Such were the salient characteristics of the Tetongs, westernmost representatives of a once powerful race of hunters, whose home had been far to the east, in a land of lakes, rivers, and forests. They were not strangers to the young soldier; he knew their history and their habits of thought. He now studied them to detect change and found deterioration. "I am your friend," he said to them each and all. "I come to do you good, to lead you in the new road. It is a strange road to me also, for I, too, am a soldier and a hunter; but together we will learn to make the earth produce meat for our eating. Put your hand in mine." He was plunged at once into a wilderness of work, but in his moments of leisure the face of Elsie Brisbane came into his thought and her resentment troubled him more than he cared to acknowledge. He well knew that her birth and her training put her in hopeless opposition to all he was planning to do for the Tetongs, and yet he determined to demonstrate to her both the justice and the humanity of his position. He knew her father's career very well. He had once travelled for two days on the same railway train with him, and remembered him as a boastful but powerful man, whose antagonism no one held in light esteem. Andrew Brisbane had entered the State at a time when its mineral wealth lay undeveloped and free to the taker, and having leagued himself with men less masterly than himself but quite as unscrupulous, had set to work to grasp and hold the natural resources of the great Territory--he laid strong fists upon the mines and forests and grass of the wild land. Once grasped, nothing was ever surrendered. It mattered nothing to him and his kind that a race of men already lived upon this land and were prepared to die in defence of it. By adroit juggling, he and his corporation put the unsuspecting settler forward to receive the first shock of the battle, and, when trouble came, loudly called upon the government to send its troops "in support of the pioneers." In this way, without danger to himself, the shrewd old Yankee had acquired mineral belts, cattle-ranges, railway rights, and many other good things, and at last, when the Territory was made a State, he became one of its senators.