The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [167]
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay …26
Progress was fairly rapid that day and the next, Sewall and Dow poling through stretches of bad water with an expertise no Westerner could match. They would have moved faster had it not been for a freezing wind in their faces, which seemed to bluster ever stronger, no matter which way the river turned. (Sewall was heard grumbling that it was “the crookedest wind in Dakota.”)27 The temperature dropped steadily, and ice began to form on the handles of the poles. The only sign of human life was a deserted group of tepees, sighted on the second day. Of the thieves there was no trace whatsoever. It began to seem as if Finnegan had not headed downriver after all. Then why steal a boat?
They camped, when they were too cold to go on, under whatever shelter they could find ashore, but naked trees afforded little relief from the wind. During the second night, the thermometer reached zero.
Next morning, 1 April, anchor-ice was jostling so thick they could not push on for several hours. They managed to shoot a couple of deer for breakfast, and the hot meat warmed their frozen bodies back to life. Early that afternoon, when they were nearly a hundred miles north of Elkhorn, they rounded a bend, laughing and talking, and almost collided with their stolen boat.28 It lay moored against the right bank.
From among the bushes some little way back, the smoke of a campfire curled up through the frosty air … Our overcoats were off in a second, and after exchanging a few muttered words, the boat was hastily and silently shoved toward the bank. As soon as it touched the shore ice I leaped and ran up behind a clump of bushes, so as to cover the landing of the others, who had to make the boat fast. For a moment we felt a thrill of keen excitement and our veins tingled as we crept cautiously toward the fire …
We took them absolutely by surprise. The only one in the camp was the German [Pfaffenbach], whose weapons were on the ground, and who, of course, gave up at once, his companions being off hunting. We made him safe, delegating one of our number to look after him particularly and see that he made no noise, and then sat down and waited for the others. The camp was under the lee of a cut bank, behind which we crouched, and, after waiting an hour or over, the men we were after came in. We heard them a long way off and made ready, watching them for some minutes as they walked towards us, their rifles on their shoulders and the sunlight glittering on their steel barrels. When they were within twenty yards or so we straightened up from behind the bank, covering them with our cocked rifles, while I shouted to them to hold up their hands … The half-breed obeyed at once, his knees trembling as if they had been made of whalebone. Finnegan hesitated for a second, his eyes fairly wolfish; then, as I walked up within a few paces, covering the center of his chest so as to avoid overshooting, and repeating the command, he saw that he had no shot, and, with an oath, let his rifle drop and held his hands up beside his head.29
Having divested his prisoners of an alarming array of rifles, revolvers, and knives, Roosevelt now found himself in something of a quandary. He could not tie them up, for their hands and feet would freeze off.30 What was more, Mandan, the first big town downriver, was more than 150 miles away, and the ice-floes ahead were so thick it could be weeks