[Footnote 8: "I am inclined to doubt the truth of this story. Mrs. Maddox was a terror only to those who took her wrong or tried to put it over her. Normally she was a very pleasant woman with a good, strong sense of humor. My impression is she took a liking to T. R. that time I took him there to be measured for his suit. If she ever spoke as above, she must have been on the war-path about something else at the time."--_Lincoln Lang._] [Illustration: The Little Missouri just above Elkhorn.] It was on another solitary ride, this time in pursuit of stray horses,--the horses, he found, were always straying,--that he had an adventure of a more serious and decidedly lurid sort. The horses had led him a pace through the Bad Lands westward out over the prairie, and night overtook him not far from Mingusville, a primitive settlement named thus with brilliant ingenuity by its first citizens, a lady by the name of Minnie and her husband by the name of Gus. The "town"--what there was of it--was pleasantly situated on rolling country on the west bank of Beaver Creek. Along the east side of the creek were high, steep, cream-colored buttes, gently rounded and capped with green, softer in color than the buttes of the Bad Lands and very attractive in spring in their frame of grass and cottonwoods and cedars. Mingusville consisted of the railroad station, the section-house, and a story-and-a-half "hotel" with a false front. The "hotel" was a saloon with a loft where you might sleep if you had courage. Roosevelt stabled his horse in a shed behind the "hotel," and started to enter. Two shots rang out from the bar-room. He hesitated. He had made it a point to avoid centers of disturbance such as this, but the night was chilly and there was no place else to go. He entered, with misgivings. Inside the room were several men, beside the bartender, all, with one exception, "wearing the kind of smile," as Roosevelt said, in telling of the occasion, "worn by men who are making-believe to like what they don't like." The exception was a shabby-looking individual in a broad-brimmed hat who was walking up and down the floor talking and swearing. He had a cocked gun in each hand. A clock on the wall had two holes in its face, which accounted for the shots Roosevelt had heard. It occurred to Roosevelt that the man was not a "bad man" of the really dangerous, man-killer type; but a would-be "bad man," a bully who for the moment was having things all his own way. "Four-eyes!" he shouted as he spied the newcomer. There was a nervous laugh from the other men who were evidently sheepherders. Roosevelt joined in the laugh. "Four-eyes is going to treat!" shouted the man with the guns. There was another laugh. Under cover of it Roosevelt walked quickly to a chair behind the stove and sat down, hoping to escape further notice.