Roosevelt in the Bad Lands Part 30

But there was another reason why the relations between the Marquis and Roosevelt were strained. In the Marquis's business ventures he was constantly being confronted by unexpected and, in a sense, unaccountable obstacles, that rose suddenly out of what appeared a clear road, and thwarted his plans. The railroads, which gave special rates to shippers who did far less business than he, found for one reason or another that they could not give him any rebate at all.

Wholesale dealers refused, for reasons which remained mysterious, to handle his meat; yard-men at important junctions delayed his cars. He could not help but be conscious that princ.i.p.alities and powers that he could not identify were working in the dark against him. He suspected that the meat-packers of Chicago had pa.s.sed the word to their allies in Wall Street that he was to be destroyed; and a.s.sumed that Roosevelt, bound by a dozen ties to the leaders in the business life of New York, was in league with his enemies.

A totally unexpected incident brought the growing friction between the two men for a flash into the open. Roosevelt had agreed to sell the Marquis eighty or a hundred head of cattle at a price, on which they agreed, of about six cents a pound. Accompanied by two of his cowpunchers, he drove the cattle to the enclosure adjoining the abattoir of the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company, had them weighed, and went to the Marquis for his check.

"I am sorry I cannot pay you as much as I agreed for those cattle,"

said the Marquis.

"But you bought the cattle," Roosevelt protested. "The sale was complete with the delivery."

"The Chicago price is down a half cent," answered the Marquis regretfully. "I will pay you a half cent less than we agreed."

The air was electric. Packard told about it long afterwards. "It was a ticklish situation," he said. "We all knew the price had been agreed on the day before; the sale being completed with the delivery of the cattle. Fluctuations in the market cut no figure. Roosevelt would have made delivery at the agreed price even if the Chicago price had gone up."

Roosevelt turned to the Marquis. "Did you agree to pay six cents for these cattle?"

"Yes," the Marquis admitted. "But the Chicago price--"

"Are you going to pay six cents for them?" Roosevelt broke in.

"No; I will pay five and a half cents."

Roosevelt turned abruptly to his cowpunchers. "Drive 'em out, boys,"

he said. The men drove out the cattle.

"There was no particular ill-feeling between them," Packard said later, "and Roosevelt gave the Marquis credit for an honest belief that a variation in the Chicago price would cut a figure in their agreed price. It was that very fact, however, which made impossible any further business relations between them."

The _Pioneer Press_ of St. Paul, in its issue of August 23d, 1885, tells its own version of the story.

About a year ago the Marquis made a verbal contract with Theodore Roosevelt, the New York politician, who owns an immense cattle ranch near Medora, agreeing to purchase a number of head of cattle. Roosevelt had his stock driven down to the point agreed upon, when the Marquis declined to receive them, and declared that he had made no such contract. Roosevelt stormed a little, but finally subsided and gave orders to his men not to sell any cattle to the Marquis or transact any business with him. The relations between the Marquis and Roosevelt have since been somewhat strained.

A reporter of the Bismarck _Tribune_, a few days after this story appeared, caught Roosevelt as he was pa.s.sing through the city on his return from a flying visit to the East, and evidently asked him what truth there was in it. His deprecation of the story is not altogether conclusive.

Theodore Roosevelt, the young reformer of New York, pa.s.sed through this city yesterday [he writes], _en route_ to his ranch in the Bad Lands. He was as bright and talkative as ever, and spoke of the great opportunities of the imperial Northwest with more enthusiasm than has ever been exhibited by the most sanguine old-timer. Mr. Roosevelt recently had a slight tilt with the Marquis de Mores on a cattle deal, and the story has been exaggerated until readers of Eastern papers are led to believe that these two cattle kings never speak as they pa.s.s by and are looking for each other with clubs. This is not true.

Meanwhile, during those summer months of 1885 the hot water into which the Frenchman had flung himself when he a.s.sisted in the killing of Riley Luffsey began to simmer once more. It came to a boil on August 26th, when a grand jury in Mandan indicted the Marquis de Mores for murder in the first degree.

The Marquis had not been unaware how matters were shaping themselves.

When the movement to have him indicted first got under way, in fact, it was intimated to him that a little matter of fifteen hundred dollars judiciously distributed would cause the indictment to be withdrawn. He inquired whether the indictment would stay withdrawn or whether he would be subject to indictment and, in consequence, to blackmail, during the rest of his life. He was told that since he had never been acquitted by a jury, he might be indicted at any moment, the next day, or ten years hence. He declared that he preferred to clean up the matter then and there.

"I have plenty of money for defense," he said to a reporter of the New York _Times_, adapting, not without humor, a famous American war-cry to his own situation, "but not a dollar for blackmail."

Knowing the ways of courts, he removed himself from the Territory while the forces were being gathered against him at Mandan.

"I determined that I would not be put in jail," he explained to the _Times_ interviewer, "to lie there perhaps for months waiting for a trial. Besides, a jail is not a safe place in that part of the country. Now the court seems to be ready and so will I be in a few days. I do not fear the result."

He was convinced that the same forces which had thwarted him in his business enterprises were using the Luffsey episode to push him out of the way.

"I think the charge has been kept hanging over me," he said, "for the purpose of breaking up my business. It was known that I intended to kill and ship beef to Chicago and other Eastern cities, and had expended much money in preparations. If I could have been arrested and put in jail some months ago, it might have injured my business and perhaps have put an end to my career."

The Marquis was convinced that it was Roosevelt who was financing the opposition to him and spoke of him with intense bitterness.

The indictment of the Marquis, meanwhile, was mightily agitating the western part of the Territory. Sentiment in the matter had somewhat veered since the first trials which had been held two years before.

The soberer of the citizens, recognizing the real impetus which the Marquis's energy and wealth had given to the commercial activity of the West Missouri region, were inclined to sympathize with him. There was a widespread belief that in the matter of the indictment the Marquis had fallen among thieves.

The Marquis returned from the East about the last day of August, and gave himself up to the sheriff at Mandan. He was promptly lodged in jail. The remark he had made to the interviewer in New York, that a jail was not a safe place in Dakota, proved prophetic. A mob, composed of cowboys and lumberjacks, bombarded the jail in which the Marquis was confined. At the close of the bombardment, Roosevelt, who happened to be in Mandan, on his way to the East, called on the Marquis.

In the Marquis's cell he found the Frenchman with his faithful valet and secretary. The secretary was under the bed, but the Marquis was sitting on its edge, calmly smoking a cigarette.

As the date for the trial drew near, feeling rose. The idle and vociferous elements in the town discovered that the Marquis was a plutocrat and an enemy of the people, and called thirstily for his blood. There was a large Irish population, moreover, which remembered that the slain man had borne the name of Riley and (two years after his demise) hotly demanded vengeance. The Marquis declared that, with popular sentiment as it was, he could not be given a fair trial, and demanded a change of venue. It was granted. The mob, robbed of its prey, howled in disappointment. A ma.s.s meeting was held and resolutions were pa.s.sed calling for the immediate removal of the iniquitous judge who had granted the Marquis's pet.i.tion.

The trial, which began on September 15th, was more nerve-racking for the lawyers than for the defendant. For the witnesses were elusive.

The trial seemed to be regarded by the majority of those connected with it as a gracious act of Providence for the redistribution of some of the Marquis's wealth. Everybody, it seemed, was thrusting a finger into the Marquis's purse. One of his friends later admitted that the Frenchman's money had been freely used, "but, of course, only," he blandly explained, "to persuade the witnesses to tell the truth."

McFay, a carpenter, who had distinguished himself at the previous trial by the melodramatic quality of his testimony, proved the peskiest witness of all. He was spending his days and his nights during the trial gambling and living high. Whenever his money gave out he called at the office of one of the Marquis's supporters to "borrow"

fifty dollars to continue his revelry, and the victim was too much afraid of what fiction he might tell the jury to refuse him. It was determined in solemn conclave, however, that McFay should be the first witness called, and disposed of.

The lawyers breathed a sigh of relief when the time came to put the shifty carpenter on the stand. But just as he was to be called, McFay drew aside the friend of the Marquis whom he had so successfully bled.

"Come outside a minute," he said.

The friend went.

"My memory is getting d.a.m.n poor," declared the carpenter.

"How much do you want?"

"Oh, five hundred."

He got it. The trial proceeded.

One juror was, for no reason which they themselves could adequately a.n.a.lyze, withdrawn by the Marquis's attorneys at the last minute. He told one of them years after that, if he had been allowed to serve, he would have "hung up the jury until some one had pa.s.sed him ten thousand." It was a close shave.

Two items in the testimony were notably significant. One was contributed by the Marquis: "O'Donald and Luffsey discharged all the barrels of their revolvers," he said, "and then began to shoot with their rifles." The other item was contributed by Sheriff Harmon, who arrested O'Donald and "Dutch Wannigan" immediately after the affray.

He testified "that the guns and pistols of the hunters were loaded when handed to him."

The jury made no attempt to pick its way through contradictions such as this, and returned to the court room after an absence of ten minutes with a verdict of "not guilty."

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Bad Lands near Medora. Showing the house of the Marquis de Mores.]

The Marquis's acquittal did not, it seems, mollify his bitterness toward Roosevelt. He prided himself on his judgment, as he had once informed Howard Eaton, but his judgment had a habit of basing its conclusions on somewhat nebulous premises. Two or three bits of circ.u.mstantial evidence had served to convince the Marquis definitely that Roosevelt had been the impelling force behind the prosecution.

The fact that "Dutch Wannigan" was an employee of Roosevelt's, in itself, not unnaturally, perhaps, stirred the Marquis's ire. When he was told, however, that "Dutch Wannigan," before departing for the trial at Mandan, had received money from Joe Ferris, his suspicions appeared confirmed, for Joe was known to be Roosevelt's close friend, and it was an open secret that Roosevelt was financing Joe's venture in storekeeping. If his suspicions needed further confirmation, they seemed to get it when a little, black-haired Irishman, named Jimmie McShane, otherwise known as "Dynamite Jimmie," received a sum of money from Joe Ferris and appeared at the trial as the first witness for the prosecution. On the surface the case against Roosevelt was convincing, and the Marquis evidently did not dip beneath it. If he had, he would have realized that Joe Ferris was the acknowledged banker of the Bad Lands to whom practically all the thrifty souls among the cowpunchers brought a portion of their wages for safe-keeping. When "Dutch Wannigan" and "Dynamite Jimmie," therefore, received money from Joe Ferris, they received only what was their own, and what they needed for their expenses at the trial.

But the Marquis, whose mind liked to jump goat-like from crag to crag, did not stop to examine the evidence against Roosevelt. He accepted it at its face value, and wrote Roosevelt a stinging letter, telling him that he had heard that Roosevelt had influenced witnesses against him in the murder trial. He had supposed, he said, that there was, nothing but friendly feeling between himself and Roosevelt, but since it was otherwise there was always "a way of settling differences between gentlemen."

Roosevelt, who had returned from the East early in October, received the letter at Elkhorn Ranch and read it aloud to Bill Sewall. "That's a threat," he exclaimed. "He is trying to bully me. He can't bully me.

I am going to write him a letter myself. Bill," he went on, "I don't want to disgrace my family by fighting a duel. I don't believe in fighting duels. My friends don't any of them believe in it. They would be very much opposed to anything of the kind, but I won't be bullied by a Frenchman. Now, as I am the challenged party, I have the privilege of naming the weapons. I am no swordsman, and pistols are too uncertain and Frenchy for me. So what do you say if I make it rifles?"

Roosevelt sat down on a log and then and there drafted his reply. He had no unfriendly feeling for the Marquis, he wrote, "but, as the closing sentence of your letter implies a threat, I feel it my duty to say that I am ready at all times and at all places to answer for my actions."