Biography; Frontier and pioneer life -- Dakota Territory; Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
The Haupts were by this time thoroughly out of patience with de Mores.
There was a stormy meeting of the directors of the Northern Pacific
Refrigerator Car Company in St. Paul, in the course of which the Haupt
brothers told their distinguished senior partner exactly what they
thought of his business ability; and suggested that the Company go
into liquidation.
The Marquis jumped to his feet in a rage. "I won't let it go into
liquidation," he cried. "My honor is at stake. I have told my friends
in France that I would do so and so and so, that I would make money, a
great deal of money. I must do it. Or where am I?"
The Haupts did not exactly know. They compromised with the Marquis by
taking the bonds of the Company in exchange for their stock, and
retired with inner jubilation at having been able to withdraw from a
perilous situation with skins more or less intact.
The Marquis, as usual, secreted himself from the stern eyes of
Experience, in the radiant emanations of a new dream. The Dickinson
_Press_ announced it promptly:
The Marquis de Mores has a novel enterprise under way, which
he is confident will prove a success, it being a plan to
raise 50,000 cabbages on his ranch at the Little Missouri,
and have them ready for the market April 1. They will be
raised under glass in some peculiar French manner, and when
they have attained a certain size, will be transplanted into
individual pots and forced rapidly by rich fertilizers, made
from the offal of the slaughter-houses and for which
preparation he owns the patent. Should the cabbages come out
on time, he will try his hand on other kinds of vegetables,
and should he succeed the citizens along the line will have
an opportunity to get as early vegetables as those who live
in the sunny South.
The cabbages were a dream which seems never to have materialized even
to the point of being a source of expense, and history speaks no more
of it.
The boys at the Chimney Butte, meanwhile, were hibernating, hunting as
the spirit moved them and keeping a general eye on the stock. Of
Roosevelt's three friends, Joe was the only one who was really busy.
Joe, it happened, was no longer working for Frank Vine. He was now a
storekeeper. It was all due to the fateful hundred dollars which he
had loaned the unstable Johnny Nelson.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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