they were riding along the face of a steep bluff, the sandy soil suddenly broke away under the ponies' hoofs. They slid and rolled to the bottom, coming to a stop at last in a huddled heap of horses and men. The hunters mounted the frightened animals again, but shortly after, while galloping through a brushcovered bottom, Roosevelt's pony put both forefeet in a hole made by the uprooting of a tree and turned a complete somersault, pitching his rider a good ten feet beyond his head.

It's dogged as does it, runs a famous maxim.

Roosevelt helped his horse to his feet and again mounted. And a little later, in the bed of a dry creek which had all the appearance of solid ground, the earth suddenly gave way like a trap-door under his horse and let him down to his withers in soft, sticky mud. Roosevelt flung himself off the saddle and floundered to the bank, loosening the lariat from the saddle-bow. Pulling and hauling, with Ferris's pony to aid, they drew the trembling and mudplastered horse to safety.

For three days they had lived on nothing but dry biscuits; they had had every variety of discomfort and misadventure; and they had shot no buffalo.

It's dogged as does it. Roosevelt said he would keep on until they did shoot one.

Less than an hour later, grazing in the bunchgrass of a narrow coulée, Roosevelt, on foot, following the round hoofprints of a buffalo the ponies had scented, came upon a great bull bison. The bull threw back his head and cocked his tail in the air. Roosevelt fired, hitting him behind the shoulder.

The buffalo bounded up the farther side of the ravine, heedless of two more shots that struck him in the flank, and disappeared over the ridge.

They found him in the next gully, stark dead.

Sylvane Ferris had had certain apprehensions, at the beginning of the trip, that the slender young man with spectacles would not be able "to stand the racket." He had no notions of that kind at the end of it. He told his brother and Joe Merrifield that this was a new variety of tenderfoot, "handy as a pocket in a shirt" and altogether a "plumb good sort." Roosevelt, on his part, took a huge fancy to the three quiet, bronzed, self-reliant men. He liked the country, too. It was bare and wild and desolate, a land of endless prairie, brown from the scorching heat of summer and varied only by abrupt and savage hills, known to the cowboys as buttes. In the river-bottoms were waving cottonwood-trees; in the scarred uplands, cut by cañons, here and there bleak and twisted cedars. There was no soft loveliness in this country, but there was about it a stark beauty that made it a fit background for the men who lived and worked and suffered hardship in it.

People called it the Bad Lands, not without reason, for winter and summer did their worst there. It was a land of enormous distances, with no farms and no fences, only at wide intervals ranch-houses, where the men lived whose herds grazed over the prairie through the summers, and congregated in huddled, shivering, unhappy herds in the shelter of the cañons through the winters. Roosevelt saw the long-horned cattle grazing by hundreds and thousands along the

fertile river-bottoms. He saw the cowboys dashing about them recklessly on their half-broken ponies. He talked with the ranchmen. The life they led allured him. He wanted with all his heart to share it, to feel that he was a comrade of such men as these.

He inquired whether he could buy Chimney Butte Ranch. He found that he could; and less than three weeks after that early autumn morning when he had descended from the train at Medora he signed the deeds of purchase and engaged Merrifield as foreman. He returned East, strengthened in body and spirit.

He was re-elected to the Legislature in November and plunged into his work with new vigor and a more solid self-reliance. He ardently supported civilservice reform; he was chairman of a committee which investigated certain phases of New York City official life, and carried through the Legislature a bill taking from the Board of Aldermen the power to confirm the Mayor's appointments. He was chairman and practically the only active member of another committee to investigate living conditions in the tenements of New York, and, as spokesman of the worn and sad-looking foreigners who constituted the Cigar-Makers' Union, argued before Governor Cleveland for the passage of a bill to prohibit the manufacture of cigars in tenement-houses.

The bill was passed. The Governor signed it. But it never became operative. The Court of Appeals declared it unconstitutional, declaring it an assault on "the hallowed associations of home"! Many of those homes consisted of a single room,

where two families, sometimes with a boarder or two, lived and ate and worked!

Theodore Roosevelt raged at the injustice, at the absurdity of the decision, and began to wonder whether in such matters the people rather than the judges should not speak the final word.

For two years Roosevelt had now worked in the Legislature, learning much of politics and of life and growing day by day in character and vision and spirit. He saw, he could not help seeing, that he was making a striking success in politics. He realized that there was a possibility that he might have ahead of him a great career. With a little care in the choice of associates, with a little circumspection in his actions, he said to himself, perhaps .

He began to adapt everything he said and did to the requirements of political nursing. "How will this affect my career?" he began to say to himself. "How will that further or hinder my career?"

He nursed along his career for one month and for one month only. Then, in utter disgust with himself, he decided one day that if such careful time-serving were the price of a "career," he would not have a "career" for all the glory in the world.

It was vastly more useful, he decided, to do his day's work as it came along, and very much more fun.

Life was running, on the whole, very smoothly for Theodore Roosevelt when in January, 1884, he entered upon his third term in the Legislature. He was only twenty-five years old and he was one of the leading political figures in his state, with promo