For three weeks Roosevelt was in the saddle every day from dawn till night, riding, often in no company but his own, up and down the river, restless and indefatigable. On one of his solitary rides he stopped at Mrs. Maddox's hut to call for the buckskin suit he had ordered of her. She was a woman of terrible vigor, and inspired in Roosevelt a kind of awe which none of the "bad men" of the region had been able to make him feel.
She invited him to dinner. While she was preparing the meal, he sat in a corner of the cabin. He had a habit of carrying a book with him wherever he went and he was reading, altogether absorbed, when suddenly Mrs. Maddox stumbled over one of his feet.
"Take that damn foot away!" she cried in tones that meant business.[8] Roosevelt took his foot away, "and all that was attached to it," as one of his cowboy friends explained subsequently, waiting outside until the call for dinner came. He ate the dinner quickly, wasting no words, not caring to run any risk of stirring again the fury of Mrs. Maddox.
The Little Missouri Just Above Elkhorn.
It was on another solitary ride, this time in pursuit of stray horses,—the horses, he found, were always straying,—that he had an adventure of a more serious and decidedly lurid sort. The horses had led him a pace through the Bad Lands westward out over the prairie, and night overtook him not far from Mingusville, a primitive settlement named thus with brilliant ingenuity by its first citizens, a lady by the name of Minnie and her husband by the name of Gus. The "town"—what there was of it—was pleasantly situated on rolling country on the west bank of Beaver Creek. Along the east side of the creek were high, steep, cream-colored buttes, gently rounded and capped with green, softer in color than the buttes of the Bad Lands and very attractive in spring in their frame of grass and cottonwoods and cedars. Mingusville consisted of the railroad station, the section-house, and a story-and-a-half "hotel" with a false front. The "hotel" was a saloon with a loft where you might sleep if you had courage.
Roosevelt stabled his horse in a shed behind the "hotel," and started to enter.
Two shots rang out from the bar-room.
He hesitated. He had made it a point to avoid centers of disturbance such as this, but the night was chilly and there was no place else to go. He entered, with misgivings.