sheriff was known as Hell Roaring Bill Jones.  He was a thorough frontiersman, excellent in all kinds of emergencies, and a very game man.  I became much attached to him.  He was a thoroughly good citizen when sober, but he was a little wild when drunk.  Unfortunately, toward the end of his life he got to drinking very heavily.  When, in 1905, John Burroughs and I visited the Yellowstone Park, poor Bill Jones, very much down in the world, was driving a team in Gardiner outside the park.  I had looked forward to seeing him, and he was equally anxious to see me.  He kept telling his cronies of our intimacy and of what we were going to do together, and then got drinking; and the result was that by the time I reached Gardiner he had to be carried out and left in the sage-brush.  When I came out of the park, I sent on in advance to tell them to be sure to keep him sober, and they did so.  But it was a rather sad interview.  The old fellow had gone to pieces, and soon after I left he got lost in a blizzard and was dead when they found him.

Bill Jones was a gun-fighter and also a good man with his fists.  On one occasion there was an election in town.  There had been many threats that the party of disorder would import section hands from the neighboring railway stations to down our side.  I did not reach Medora, the forlorn little cattle town which was our county seat, until the election was well under way.  I then asked one of my friends if there had been any disorder.  Bill Jones was standing by.  “Disorder hell!” said my friend.  “Bill Jones just stood there with one hand on his gun and the other pointing over toward the new jail whenever any man who didn’t have a right to vote came near the polls.  There was only one of them tried to vote, and Bill knocked him down.  Lord!” added my friend, meditatively, “the way that man fell!” “Well,” struck in Bill Jones, “if he hadn’t fell I’d have walked round behind him to see what was propping him up!”

In the days when I lived on the ranch I usually spent most of the winter in the East, and when I returned in the early spring I was always interested in finding out what had happened since my departure.  On one occasion I was met by Bill Jones and Sylvane Ferris, and in the course of our conversation they mentioned “the lunatic.”  This led to a question on my part, and Sylvane Ferris began the story:  “Well, you see, he was on a train and he shot the newsboy.  At first they weren’t going to do anything to him, for they thought he just had it in for the newsboy.  But then somebody said, ’Why, he’s plumb crazy, and he’s liable to shoot any of us!’ and then they threw him off the train.  It was here at Medora, and they asked if anybody would take care of him, and Bill Jones said he would, because he was the sheriff and the jail had two rooms, and he was living in one and would put the lunatic in the other.”  Here Bill Jones interrupted:  “Yes, and more fool me!  I wouldn’t take charge of another