Johnny had the reputation of being a hard strict man. Wil thought, He is a kind man too, and wondered how many men were aware of that streak in the tall Texan.

Roosevelt peered at Bill Sewall, then at Wil Dow.

Sewall said, “Take Wil, if it’s all the same to you, sir.”

“You mean that, Uncle Bill?”

“Why not? Myself, I’ve got no hankering to ride a thousand miles of boring prairie.”

“Whoopee!”

And so in the morning Wil set off for the far West with Theodore Roosevelt.

They drove their sixteen-horse remuda at alternating canter and trot, tiring them out enough so that the horses would not be inclined to stray during the night; otherwise it would be too much work for two men to hobble eighteen horses each evening.

The rich smell of the recent rains lifted from the damp earth. Wil Dow could not contain his excitement. He kept throwing his hat in the air. When he looked at Roosevelt he saw the boss grinning at him with wide pleasure.

They stopped briefly in the afternoon for a cold meal of smoked beef and hard biscuits. Roosevelt said, “I wish I could fathom what excellence Mr. De Morès must own that commands unwavering loyalty from a man as fine as John Goodall.”

So the truth about Johnny Goodall’s kindness had not escaped him after all. In spite of his obtuse-seeming ways there wasn’t much, Wil thought, that escaped Roosevelt’s awareness. The cowboys still regarded the boss as something of a buffoon—he’d proved himself among the men and they were no longer stringing the tenderfoot but echoes of “Hasten forward quickly there” would reverberate through the Bad Lands as long as there were horsemen. Wil felt privileged to be among the rare few who knew how good and astute a man existed behind the surface of that buffoonery.

The trek west toward the Tetons was a journey of endless fascination for Wil. Roosevelt talked a great deal, mostly contributing to Wil’s education about terrain and wild animals and the history of the land; he also read three or four books a day. And he read and re-read those letters he had from the East.

There were two women who wrote to him with great frequency. One was his sister Bamie. The other—Bill Sewall had been so bold as to ask: Roosevelt had replied only, “An old friend, Bill. A very old and valued friend.”

Finally they raised a lonely light far across the vast darkness. Homing on it, they found a camp of cattlemen gathered around a fire. They turned in their horses to the night wranglers and Roosevelt took out his eleven branding irons and led the way into the camp, where he walked directly to the sulky-looking cook and said, “We’re from the Little Missouri round-up.”

“My God, now they’re sendin’ us a dude four-eyes.” The cook pushed spite at them. “I suppose you want grub to eat?”

Roosevelt said quickly, “We’re not hungry. We’ll wait for breakfast.” It wasn’t true but it was the expected thing to say.

A short wide fellow brought himself across to have a look at the pilgrims. “What brands you represent?”

“Are you the wagon boss?”

“Aeah.”

Roosevelt knew enough to say nothing further; he merely handed his collection of irons to the man, who examined their ends with concentrated deliberation before he handed them back. “Pick yourselves a spot and bed down where you ain’t in the way. We break out at three in the morning, and I want your bedding rolled and corded. If it ain’t, cook’ll leave it here and you’ll go without for the rest of the round-up.”

The wagon boss turned away. He hadn’t introduced himself; he hadn’t said good night. But that was customary. If you were a stranger you had to prove yourself.

In the present case that was no great difficulty, as Roosevelt’s good reputation had preceded him among some of the cow hands and it spread swiftly throughout the round-up after their arrival. Wil Dow was pleased that his own name was known a bit too, as that of a Down-Easter who had learned cowboying faster than anyone in known history.

And if they needed any further means of cementing themselves in the good graces of the Yellowstone cattlemen they achieved it on the second day by shooting two antelope and delivering them to camp for dinner.

The country had an enormous majesty and that week was an idyll for Wil until an afternoon when clouds rolled forward over the high jagged peaks. Upon the prairie an unsteady wind stirred the tall grass in slashing green waves.

There was an uneasy quiet in camp that evening. Then somewhere around midnight there was a sharp blow in Wil’s ribs and he awakened to hear the cook growl: “On your horses, gents. Everybody out.”

Wil sat up, grinding knuckles into eye-sockets. “What is it?”

“Stompede weather. Wagon boss want all hands on deck tonight.”

Thunder rolled in the distance. Voices drifted in the dark still air and he heard a rattle of hoofbeats. Beyond the fire’s circle of illumination he could see nothing. He saw Roosevelt groping to saddle his horse and the boss’s strange clumsy movements made Wil say, “Are you all right, sir?”

“Fine as can be, thank you. You’ll find if you keep your eyes shut around the fire, you’ll be able to see better in the dark once you’re away.”

“Wouldn’t care if I kept my eyes shut all night,” Wil said.

“Never mind, Wil. Nobody ever gets enough sleep on a roundup.”

The wagon boss’s voice carried softly across the camp: “Wranglers—I want double spare ponies on halters and rope-tie. We won’t have time to fish for them if the sky breaks—and I ain’t fixing to find these cows dispersed over half of Wyoming when the sun comes up. Got better things to do than gather these same cows all over again. Now everybody ride an easy circle and keep gentling those critters. If, God help us, things do bust loose, try to head ’em east so they’ll bunch against the river. Otherwise, they run west, we’ll spend all summer combing them out of those mountains.”

At first the slow circling line of soft-singing horsemen kept fragile control. Three thousand uneasy cattle stayed put even when lightning flickered over the plains to the south and thunder carved its long ragged tearing slits through the thick damp fabric of the air.

Wil Dow kept licking rain off his lips. He could see hardly a thing in the clouded night—now and then the hint of a steer’s horn alarmingly close to his knee—but in the increasingly frequent artillery flashes of lightning he managed to keep himself oriented with regard to the herd.

He tried to keep from laughing at the extraordinary sound of Roosevelt’s attempts to sing “Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie.” If anything will start a stampede, Wil thought wryly—and never had the chance to finish the thought, for an earsplitting crash all but opened his skull while a blinding many-forked snake’s tongue of light split the sky so close as to awe Wil and strike him half-blind.

The horse shuddered, squealed and bolted. Wil grabbed the saddlehorn and flailed. He swayed precariously—tried to firm his feet in the stirrups and knew he was riding for his very life.

Stampede.

The world was revealed to him in sudden flashes—battlefields must be like this. The noise was awful: as if the earth itself were in collapse. The horse galloped flat-out, head down, ears back, and only barely kept up with the heaving surf of lifted tails and longhorns; Wil was in the middle of the stampede and if he should fall, or his horse stumble, he would be minced under a thousand cloven hoofs.

Another flash—and ahead he saw nothing: the great seething ocean of dark forms crested and disappeared.

A cliff?

In the darkness his eyes went wide with terror.

The horse ran and ran. Wil prayed for a lightning bolt and heard nothing but a continuation of the horrible deafening rattle of the stampede.

Somewhere right around here, it must be …