On one of these expeditions night overtook him not far from Mingusville. That hot little community, under the inspiration of a Frenchman named Pierre Wibaux, was rapidly becoming an important cattle center. As a shipping point it had, by the close of 1884, already attained notable proportions on the freight records of the Northern Pacific. Medora, in all its glory, could not compete with it, for the cattle trails through the Bad Lands were difficult, and space was lacking on the small bottoms near the railroad to hold herds of any size preparatory to shipping. About Mingusville all creation stretched undulating to the hazy horizon. The great southern cattle companies which had recently established themselves on the northern range, Simpson's "Hash-Knife" brand, Towers and Gudgell's O. X. Ranch, and the Berry, Boyce Company's "Three-Seven outfit," all drove their cattle along the Beaver to Mingusville, and even Merrifield and Sylvane preferred shipping their stock from there to driving it to the more accessible, but also more congested, yards at Medora. Civilization had not kept pace with commerce in the development of the prairie "town." It was a lurid little place. Medora, in comparison to it, might have appeared almost sober and New-Englandish. It had no "steady" residents save a half-dozen railroad employees, the landlord of the terrible hotel south of the tracks, where Roosevelt had had his encounter with the drunken bully, and a certain Mrs. Nolan and her daughters, who kept an eminently respectable boarding-house on the opposite side of the railroad; but its "floating population" was large. Every herd driven into the shipping-yards from one of the great ranches in the upper Little Missouri country brought with it a dozen or more parched cowboys hungering and thirsting for excitement as no saint ever hungered and thirsted for righteousness; and celebrations had a way of lasting for days. The men were Texans, most of them, extraordinary riders, born to the saddle, but reckless, given to heavy drinking, and utterly wild and irresponsible when drunk. It was their particular delight to make life hideous for the station agent and the telegraph operator. For some weeks Mingusville, it was said, had a new telegraph operator every night. About ten o'clock the cowboys, celebrating at the "hotel," would drift over to the board shack which was the railroad station, and "shoot it full of holes." They had no particular reason for doing this; they had no grudge against either the railroad or the particular operator who happened to be in charge. They were children, and it was fun to hear the bullets pop, and excruciating fun to see the operator run out of the shack with a yell and go scampering off into the darkness. One operator entered into negotiations with the enemy. Recognizing their perfect right to shoot up the station if they wanted to, he merely stipulated that they allow him to send off the night's dispatches before they began. This request