One by one its leading citizens deserted it. Roosevelt came and went, making his long stays no longer in the West, but in the East, where "home" was now. Packard went, then Fisher, then Van Driesche. [J. C. Maunders,] of Medora [runs an item in the Dickinson _Press_], is talking of moving two or three of his buildings from there to Dickinson. It was followed by other items full of mournful import. [J. C. Maunders,] [Joseph Morrill,] and John W. Goodall, of Medora, were here Thursday and closed contracts for several lots. They will build. Two weeks later, the exodus began. The telling of it has a Shaksperean flavor: Medora is coming to Dickinson. On Thursday a train came in from the west with a number of flat-cars on which were loaded the buildings of [J. C. Maunders,] who recently bought lots here. Thus it was that the Pyramid Park Hotel, where Roosevelt had spent his first night in Little Missouri, four years previous, came to Dickinson to become a most respectable one-family dwelling. Mrs. McGeeney's hotel followed it two weeks later. In August came the final blow: D. O. Sweet and family have moved from Medora to Dickinson. Mr. Sweet desired to reside where there was some life and prospect of growth. Alas, for earthly greatness, when a son of the town that was to rival Omaha should desert her with such a valedictory! XXVII The range is empty and the trails are blind, And I don't seem but half myself to-day. I wait to hear him ridin' up behind And feel his knee rub mine the good old way. He's dead--and what that means no man kin tell. Some call it "gone before." Where? I don't know, but, God! I know so well That he ain't here no more! Badger CLARK This, then, is the story of Roosevelt in the Bad Lands. What remains is epilogue. In the autumn of 1887, Roosevelt was again with the Merrifields at Elkhorn and with Sylvane at the Maltese Cross, to assist in the round-up of a train-load of cattle which he subsequently sold at Chicago (again at a loss, for the prices for beef were even lower than the previous year). He went on a brief hunt after antelope in the broken country between the Little Missouri and the Beaver; he fought a raging prairie fire with the split and bleeding carcass of a steer; he went on another hunt late in December with a new friend named Fred Herrig, and was nearly frozen to death in a blizzard, attempting (not without success) to shoot mountain sheep; whereupon, feeling very fit, he returned East to his family and his books.