. A carpenter, whose name was the same as his trade, built him a bookcase out of scraps of lumber, and on the shelves of it he assembled old friends—Parkman and Irving and Hawthorne and Cooper and Lowell, "Ike Marvel's breezy pages and the quaint, pathetic character-sketches of the Southern writers—Cable, Craddock, Macon, Joel Chandler Harris, and sweet Sherwood Bonner." Wherever he went he carried some book or other about him, solid books as a rule, though he was not averse on occasion to what one cowpuncher, who later became superintendent of education in Medora, and is therefore to be regarded as an authority, reproachfully described as "trash." He consumed the "trash," it seems, after a session of composition, which was laborious to him, and which set him to stalking to and fro over the floor of the cabin and up and down through the sagebrush behind it.
The Ford Of The Little Missouri Near The Maltese Cross.