But, with two men who had been his guides in Maine, Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow, he began his life as a ranchman and a cow-puncher, and went through all the hard work and all the fun.  He took long rides after cattle, rounded them up and helped in the branding.  He followed the herd when it stampeded in a thunderstorm.  He hunted all the game that there was in the county, and also acted as Deputy Sheriff and helped clear the place of horse-thieves and “bad men.”

In one of his adventures Roosevelt showed that he had taken to heart the celebrated advice which, in Hamlet, Polonius gives to his son: 

    Beware
    Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
    Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.

Mulvaney, in one of Kipling’s stories, proved that he knew something about Shakespeare, for he put this advice into his own language so as to express the meaning perfectly: 

“Don’t fight wid ivry scutt for the pure joy av fightin’, but if you do, knock the nose av him first an’ frequint.”

Roosevelt tried to keep out of the fight,—­but this is the way it happened.  He was out after lost horses, and had to put up at a little hotel where there were no rooms downstairs, but a bar, a dining-room and a kitchen.  It was late at night, and there was trouble on, for he heard one or two shots in the bar as he came up.  He disliked the idea of going in, but it was cold outside and there was nowhere else to go.  Inside the bar, a cheap “bad man” was walking up and down with a cocked revolver in each hand.  He had been shooting at the clock, and making every one unhappy and uncomfortable.

When Roosevelt came in, he called him “Four eyes,” because he wore spectacles, and announced “Four eyes is going to set up the drinks.”  Roosevelt tried to pass it off by laughing, and sat down behind the stove to escape notice, and keep away from trouble.  But the “bad man” came and stood over him, a gun in each hand, using foul language, and insisting that “Four eyes” should get up and treat.

“Well,” Roosevelt reluctantly remarked, “if I’ve got to, I’ve got to!” As he said this, he rose quickly, and hit the gun-man with his right fist on the point of the jaw, then with his left, and again with his right.  The guns went off in the air, as the “bad man” went over like a nine-pin, striking his head on the corner of the bar as he fell.  Roosevelt was ready to drop on him if he moved, for he still clutched the revolvers.  But he was senseless.

The other people in the bar recovered their nerve, once the man was down.  They hustled him out into the shed, and there was no more trouble from him.

Roosevelt hunted geese and ducks, deer, mountain sheep, elk and grizzly bear during his stay in the West.  It was still possible to find buffalo, although most of the great herds had vanished.  The prairie was covered with relics of the dead buffalo, so that one might ride for hundreds of miles, seeing their bones everywhere, but never getting a glimpse of a live one.  Yet he managed, after a hard hunt of several days, to shoot a great bull buffalo.