[Footnote 19: "Whoever wrote that was badly off his base. The simon-pure cowpuncher would not accept a self-cocker as a gift. They laughed at them in fact. Once, on a bet, a cowpuncher shot off all six shots with his single-action Colt .45 while his opponent was getting off three with his self-cocker."--_Lincoln Lang._]
In Medora in those midsummer days of 1885, Hell-Roaring Bill Jones was the life of every party. Wherever there was deviltry, there was Bill Jones, profane and obscene beyond description, but irresistibly comical. He was as lean and muscular as John Falstaff was short and fat, but the divergences between the genial old reprobate of Eastcheap and the saturnine, but by no means unlovable, rapscallion of Medora were less striking than the qualities they had in common. He had good friends, none better than the gay, infinitely pathetic patrician's son, Van Zander, who played Prince Hal to him, light-heartedly flipping a fortune in the air as others, essentially less admirable, might have flipped a dollar.
"Deacon" Cummins thought Bill Jones dreadful, which naturally incited Bill Jones always to do the worst that was in him to do whenever the "Deacon" was within earshot. He found delight in drawing up beside him on the round-up and pouring forth every evil tale he knew.
"Jones, I don't know why you tell those stories when I'm around," the "Deacon" would exclaim, not without pathos. "You know I don't like them."
After his first encounter with Roosevelt in the office of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_, Bill Jones told him no foul stories. The contrast between Bill Jones's attitude toward a virtuous man who was strong and a virtuous man who was weak might furnish a theme for many sermons.
The antics of Saturday nights were many and some of them were explosive, but on the whole men looked more tolerantly on the shackles of civilization in Medora in 1885 than they had in 1884. The vigilantes' raid had undoubtedly chased the fear of God into the hearts of the evil-doers.
Whatever can be said against the methods adopted by the "stranglers" who came through here last fall [remarked the _Bad Lands Cowboy_], it cannot but be acknowledged that the result of their work has been very wholesome. Not a definite case of horse-stealing from a cowman has been reported since, and it seems as though a very thorough clean-up had been made.