Roosevelt, learning a great deal about the ways of men who are civilized too little and men who are civilized too much, spent a week waiting in Little Missouri and roundabout for word from Merrifield and Sylvane. It came at last in a telegram saying that Wadsworth and Halley had given them a release and that they were prepared to enter into a new partnership. Roosevelt started promptly for St. Paul, and on September 27th signed a contract[3] with the two Canadians. Sylvane and Merrifield thereupon went East to Iowa, to purchase three hundred head of cattle in addition to the hundred and fifty which they had taken over from Wadsworth and Halley; while Roosevelt, who a little less than three weeks previous had dropped off the train at Little Missouri for a hunt and nothing more, took up again the sober threads of life. [Footnote 3: See Appendix.] He returned East to his lovely young wife and a campaign for a third term in the New York Legislature, stronger in body than he had ever felt before. If he expected that his family would think as highly of his cattle venture as he did himself, he was doomed to disappointment. Those members of it whom he could count on most for sincere solicitude for his welfare were most emphatic in their disapproval. They considered his investment foolhardy, and said so. Uncle James and the other business men of the family simply threw up their hands in despair. His sisters, who admired him enormously and had confidence in his judgment, were frankly worried. Pessimists assured him that his cattle would die like flies during the winter. He lost no sleep for apprehensions. Little Missouri, meanwhile, was cultivating the air of one who is conscious of imminent greatness. The Marquis was extending his business in a way to stir the imagination of any community. In Miles City he built a slaughter-house, in Billings he built another. He established offices in St. Paul, in Brainerd, in Duluth. He built refrigerator plants and storehouses in Mandan and Bismarck and Vedalles and Portland. His plan, on the surface, was practical. It was to slaughter on the range the beef that was consumed along the Northern Pacific Railway, west of St. Paul. The Marquis argued that to send a steer on the hoof from Medora to Chicago and then to send it back in the form of beef to Helena or Portland was sheer waste of the consumer's money in freight rates. A steer, traveling for days in a crowded cattle-car, moreover, had a way of shrinking ten per cent in weight. It was more expensive, furthermore, to ship a live steer than a dead one. Altogether, the scheme appeared to the Marquis as a heaven-sent inspiration; and cooler-headed business men than he accepted it as practical. The cities along the Northern Pacific acclaimed it enthusiastically, hoping that it meant cheaper beef; and presented the company that was exploiting it with all the land it wanted.