“He’s proved himself on round-up and on the range.”

“Understand he’s been quarreling with my friend the Marquis.”

“He’s had his provocations, I believe.”

“The very thought of Jerry Paddock makes me feel positively warm toward Judas Iscariot,” Deacon Osterhaut was saying to Pierce Bolan. “Paddock’s a mendacious scoundrel.”

Bolan said, “A what?”

But at that moment Deacon Osterhaut espied Huidekoper and reached for him. Huidekoper could not escape. The Deacon’s handshake was like a Bible drummer’s: he gripped Huidekoper’s right hand in his own, folded his left over them both, stared Huidekoper unctuously in the eye and, standing a foot too close, spoke in his treacly Southern accent with foul-breathed earnestness: “I’ve lost four head to wolves. It is an unholy tragedy. Now you bring your hounds to my place at the earliest convenience, y’hear?”

Huidekoper extracted himself as quickly as he could from the clutches of the dour pumpkin roller.

Huidekoper was taken aback when he saw the glint of Roosevelt’s eyes, the flash of his teeth in comical zest. Roosevelt said sotto voce, “One might suspect the Deacon suffereth from mental carbuncles and dyspepsia.”

Huidekoper took the New Yorker away from the fireplace. In the corner past the window he said, “There’ll be a vote tonight, on the Association.”

“I know.”

“I wanted to sound you out privately.”

“About what?”

Huidekoper said, “About the Marquis De Morès.”

“What about him?”

“If the Association were in your hands—what would you do about him?”

Roosevelt blinked, his eyes artificially large behind the lenses. “I should seek to insure that the laws be enforced—and I should be prepared to journey to Bismarck or if need be to Washington to make sure they were carried out properly and vigorously. But I can’t support or condone the employment of lawlessness to fight lawlessness.”

Huidekoper said, “Then you’ve changed your mind?”

“Not about vigilantes.”

“About taking a hand here. If your name is put forward for the chair, you’ll accept it?”

“Let’s wait and see whose names are put forward, shall we?”

Roosevelt gave him a quick flash of a smile and a friendly gentle punch on the bicep, and turned to contend with a question from Pierce Bolan.

Huidekoper stood alone for a moment, pleased. He felt that in some fashion—perhaps soon to make itself more clear—his judgment had been vindicated. His early instinct had been astute: Roosevelt, for all his initial reluctance, could yet be the salvation of them. Huidekoper held what he had no difficulty admitting to himself was a nearly superstitious conviction that Roosevelt—because he was on a level with De Morès in matters not only of class and wealth but of will, acumen, leadership, spirit—Roosevelt, in spite of all the dubious attributes that made him seem ludicrous and outlandish, could be the one man who had any chance of marshaling the Forces of Good successfully against the Marquis De Morès and his ever so formidable Forces of Evil. The victory would require no less than a Crusade, Huidekoper knew, and no less a knight to lead it than the outwardly absurd Theodore Roosevelt.

Granville Stuart’s voice grated painfully on Huidekoper’s ears: “A.C.—I hear you don’t like the way the country’s developing.”

Huidekoper pulled out a chair and adjusted himself on it; the actions gave him time to compose his thoughts. “As I see it, the country has got limitations no one wants to acknowledge. Too many have made the mistake of allowing themselves to be caught up in this cattle craze. The Marquis De Morès keeps increasing his herds at a mad rate, and at the same time it seems as if every week another Texan arrives with as many cattle as he’s got left from the twelve-hundred-mile drive from the Red. We’ve got an alarming invasion on our hands—they’re increasing the number of beeves in the Bad Lands far beyond the capacity of our grasses to support them. We’ll soon be entirely overgrazed. As for such fodder as remains, I reckon horses are best adapted to it.”

Deacon Osterhaut said, “Crying wolf again, A.C.? They more than three million acres of grass on the Little Missouri. Three million. You’re irresponsible, forever fueling fears.”

Was the Deacon’s alliteration deliberate? Surely not. He hadn’t the ear.

Howard Eaton said, “I happen to agree with A.C. Too many folks seem to look at Dakota as a place to make a killing but not a living. They don’t see it as a place to settle and stay. They’ve all got plans to go ‘home.’”

Huidekoper said, “To me this is home.”

Eaton said, “What about you, Theodore? Is this country home?”

“It is for now,” said Roosevelt. “I’ve no idea what the future holds. But at this time the Bad Lands are my home, and this country has my undivided regard.”

Granville Stuart glanced unpleasantly at Roosevelt, making a show of his dislike. Huidekoper thought immediately that Stuart was not at all the sort of man who ever could apprehend the value of the little New Yorker; Stuart probably did not like Roosevelt’s cocksuredness and most likely regarded Roosevelt as no more than a nuisance that had to be tolerated—a small bull who, wherever he went, brought his own china shop with him. That was Roosevelt’s reputation. Old Four Eyes. Storm Windows. Dude Roosenfelder. But Huidekoper felt confident that his expectations of the Cyclone Assemblyman had been met. All but one, which—now that he had Roosevelt’s encouragement in the matter—he had every hope of accomplishing this very night.

Unlike the Montana baron, Roosevelt did not have a big voice but he seemed to have learned to make his limited vocal range effective by enunciating precisely and biting off words with sharp attention-commanding clicks of his teeth. He said to Howard Eaton, “What you’ve said has merit. We’re all beginning to feel crowded. As long as we have tolerable weather we can get by with fifteen acres per head of cattle, but should there be drought we’d need twice as much, and we’re nearly at that density now. It isn’t only the newcomers. We all depend on cooperation in the cattle trade—without it, there’d be no round-ups and indeed no trade at all. Now we seem to be at a point where when one outfit overstocks its range, it is not only that outfit’s cattle that suffer—it’s the cattle of everyone along the river who finds his grass consumed by visiting herds that happen to have wandered by for a bite.”

He was looking at Johnny Goodall when he spoke. Johnny said mildly, “If anybody breaks a law, I expect he ought to be held to book for it.”

Huidekoper inserted himself angrily. “Where’s there no effective law enforcement, there are still certain unwritten laws that civilized men recognize. Your employer seems to have chosen to disregard those. Let me put it plain to you, Johnny—some of us are tired of being intimidated by the roughshod tactics of the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company. I for one won’t stand for more of it. If your cattle are pushed onto my range I’ll have no hesitation. And if that doesn’t put it clear enough, it’s my opinion the Marquis has as much moral code as a water trough.”

Feeling Johnny’s immediate brittle stare, Huidekoper clasped his hands behind him and thrust his chest out while privately he wondered, What is in me that will not let me leave well enough alone?

Granville Stuart said, “It’s all very well to stand at the end of your chain barking, but if I was you I’d be careful the Marquis doesn’t slip the chain.”

The sarcastic outburst gave Johnny time to think it over and fortunately the heat went out of his eyes. He said, “Take that up with my boss, Mr. Huidekoper, not with me.”

Huidekoper resumed breathing, realizing only then that he had stopped doing so. Johnny Goodall was a decent man, he thought charitably, but nevertheless it was deuced difficult to feel any warmth toward the Texan. Brutally practical, Johnny chose his friends by their usefulness or their toughness, and was loyal to his hire simply because it was his hire, with no evident concern for the moral quality of his employer.