I like the West and I like ranching life [he said to a reporter of the New York _Tribune_ who interviewed him at his sister's house a day or two before his return to Dakota]. On my last trip I was just three weeks at the ranch and just twenty-one days, of sixteen hours each, in the saddle, either after cattle, taking part in the "round-up," or hunting. It would electrify some of my friends who have accused me of representing the kid-gloved element in politics if they could see me galloping over the plains, day in and day out, clad in a buckskin shirt and leather chaparajos, with a big sombrero on my head. For good, healthy exercise I would strongly recommend some of our gilded youth to go West and try a short course of riding bucking ponies, and assist at the branding of a lot of Texas steers. There is something charmingly boyish in his enthusiasm over his own manly valor and his confidence in its "electrifying" effect. Roosevelt wrote to Sewall immediately after his arrival in the East, telling him that he would take him West with him. Toward the end of July, Sewall appeared in New York with his stalwart nephew in tow. The contract they entered into with Roosevelt was merely verbal. There was to be a three-year partnership. If business were prosperous, they were to have a share in it. If it were not, they were to have wages, whatever happened. "What do you think of that, Bill?" asked Roosevelt. "Why," answered Bill in his slow, Maine way, "I think that's a one-sided trade. But if you can stand it, I guess we can." That was all there was to the making of the contract. On the 28th the three of them started westward. In the cattle country, meanwhile, things had been happening. Shortly after Roosevelt's departure for the East, Granville Stuart had gathered his clans, and, suddenly and without warning, his bolt from the blue had fallen upon the outlaws of Montana. At a cabin here, at a deserted lumber-camp there, where the thieves, singly or in groups, made their headquarters, the masked riders appeared and held their grim proceedings. There was no temporizing, and little mercy. Justice was to be done, and it was done with all the terrible relentlessness that always characterizes a free citizen when he takes back, for a moment, the powers he has delegated to a government which in a crisis has proved impotent or unwilling to exercise them. A drumhead court-martial might have seemed tedious and technical in comparison with the sharp brevity of the trials under the ominous cottonwoods.