"We were sitting on a log," said Merrifield, many years later, "up at what we called Cannonball Creek. He handed us a check for fourteen thousand dollars, handed it right over to us on a verbal contract. He didn't have a scratch of a pen for it." "All the security he had for his money," added Sylvane, "was our honesty." The man from the East, with more than ordinary ability to read the faces of men, evidently thought that that was quite enough. The next dawn Roosevelt did not go hunting as usual. All morning he sat over the table in the cabin with Lang and the two Canadians laboring over the contract which three of them were to sign in case his prospective partners were released from the obligation which for the time bound them. It was determined that Ferris and Merrifield should go at once to Minnesota to confer with Wadsworth and Halley. Roosevelt, meanwhile, would continue his buffalo hunt, remaining in the Bad Lands until he received word that the boys from the Maltese Cross were in a position to "complete the deal." The wheels of the new venture having thus, in defiance of Uncle James, been set in motion, Roosevelt parted from his new friends, and resumed the interrupted chase. The red gods must have looked with favor on Roosevelt's adventurous spirit, for luck turned suddenly in his favor. Next morning he was skirting a ridge of broken buttes with Joe Ferris, near the upper waters of the Little Cannonball west of Lang's camp over the Montana line, when suddenly both ponies threw up their heads and snuffed the air, turning their muzzles toward a coulee that sloped gently toward the creek-bottom they were traversing. Roosevelt slipped off his pony and ran quickly but cautiously up the side of the ravine. In the soft soil at the bottom he saw the round prints of a bison's hoof. He came upon the buffalo an instant later, grazing slowly up the valley. Both wind and shelter were good, and he ran close. The bull threw back his head and cocked his tail in the air. Joe Ferris, who had followed close at Roosevelt's heels, pointed out a yellow spot on the buffalo, just back of the shoulder. "If you hit him there," he whispered, "you'll get him right through the heart." It seemed to Joe that the Easterner was extraordinarily cool, as he aimed deliberately and fired. With amazing agility the buffalo bounded up the opposite side of the ravine, seemingly heedless of two more bullets aimed at his flank. Joe was ready to throw up his hands in despair. But suddenly they saw blood pouring from the bison's mouth and nostrils. The great bull rushed to the ridge at a lumbering gallop, and disappeared. They found him lying in the next gully, dead, as Joe Ferris remarked, "as Methusalem's cat." Roosevelt, with all his intellectual maturity, was a good deal of a boy, and the Indian war-dance he executed around the prostrate buffalo left nothing in the way of delight unexpressed. Joe watched the performance open-mouthed.