Out of the open country, where "Stuart's vigilantes" were swooping on nest after nest of the thieves, riders came with stories that might well have sent shudders down the backs even of innocent men. The newspapers were filled with accounts of lifeless bodies left hanging from countless cottonwoods in the wake of the raiders, tales of battles in which the casualties were by no means all on one side, and snatches of humor that was terrible against the background of black tragedy. Some of the stories were false, some were fantastic exaggerations of actual fact sifted through excited imaginations. Those that were bare truth were in all conscience grim enough for the most morbid mind. The yarns flew from mouth to mouth, from ranch to ranch. Cowboys were hard to hold to their work. Now that a determined man had shown the way, everybody wanted to have a part in the last great round-up of the unruly. The excitement throughout the region was intense. Here and there subsidiary bands were formed to "clean up the stragglers." Thoughtful men began to have apprehensions that it might prove more difficult to get the imp of outraged justice back into the bottle than it had been to let him out. The raiders skirted the Bad Lands on the north, pushing on east to the Missouri, and for a time Medora's precious collection of desperadoes remained undisturbed. There were rumors that Maunders was on the books of Stuart's men, but under the wing of the Marquis he was well protected, and that time, at least, no raiders came to interrupt his divers and always profitable activities. Roosevelt reached Medora with Sewall and Dow on July 31st. A reporter of the _Pioneer_ interviewed him while the train was changing engines at Mandan. Theodore Roosevelt, the New York reformer, was on the west-bound train yesterday, _en route_ to his ranch near Little Missouri [ran the item in the next day's issue]. He was feeling at his best, dressed in the careless style of the country gentleman of leisure, and spoke freely on his pleasant Dakota experience and politics in the East. He purposes spending several weeks on his ranch, after which he will return East.... Mr. Roosevelt believes that the young men of our country should assume a spirit of independence in politics. He would rather be forced to the shades of private life with a short and honorable career than be given a life tenure of political prominence as the slave of a party or its masters. Roosevelt brought his two backwoodsmen straight to the Maltese Cross. The men from Maine were magnificent specimens of manhood. Sewall, nearing forty, with tremendous shoulders a little stooped as though he were accustomed to passing through doorways that were too low for him; Dow, twenty-eight or twenty-nine, erect and clear-eyed. They looked on the fantastic landscape with quiet wonderment. "Well, Bill," remarked Roosevelt that night, "what do you think of the country?"