On the 8th of October, Packard offered the dubious joys of his stage-line for the first time to the public; and began to see a faint prospect of return on his rather extravagant investment of energy and time. But his satisfaction died stillborn. The Marquis's sanguine temperament had once more proved the undoing of what might have been a profitable venture. The mail contract, which the easy-going Frenchman had thought that he had secured, proved illusory. Packard, who had been glad to leave that part of the business to his principal, discovered, as soon as he began to inquire for the mail-bags, that what his principal had actually secured from the Postmaster-General was not a contract at all, but merely a chance to bid when the annual offers for star routes came up for bidding the following May. It was a body blow to the putative owner of a stage-line.
Long after the last of his Deadwood coaches had been rattled to kindlings in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Packard told the last chapter of his connection with the Medora and Black Hills Forwarding and Transportation Company.
"No mail contract; hardly a month of earnings before winter, when there was no chance of paying operating expenses; responsible for the pay-roll, but not on it; with a private pay-roll and expenses equal to or greater than my private income; with all my cash savings gone in the preliminary expenses of putting on the line, and finally with no chance, under my contract, of getting a cent from the stage-line before that nebulous time when it had paid for itself. The Marquis soon returned and I told him I could not consider myself bound by the contract. The delay in providing funds I had condoned by staying with the proposition, but a mail contract which was essential in helping to pay expenses was not even a possibility for seven or more months in the future. I stayed until another man was hired and left my duties with a grunt of relief."[9]
For Packard the failure of his venture was not a serious matter. The Cowboy was flourishing and there was enough in all conscience to keep him occupied in his duties as Chief of Police. But for the Marquis it was bad business. He had, as it was, few enough honest men at his side.[Back to Contents]
XIII.
Oh, we're up in the morning ere breaking of day,
The chuck-wagon's busy, the flapjacks in play;
The herd is astir o'er hillside and vale,
With the night riders rounding them into the trail.
Oh, come take up your cinches, come shake out your reins;
Come, wake your old bronco and break for the plains;
Come, roust out your steers from the long chaparral,
For the outfit is off to the railroad corral.
The Railroad Corral
Roosevelt returned to the Bad Lands on the 16th of November and was greeted with enthusiasm by Merrifield and Sylvane. The next day he started for the new ranch. He had intended to get under way by noon, but Sylvane and Merrifield wanted to drive a small beef herd, which they were shipping to Chicago, to the shipping corrals near the Cantonment, and it was mid-afternoon before he was able to put spurs to his smart little cowpony and start on the long ride to Elkhorn. The day was bitterly cold, with the mercury well down toward zero, and the pony, fresh and impatient, went along at a good rate. Roosevelt had not gone many miles before he became conscious that darkness was falling. The trail followed along the bottom for a half-dozen miles and then turned off into the bad lands, leading up and down through the ravines and over the ridge crests of a rough and broken country. He crossed a wide plateau where the wind blew savagely, sweeping the powdery snow into his face, then dipped again into the valley where the trail led along the bottoms between the rows of high bluffs, continually crossing and recrossing the river. The ice was too thin to bear the horse, for the cold had come suddenly and had not yet frozen it solid, and again and again, as the pony cautiously advanced, the white surface would suddenly break and let horse and rider down into the chilling water.
Roosevelt had made up his mind that he could under no circumstances reach the new ranch that night and had determined to spend the night with Robins, the seafaring man, whose hut was three or four miles nearer. But the sun set while he was still several miles from his goal, and the darkness, which had been closing round him where he rode in the narrow valley, crept over the tops of the high bluffs and shut out from his vision everything but a dim track in the snow faintly illuminated by the stars. Roosevelt hurried his pony. Clouds were gathering overhead, and soon, Roosevelt knew, even the light that the stars gave would be withdrawn. The night was very cold and the silence was profound. A light snow rendered even the hoof-beats of his horse muffled and indistinct, and the only sound that came out of the black world about him was the long-drawn, melancholy howling of a wolf.
Captain Robins's shack stood in the midst of a large clump of cottonwoods thickly grown up with underbrush. It was hard enough to find in the day-time, but in the darkness of that wintry night it proved tantalizingly elusive. There was no light in it to guide him, which depressed him.