SHERIFF'S WORK ON A RANCH jt25 



shot down ; but, although there was thus no risk, it was harassing-, tedious 

 work, and the strain, day in and day out. without any rest or let up, 

 became very tiresome. 



The days were monotonous to a degree. The endless rows of hills 

 bounding the valley, barren and naked, stretched along without a break. 

 When we rounded a bend, it was only to see on each hand the same 

 lines of broken buttes dwindling off into the distance ahead of us as 

 they had dwindled off into the distance behind. If, in hunting, we 

 climbed to their tops, as far as our eyes could scan there was nothing 

 but the great rolling prairie, bleak and lifeless, reaching off to the horizon. 

 We broke camp in the morning, on a point of land covered with brown, 

 leafless, frozen cottonwoods; and in the afternoon we pitched camp on 

 another point in the midst of a grove of the same stiff, dreary trees. The 

 discolored river, whose eddies boiled into yellow foam, flowed always 

 between the same banks of frozen mud or of muddy ice. And what was, 

 from a practical standpoint, even worse, our diet began to be as same as 

 the scenery. Being able to kill nothing, we exhausted all our stock of 

 provisions, and got reduced to flour, without yeast or baking-powder ; and 

 unleavened bread, made with exceedingly muddy water, is not, as a steady 

 thing, attractive. 



Finding that they were well treated and were also watched with the 

 closest vigilance, our prisoners behaved themselves excellently and gave 

 no trouble, though afterward, when out of our hands and shut up in jail, 

 the half-breed got into a stabbing affray. They conversed freely with my 

 two men on a number of indifferent subjects, and after the first evening no 

 allusion was made to the theft, or anything connected with it; so that an 

 outsider overhearing the conversation would never have guessed what our 

 relations to each other really were. Once, and once only, did Finnigan 

 broach the subject. Somebody had been speaking of a man whom we all 

 knew, called " Calamity," who had been recently taken by the sheriff on a 

 charge of horse-stealing. Calamity had escaped once, but was caught at 

 a disadvantage the next time ; nevertheless, when summoned to hold his 

 hands up, he refused, and attempted to draw his own revolver, with the 

 result of having two bullets put through him. Finnigan commented on 

 Calamity as a fool for "not knowing when a man had the drop on him " ; 

 and then, suddenly turning to me, said, his weather-beaten face flushing 

 darkly: " If I 'd had any show at all, you 'd have sure had to fight, Mr. 

 Roosevelt ; but there was n't any use making a break when I 'd only have 

 got shot myself, with no chance of harming any one else." I laughed 

 and nodded, and the subject was dropped. 



