Lang's cow-camp, which was to be the starting-point for the buffalo hunt, was situated some forty-five miles to the south, in the neighborhood of Pretty Buttes. Merrifield and the Ferrises had spent some months there the previous winter, staying with a half-breed named O'Donald and a German named Jack Reuter, known to the countryside as "Dutch Wannigan," who had built the rough log cabin and used it as their headquarters. Buffalo at that time had been plentiful there, and the three Canadians had shot them afoot and on horseback, now and then teasing one of the lumbering hulks into charging, for the excitement of the "close shave" the maddened beast would provide. If there were buffalo anywhere, there would be buffalo somewhere near Pretty Buttes. [Illustration: Maltese Cross ranch-house.] [Illustration: View from the door of the Maltese Cross ranch-house.] Joe, who was of a sedentary disposition, decided that they would make the long trip south in the buckboard, but Roosevelt protested. He saw the need of the buckboard to carry the supplies, but he saw no reason why he should sit in it all day. He asked for an extra saddle horse. The three declared they did not have an extra saddle horse. Roosevelt pleaded. The three Canadians thereupon became suspicious and announced more firmly than before that they did not have an extra saddle horse. Roosevelt protested fervidly that he could not possibly sit still in a buckboard, driving fifty miles. "By gosh, he wanted that saddle horse so bad," said Joe a long time after, "that we were afraid to let him have it. Why, we didn't know him from Job's off ox. We didn't know but what he'd ride away with it. But, say, he wanted that horse so blamed bad, that when he see we weren't going to let him have it, he offered to buy it for cash." That proposal sounded reasonable to three cautious frontiersmen, and, before they all turned into their bunks that night, Roosevelt had acquired a buckskin mare named Nell, and therewith his first physical hold on the Bad Lands. II It rains here when it rains an' it's hot here when it's hot, The real folks is real folks which city folks is not. The dark is as the dark was before the stars was made; The sun is as the sun was before God thought of shade; An' the prairie an' the butte-tops an' the long winds, when they blow, Is like the things what Adam knew on his birthday, long ago. From _Medora Nights_ Joe in the buckboard and Roosevelt on his new acquisition started south at dawn.