Pack stared enraptured at the celebrated portrait of Madame Medora. It was an excellent likeness, beautifully rendered by the celebrated Charles Jalabert; it captured Madame’s delicate beauty and impish good humor and the richness of her masses of auburnred hair.

He knew these things about her achievements: she spoke seven languages fluently; she painted well; she played the pianoforte with accomplished technique and great feeling; she created divine needlepoint; she was an accomplished horsewoman and huntress. There were some, Huidekoper among them, who said she could outride and outshoot her own husband. In a Cow Boy column two weeks ago Pack had christened her the Diana of Dakota.

Pack found it significant that the hunting trophies—the envy of every sporting gentleman and lady in the Territory—were juxtaposed matter-of-factly with shelves of books and magazines published in more than half a dozen languages, all of which both the Marquis and his wife could read effortlessly. There were books on cattle and banking and finance and history and the French monarchy—as well as volumes of Longfellow, Hugo, Emerson, Goethe. The family De Morès, making no concessions to wilderness, had brought every refinement of Civilization to the Territory. Therein, Pack was sure, resided the hope of the Future.

Fitfully distracted by Huidekoper’s alarums, Pack wandered through the dining room, laid with its settings of Minton china; the complete set contained five hundred pieces. Fine table linens, delicate crystal glassware and expensive silver caught his eye. Like all rooms in civilized homes the chamber was wallpapered. The dominant color was deep red, to go with Madame’s hair.

His interest lay mainly in the windows just now. There was still daylight; he peered out one pane and then another, judging angles of fire….

He prowled past several hard-working servants in kitchen and scullery to the long trophy room where most guests tended to congregate during gatherings here. The maid who’d admitted him was on her knees polishing the floor. Except for the rugs, which were from the Orient, most of the furnishings and draperies were French. Here and there, sometimes with startling rudeness, a Wild West artifact boomed: a red Mackinac blanket over a chair, a racked elk head above the doorway and of course that magnificent grizzly bearskin and the huge knife beside it. Pack recalled his previous visit when the Marquis had pointed out the knife, eyes glittering with pride, and gripped Pack’s arm until Pack thought gangrene would set in. The Marquis’s voice had trembled with feeling: I adore the thrilling excitement of the chase and the hunt. It’s no longer enough to shoot game. The spirit craves more. With glistening steel I met this grizzly bear. I wrestled the great beast with nothing but my knife.

Every time Pack saw the knife his awe was renewed.

To keep the establishment functioning there was a considerable population of servants. Pack had catalogued them for the newspaper’s ardent readers: butler, French cook, wine steward, Madame’s private maids, seamstress, six Italian chambermaids, dining room maids, laundress, scullery maids, maids for the children, stable boy, four German gardeners, a guide, four handlers to care for the horses and carriages and hunting dogs, a doctor for the Marquise and her two infant children. Pack had interviewed several of them to provide incidental stories here and there in the Cow Boy.

He moved along the north side of the room, having his look out the windows. The lawn was wide; no cover within easy range of the house. Only a fool would try the half-blind luck of long-range shooting, whether by night or by daylight when he faced nothing but reflections off the surfaces of the windows.

No, it was nonsense. Huidekoper was getting exercised over nothing. Pack put it from his mind.

Lady Medora entered, skirts brushing the floor; behind her came a train of womanservants who took the two children into the kitchen. Madame la Marquise watched the little ones fondly through the open kitchen door as she pointed Pack toward a seat.

“Antoine apologizes for his rudeness. I hope you haven’t been too bored.” She smelled delectably of washed linen and sachet. “You look very handsome, Arthur.”

Pack knew if he spoke he’d only stammer. He smiled, shook his head, kissed Medora’s lovely hand.

She said, “Dakota is a better place to rear children than New York, don’t you think?” In the kitchen he saw the high chair—Medora’s own; her parents had saved it twenty years and given it to her for her firstborn. The children—daughter Athenais and son Louis—of course ate in the kitchen with the servants; they would not be allowed to eat in the dining room with their elders until they were judged fit to behave properly. That would be a while yet—they’d have to be somewhere between the ages of twelve and sixteen.

Madame’s skirts rustled. “I’m pleased they’re completing the church so quickly.”

“It seems to be going very nicely,” Pack agreed. That was the brick Roman Catholic chapel she was erecting in town as a thank-you offering after the births of her two children. It was to be the only church building of any denomination in Billings County.

She smiled with infinite sweetness and said, “The inhabitants of these Bad Lands do seem to feel less in need of theological instruction than of the spiritual consolation provided by Forty-Mile Red-Eye. But we mustn’t let such things stand in the way of bringing the influence of civilization to the West. I’m employing a schoolteacher from the East, did we tell you?” She looked up past him and beamed. “Ah—Antoine.”

De Morès entered—tall, dashing, slender, erect, wafting cologne, wearing a blue shirt with yellow silk lacings. Pack stood and bowed. It was a practice De Morès preferred to the American habit of handshaking.

Pack said, “Your fine lady certainly adds more than a touch of charm to the Bad Lands.”

“She adds magic to whatever she touches,” De Morès said. He was watching the way Pack glanced at Madame; he seemed not resentful but, rather, pleased. His dark flashing eyes missed nothing.

When Madame excused herself from the room, Pack said to the Marquis, “Some of the ranchers seem to have misgivings about your personal safety. They feel you and your family may be in danger from the wilder crowd. I don’t know how seriously you ought to take these vague threats but I feel obliged to pass them on to you.”

“I’ll take them under advisement.” The Marquis smiled. “Thank you for not mentioning these trivialities in my wife’s presence.”

“I shouldn’t have mentioned them at all, save for concern toward Madame and the children.”

“We are grateful for your steadfast gallantry.”

Over sherry De Morès slouched on the davenport and spoke to Pack of his ambitions. He touched the barbed ends of his longhorn mustache, the points of which had been waxed and twisted to glorious perfection.

“We’re chartered to do business in every state and Territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I shall keep building. Tanneries. Soap factories, glue factories, shoe factories. I shall expand the mining of lignite coal not only for use in the abattoir but also, I anticipate, for sale to the railroad and the inhabitants of the region. I’ll raise cabbages—fertilize them with offal from the abattoir and deliver to the East in my refrigerator cars. The city of Medora will become the livestock center of North America. Ultimately it will be the capital of the state of Dakota.” He smiled for emphasis. “In the past half-century America’s population has quadrupled to fifty million. Someone has to feed them—I shall feed them!”

“How many sheep did you bring in?”

“That was the first of some fifteen thousand Merinos this season. Ultimately I shall maintain a herd sufficient to allow the slaughter and shipment of ten thousand lambs and muttons each year.”