It happened one day that an old man in a derby hat stepped off the train for a bit of an airing while the engine was taking water. Bill Jones, spying the hat, gave an indignant exclamation and promptly shot it off the man's head. The terrified owner hurried into the train, leaving the brim behind. "Come back, come back!" shouted Bill Jones, "we don't want the blinkety-blank thing in Medora." The old man, terrified, looked into Bill Jones's sinister face. He found no relenting there. Deeply humiliated, he walked over to where the battered brim lay, picked it up, and reentered the train. Medora, meanwhile, was acquiring a reputation for iniquity with overland tourists which the cowboys felt in duty bound to live up to. For a time the trains stopped both at Medora and Little Missouri. On one occasion, as the engine was taking water at the wicked little hamlet on the west bank, the passengers in the sleeping-car, which was standing opposite the Pyramid Park Hotel, heard shots, evidently fired in the hotel. They were horrified a minute later to see a man, apparently dead, being carried out of the front door and around the side of the hotel to the rear. A minute later another volley was heard, and another "dead" man was seen being carried out. It was a holocaust before the train finally drew out of the station, bearing away a car-full of gasping "dudes." They did not know that it was the same man who was being carried round and round, and only the wise ones surmised that the shooting was a volley fired over the "corpse" every time the "procession" passed the bar. All this was very diverting and did harm to nobody. Roosevelt himself, no doubt, took huge satisfaction in it. But there were aspects of Medora's disregard for the conventions which were rather more serious. If you possessed anything of value, you carried it about with you if you expected to find it when you wanted it. You studied the ways of itinerant butchers with much attention, and if you had any cattle of your own, you kept an eye on the comings and goings of everybody who sold beef or veal. The annoying element in all this vigilance, however, was that, even if you could point your finger at the man who had robbed you, it did not profit you much unless you were ready to shoot him. A traveling salesman, whose baggage had been looted in Medora, swore out a warrant in Morton County, a hundred and fifty miles to the east. The Morton County sheriff came to serve the warrant, but the warrant remained in his pocket. He was "close-herded" in the sagebrush across the track from the "depot" by the greater part of the male population, on the general principle that an officer of the law was out of place in Medora whatever his mission might be; and put on board the next train going east.