There was a rolling mighty display of farming and reaping machinery and it was followed by citizens in carriages, on horseback and finally on foot.

Bill Sewall stood just below the edge of the platform. He beckoned and, when Pack bent over, remarked in his ear, “Trouble with it is, everybody in five hundred miles is so enthusiastic they had to get in on the procession there, so there’s nobody left to watch it except you and me and those gents over there who appear to be too drunk to see a thing.”

Sewall by now was widely known for his fundamentalist disapproval of the heavy drinking of the Bad Landers. It would have made him a laughingstock if he had been a less formidable man.

The parading seemed endless in the heat but finally it was over and Howard Eaton mounted the platform and recited the Declaration of Independence very loudly. The band struck up an overture and the entire crowd joined in singing “America.” Deacon Osterhaut offered up an interminable prayer.

Sewall looked at Huidekoper’s bald head. “Old A.C. ain’t careful he’ll get the sunburn on his beaver slide there.”

Pack’s turn came. He took out his printed speech and read it aloud with as much fervor as he could manage in the wilting heat. His message to the throng was one of good tidings—Progress!—and when he concluded his remarks he was pleased by the length and enthusiasm of the applause, liquored up though it may have been.

Then he glanced to his right and announced as briefly and brusquely as decency permitted, “And now it is my privilege to give you former Minority Leader of the New York State Assembly, prominent Bad Lands citizen and chairman of the Little Missouri Stockmen’s Association—Theodore Roosevelt.”

There was too much applause to suit Pack. After prolonged yelling and whistling and the firing of far too many gunshots, Roosevelt smiled at Pack without visible rancor as he rose to speak. He had put on a healthy amount of muscle-weight in the past year but to Pack he seemed owlish and foolish. He spoke without notes. His voice was reedy but it had a penetrating whine. Admittedly he spoke with precise clarity; Pack, who sat clear of Huidekoper where no one would jostle his arms while he wrote down his notes, had no trouble understanding him.

Roosevelt said, “My fellow citizens of Dakota, we—ranchmen and cowboys alike—have opened a new land. This is our land—all of us. Let us be reminded that the Lord made the earth for us all, and not for just a few who may have been chosen by their purple bloodlines. We all are the pioneers, and we know that the first comers in a land can, by their individual efforts, do far more to channel out the course in which its history is to run than can those who come after them. Their labors, whether exercised on the side of evil or on the side of good, are far more effective than if they had remained in old settled communities. So it is particularly incumbent on us here today to act so as to leave our children a heritage for which we will receive their blessing and not their curse.”

Roosevelt went on. Ebullient and histrionic, he gathered energy until he was declaiming with intense galvanic explosions of sound and crazed facial contortions. Yet he held them in thrall. You had to grant it to him. His bombastic rhetoric would have wrung tears from a statue of General Sherman.

Showing his whole mouthful of huge tombstone teeth he enlisted their emotions: “Rampant barbarism must be countered by clarity and courage!”

A clear enough reference to the Stranglers. So foolish. Roosevelt’s maniacal bravado in the name of justice—his naive fastidiousness regarding due process—these things could bring him down, Pack thought. There were exceptional occasions when the ends justified the means; you had to acknowledge that, or you had no decent contact with reality.

“I do not undervalue for a moment our material prosperity,” the dude went on. “Like all Americans I like big things: big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat-fields, railroads—and herds of cattle, too—big factories, steamboats, and everything else. But it is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it. We must keep in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue. It is of more importance that we should show ourselves honest, brave, truthful and intelligent, than that we should own all the railways and grain elevators in the world.”

After Roosevelt took his seat and the shouting and applause and gunfire were done, the crowd flowed away toward the picnic tables and the kegs and jugs.

Pack cornered Roosevelt on his way off the platform. “Now, does this speech presage your return to active political life?”

“It jolly well does not. I’m a ranchman, pure and simple.”

On the contrary, Pack thought. There was nothing either pure or simple about the pompous dude from New York. You never could tell what devious schemes were being hatched behind the protective reflection of those flashing eyeglasses.

Jerry Paddock loomed before Roosevelt like a woolly mastodon. “You talk real loud.”

Roosevelt faced him. “Mr. Paddock, I’ve heard that you boasted you’d shoot me on sight. Perhaps I’ve been misinformed. If it’s true, I’m at your disposal. Now’s the time for you to get at it.”

Roosevelt pulled his coat back to show that he was indeed armed.

Jerry Paddock looked at Roosevelt’s gunbelt, then at his face. Jerry let a while go by, and Pack wondered what he was thinking. Finally Jerry said, “I must have been misquoted. Had a few drinks, maybe. You know how it is.”

“Then we understand each other.” Roosevelt did not conceal his scorn. He turned his back and walked away.

Jerry was in an easygoing mood, Pack observed; but then Jerry was invariably in whatever mood he wanted or needed to be in.

A moment later when Pack climbed down he glimpsed Roosevelt behind the platform—bent over, coughing violently.

Pack turned away and strode toward the punch bowl but Bill Sewall was there. Sewall said, “You see he’s no longer the greenhorn.”

Pack said, “He needs to grow up. Some of his remarks were all too transparently aimed at the Marquis, who is the bread and butter of this community. Your employer seems to enjoy throwing raw meat on the floor. He is headstrong and aggressive.”

“Being headstrong and aggressive—now and then that’s not such a bad thing. You know he is always trying to make the world better instead of worse, and that’s a rare virtue now-a-days. I reckon it may be a failing in him that he sees everything and has an opinion on everything and he is not remarkably cautious about expressing said opinion, but he wants instantly to set everything to rights, and maybe he never will grow up if by that you mean learning that things are not fair, but he has got more heart and more will power than—”

“Will power, is it? Or rabid lunacy?” Pack was impatient. “What about his own tragedies, then? What’s fair about the deaths of his mother and his wife?”

“He’s put those behind him. He pretends they never happened.”

“Now, how in hell can he do that?”

“It takes strength,” Sewall said. He looked at Pack. “I don’t guess I understand you, Mr. Packard. Seems to me you would have to hate Mr. Roosevelt a whole lot to keep from loving him.”

Somewhat drunk, Pack looked up across the river in time to see the light wink out in Madame’s bedroom window. He had found out that when Madame la Marquise prepared for bed, two of her maids helped her dress for the night and got out the two large hairbrushes from her silver-decorated toilet set. One maid would take the left-handed brush, the other the right-handed brush, and they would work on Madame’s long auburn-red hair. The loose hair was kept in a brown sack and when the sack was half full the hair would be removed from it and braided into plaits so that Madame could wear it as part of one elaborate hairdo or another; it always matched perfectly because, of course, it was her own hair. After brushing her out, the two maids would prop several pillows behind her so that Medora could sleep sitting up in the French canopied bed. Her parents believed that sleeping in a fully recumbent position could cause the lungs to collapse.