Roosevelt flashed his teeth. “I’ll try to remember my manners.”

The woman wrote numbers on a scrap of paper. “You shall have your suit in two weeks, if it please you to call back then.”

Wil Dow followed him out into the blinding sun. As they climbed aboard their steeds Roosevelt touched his hatbrim to the lady in the door. They rode out toward the great dust cloud.

“I understand she kills rattlesnakes with a hoe,” Roosevelt said. “Did you hear her on the subject of the Dutch! And they say I’m opinionated!”

Wil saw a swarm of little creatures scampering about. There was a high-pitched warning bark. Abruptly a hundred dusty dark rodents scurried into their holes, instantly out of sight.

“Gophers?”

Roosevelt said, “Prairie dog town. Wise to give it berth—your horse could crack a leg.”

They went around it and in a while rejoined Bill Sewall and the shorthorns; Roosevelt galloped out ahead to lead the trek.

For a while it was easy work, just now and then riding out to head a stray back into the flow. But toward four o’clock Wil Dow became aware that the herd was bunching up.

“Come on,” Uncle Bill Sewall said, and set about kicking his steed energetically about the flanks. The horse responded sluggishly. Wil watched with fond amusement. He gigged his horse easily to a canter, caught up and rode abreast the old Mennonite.

The cattle had got themselves into some kind of log jam. They crowded into one another’s rumps, mooing and milling.

When the two horsemen reached the front of the herd they found Roosevelt squinting down past the lip of a steep drop. Wil Dow heard his uncle’s sharp intake of breath.

“Terra damnata.”

Below he saw a marvelous vast litter of broken country all heaved and buckled, striped with lateral ribbons of vivid colors. Junipers on the hills were fat and conical and dark.

“The Bad Lands,” said Roosevelt. “Some of those piles of rock look like fallen ancient temples I’ve seen in Egypt and Greece. What do you think, then, Bill? Capital country, isn’t it!”

“This river of yours somewhere in all that?”

“It is indeed.”

Wil Dow grinned. “Then let’s go.”

Sewall gave him a look. Within the red beard his lips were pinched together in stern disapproval.

Through the afternoon the pilgrims from Down East taunted and bullied Roosevelt’s herd of one thousand shorthorns toward the river. Wil Dow’s horse was surefooted and he enjoyed the work but it had an unspeakable effect on his sore knees and thighs and rump.

Toward the bottom they threaded clusters of box-elders and junipers and scrub-oaks. The cattle had taken the scent of water and were moving westward with resolute purpose; it was no longer necessary to prod them. The riders reined up onto the side-slope of the wide gully to let the beasts pass; then they followed at a leisurely pace, squinting against the risen dust.

There were clumps of deciduous trees on these sheltered slopes; their roots must have access to some sort of artesian water. Beneath outcroppings they skirted cannonball boulders two or three feet in diameter—perfect spheres that must have weighed tons. The air had a fragrance of juniper. Wil Dow inhaled deep and felt a thrill of pleasure.

There were groves of tall cotton woods on the riverbanks. Bill Sewall watched the cattle churn mud as they drank their fill; he said, “That river’s the meanest apology for a frog-pond I ever saw. It’s a queer country. I reckon cattle will starve on it.”

“Looks green enough to me,” Wil Dow observed.

“Sooner or later—I expect sooner—there’ll be a winter storm or a summer drought, and there’ll be no more cattle here.”

“I don’t agree, Uncle Bill. I believe what Mr. Roosevelt said, a venture of grand promise.” He enjoyed ragging his uncle. Anyhow the old pessimist needed it to keep him from going sour.

The greyish leaves of the cottonwoods rustled in the breeze and there was a music of doves and magpies. The western sky was a slash of flame.

Roosevelt had a coughing fit. It provoked Uncle Bill into reviving his complaints. “I shall never like this country for a home. I have no ambition to become a cowboy. I expect the best a man can do is regard his time in Dakota as a sentence to be served out.”

Roosevelt scoffed. “Nonsense. I think it’s perfectly bully.” He pointed across the backs of the cattle at the lush land across the river bend. This country along the river was green with vegetation and its soil was darkened by rich silt. Trees were clumped thick in the lowlands. Roosevelt said, “We shall build my Elkhorn Ranch here. We have eighty horses coming in from A.C. Huidekoper’s stock, so our first task is to build corrals. Then I want you to build me a ranch house.”

God in Heaven, Wil Dow thought happily. I am in the Wild West.

There would be eight rooms, seven feet high, and a sheltered piazza along the outside of the east wall. They would build the house of cottonwood logs and they would shingle the roof with pine and Roosevelt insisted that the inside walls be finished with pine boards planed on one side. Then they had to put up outbuildings: two stables with a wagon shed between them, a cattle barn, a lean-to for blacksmith work, a chicken house. And all the while they had to look after a thousand cattle. No denying there was a great deal of work to do.

But Wil Dow didn’t mind. The country was beautiful just then: at its best, Mr. Roosevelt reckoned. There were acres of blooming wild roses; there were wild morning glories, June berries, plums and pomegranates, and fields of brown-eyed yellow daisies.

Wil Dow teased his uncle: “I didn’t come out here to be a carpenter. I want to learn cowboying.”

Uncle Bill said, “I’ve had enough cowboying in the last three days to last my lifetime. I sure don’t know what you see in it.”

Wil laughed at the old boy. “You need more Romance in your soul.”

“I didn’t know Romance smelled so bad,” Sewall said.

They went out in the morning to continue cutting timber for Mr. Roosevelt’s new house. Near an ugly Medusa of a tree he had paced out the corners thirty by sixty, back in the shade of the cotton-woods and up a commanding slope where spring floods wouldn’t take it. A handsome spot under an enormous sky.

Mr. Roosevelt picked up his axe. “What was our tally yesterday?”

Bill Sewall considered the stack of logs. “I cut down fifty, and young Wil about forty, and I believe you, sir, beavered down about twelve.”

Wil Dow tried to keep his face straight. He pictured stumps he’d seen that beavers had gnawed down.

Mr. Roosevelt didn’t seem to mind. All he said was, “I shall have to do better today.”

Wheezing heavily, Roosevelt hauled his axe away. Wil Dow set out to follow.

Uncle Bill Sewall fell in step, striding easily, a long-boned man with shaggy hair that was darker than his flaming beard. He was tall enough to appear thin but in fact he had a logger’s musculature. He was strong of back and strong of heart, as Mr. Roosevelt liked to put it; Wil was too familiar with Roosevelt’s stout opinion of how his uncle was a fearless wayfaring warrior, full of backwoodsman’s self-reliance and muscular resource, who stood for laconic courage and everything else that was to be found in true heroes. Wil Dow knew his Mennonite uncle better than that; and indeed Uncle Bill himself did not enjoy the fuss—he counted himself a man of plain common sense and he did not disagree when Wil Dow suggested Mr. Roosevelt might be able to see the simple truth better if his head weren’t so filled with book-learning.

“Of which you could use a bit yourself,” was all Uncle Bill said.

To that, Wil Dow’s constant answer was, “I got my learning out behind the barn, thank you sir.” He could read and write and do sums. That was enough.

Wil prepared a noon meal. While they ate, Roosevelt was reading Keats and listening—head cocked—to the hooting of mourning doves. He knew the song of every variety of bird, and had the annoying habit of identifying them for Bill Sewall’s edification. Wil Dow listened to him with eager interest—“Sharp-tailed grouse … Hungarian partridge”—but Uncle Bill gave Roosevelt no more than a bilious glance each time.