"We are going to lose them," Roosevelt whispered; "they are not coming to camp."
"I think," answered Sewall, "they are looking for the camp smoke."
He was evidently right, for suddenly they saw it and came straight through the sagebrush toward the watchers. Roosevelt and his men watched them for some minutes as they came nonchalantly toward them, the barrels of their rifles glinting in the sunlight. Now they were forty yards away, now thirty, now twenty.
The half-breed obeyed, but for an instant Finnegan hesitated, glaring at his captors with wolfish eyes. Roosevelt walked toward him, covering the center of the man's chest to avoid over-shooting him.
Finnegan dropped his rifle with an oath and put up his hands.
They searched the thieves and took away their weapons. "If you'll keep quiet," said Roosevelt, "and not try to get away, you'll be all right. If you try anything we'll shoot you."
This was language which the thieves understood, and they accepted the situation. Sewall took an old double-barrel ten-gauge Parker shot-gun and stood guard.
"The right-hand barrel goes off very easily," he warned Sewall. "It's gone off with me several times when I did not mean it to, and if you are going to cover the men with it you better be careful."
"I'll be careful," remarked Sewall in his deliberate fashion, "but if it happens to go off, it will make more difference to them than it will to me."
They camped that night where they were. Having captured their men, they were somewhat in a quandary how to keep them. The cold was so intense that to tie them tightly hand and foot meant in all likelihood freezing both hands and feet off during the night; there was no use tying them at all, moreover, unless they tied them tightly enough to stop in part the circulation. Roosevelt took away everything from the thieves that might have done service as a weapon, and corded his harvest in some bedding well out of reach of the thieves.
It had occurred to him that bare feet would make any thought of flight through that cactus country extremely uninviting. The men surrendered their boots. Roosevelt gave them a buffalo robe in return and the prisoners crawled under it, thoroughly cowed.
Captors and captives started downstream in the two boats the next morning. The cold was bitter. Toward the end of the day they were stopped by a small ice-jam which moved forward slowly only to stop them again. They ran the boats ashore to investigate, and found that the great Ox-Bow jam, which had moved past Elkhorn a week ago, had come to a halt and now effectually barred their way. They could not possibly paddle upstream against the current; they could not go on foot, for to do so would have meant the sacrifice of all their equipment. They determined to follow the slow-moving mass of ice, and hope, meanwhile, for a thaw.