"Don't you shoot!" cried Merrifield.
Roosevelt, with his eyes on the chickens, proceeded on his way undeterred. Suddenly, a little beyond where he had seen the prairie fowl go to covert, a mountain lion sprang out of the brush and bounded away. Roosevelt ran for his rifle, but he was too late. The lion was gone.
Merrifield's eyes were blazing and his remarks were not dissimilar. "Now, whenever I hold up my hand," he concluded, "you stop still where you are. Understand?"
Roosevelt, who would have knocked his ranch-partner down with earnestness and conviction if he had thought Merrifield was in the wrong, meekly bore the hunter's wrath, knowing that Merrifield was in the right; and thereafter on the expedition obeyed orders with a completeness that occasionally had its comic aspects. But Merrifield had no more complaints to make.
They plodded on, day after day, seeing no human being. When at last they did come upon a lonely rider, Roosevelt instantly pressed him into service as a mail carrier, and wrote two letters.
The first was to his sister Anna.
I am writing this on an upturned water-keg, by our canvas-covered wagon, while the men are making tea, and the solemn old ponies are grazing round about me. I am going to trust it to the tender mercies of a stray cowboy whom we have just met, and who may or may not post it when he gets to "Powderville," a delectable log hamlet some seventy miles north of us.
We left the Little Missouri a week ago, and have been traveling steadily some twenty or thirty miles a day ever since, through a desolate, barren-looking and yet picturesque country, part of the time rolling prairie and part of the time broken, jagged Bad Lands. We have fared sumptuously, as I have shot a number of prairie chickens, sage hens and ducks, and a couple of fine bucks—besides missing several of the latter that I ought to have killed.
Every morning we get up at dawn, and start off by six o'clock or thereabouts, Merrifield and I riding off among the hills or ravines after game, while the battered "prairie schooner," with the two spare ponies led behind, is driven slowly along by old Lebo, who is a perfect character. He is a weazened, wiry old fellow, very garrulous, brought up on the frontier, and a man who is never put out or disconcerted by any possible combination of accidents. Of course we have had the usual incidents of prairie travel happen to us. One day we rode through a driving rainstorm, at one time developing into a regular hurricane of hail and wind, which nearly upset the wagon, drove the ponies almost frantic, and forced us to huddle into a gully for protection. The rain lasted all night and we all slept in the wagon, pretty wet and not very comfortable. Another time a sharp gale of wind or rain struck us in the middle of the night, as we were lying out in the open (we have no tent), and we shivered under our wet blankets till morning. We go into camp a little before sunset, tethering two or three of the horses, and letting the others range. One night we camped in a most beautiful natural park; it was a large, grassy hill, studded thickly with small, pine-crowned chalk buttes, with very steep sides, worn into the most outlandish and fantastic shapes. All that night the wolves kept up a weird concert around our camp—they are most harmless beasts.
The second letter was to his friend Lodge, who was in the midst of a stiff fight to hold his seat in Congress.