Roosevelt in the Bad Lands Part 39

Roosevelt roared with delight. "I want to make a contract with you,"

he said. "I will give you twenty-five dollars for everything that you show me in the way of game."

"I don't want it," said Willis gruffly.

"Then I will buy the grub."

"All the grub I'll take along won't amount to more than three or four dollars--a hundred pounds of flour, twenty-five pounds of bacon, dried apples, and black tea. That's all you'll get."

"By George," cried Roosevelt, "that's fine!"

"You can't stand a trip like this," Willis remarked with deadly frankness.

"You take me on the trip and I'll show you. I can train myself to walk as far as you can."

Willis doubted it and said so.

They camped far up in the mountains, hunting day after day through the deep woods just below the timber-line. Roosevelt and Merrifield were accustomed to life in the saddle, and although they had varied it with an occasional long walk after deer or sheep, they were quite unable to cope with Willis when it came to mountaineering. The climbing was hard, the footing was treacherous, and the sharp rocks tore their moccasins into ribbons. There was endless underbrush, thickets of p.r.i.c.kly balsam or laurel--but there were no goats.

At last, one mid-afternoon, as he was supporting himself against a tree, halfway across a long landslide, Roosevelt suddenly discovered one of the beasts he was after, a short distance away, making his way down a hill, looking for all the world like a handsome tame billy. He was in a bad position for a shot, and as he twisted himself about he dislodged some pebbles. The goat, instantly alert, fled. Roosevelt fired, but the shot went low, only breaking a fore-leg.

The three men raced and scrambled after the fleeing animal. It leaped along the hillside for nearly a mile, then turned straight up the mountain. They followed the b.l.o.o.d.y trail where it went up the sharpest and steepest places, skirting the cliffs and precipices.

Roosevelt, intent on the quarry, was not what Bill Sewall would have called "over-cautious" in the pursuit.

He was running along a shelving ledge when a piece of loose slate with which the ledge was covered slipped under his foot. He clutched at the rock wall, he tried to fling himself back, but he could not recover himself.

He went head first over the precipice.

Roosevelt's luck was with him that day. He fell forty or fifty feet into a tall pine, bounced through it, and landed finally, not uncomfortably, in a thick balsam, somewhat shaken and scratched, but with no bones broken and with his rifle still clutched in his hand.

From above came the hoa.r.s.e voice of John Willis. "Are you hurt?" he asked.

"No," answered Roosevelt, a trifle breathless.

"Then come on!"

Roosevelt "came on," scrambling back up the steep height he had so swiftly descended, and raced after the guide. He came upon the goat at last, but winded as he was, and with the sweat in his eyes, he shot too high, cutting the skin above the spine. The goat plunged downhill and the hunters plunged after him, pursuing the elusive animal until darkness covered the trail.

"Now," said Willis, "I expect you are getting tired."

"By George," said Roosevelt, "how far have we gone?"

"About fifteen or twenty miles up and down the mountains."

"If we get that goat to-morrow, I will give you a hundred dollars."

"I don't want a hundred dollars. But we'll get the goat."

Roosevelt brought him down the next day at noon.

Roosevelt spent two weeks with Willis in the mountains. It was a rich experience for the Easterner, but for the tall Missourian it proved to be even more. Willis was a child of the frontier, who had knocked about between the Rio Grande and the Canadian border ever since his boyhood, doing a hundred different things upon which the law and civilized men were supposed to look with disapproval.[22]

[Footnote 22: Willis was a great teller of tales. See _Hunting the Grizzly_, by Theodore Roosevelt (The Sagamore Series, G. P. Putnam's Sons, page 216 ff.), for the most lurid of his yarns.]

To this odd child of nature, bred in the wilderness, Roosevelt opened the door to a world which John Willis did not know existed.

"He was a revelation to me," said Willis long afterward. "He was so well posted on everything. He was the first man that I had ever met that really knew anything. I had just been with a lot of roughnecks, cowpunchers, horse-thieves, and that sort. Roosevelt would explain things to me. He told me a lot of things."

Among other things, Roosevelt told Willis some of his experiences in the New York a.s.sembly. Huge sums had been offered him to divert him from this course or that which certain interests regarded as dangerous to their freedom of action. To Willis it was amazing that Roosevelt should not have accepted what was offered to him, and he began to be aware of certain standards of virtue and honor.

To Roosevelt the trip was a splendid adventure; to Willis it proved a turning-point in his life.[23]

[Footnote 23: When Roosevelt came to Helena in 1911, John Willis was one of the crowd that greeted him.

Willis clapped Roosevelt on the back familiarly. "I made a man out of you," he cried. Quick as a flash, came Roosevelt's retort: "Yes. John made a man out of me, but I made a Christian out of John."]

Roosevelt returned to Elkhorn the middle of September, to find that Sewall and Dow had come to a momentous decision. Dow had, during his absence, taken a train-load of cattle to Chicago, and had found that the best price he was able to secure for the hundreds of cattle he had taken to the market there was less by ten dollars a head than the sum it had cost to raise and transport them. Sewall and Dow had "figured things over," and had come to the conclusion that the sooner they terminated their contract with Roosevelt the less money he would lose.

They recognized that they themselves were safe enough, for by the "one-sided trade," as Sewall called it, which Roosevelt had made with them, they were to share in whatever profits there were, and in case there were no profits were to receive wages. But neither of them enjoyed the part he was playing in what seemed to both of them a piece of hopeless business.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Ferris and Merrifield on the ruins of the first shack at Elkhorn. It was this shack which Maunders claimed.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Corrals at Elkhorn. Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt.]

Roosevelt himself had been wondering whether it was wise to allow the two backwoodsmen to continue in an enterprise in which the future was so clouded and full of the possibilities of disaster. He himself might win through, and he might not. The thing was a gamble, in any event. He could afford to take the risk. Sewall and Dow could not.

He had written "Bamie," earlier in the summer, that he was "curious to see how the fall sales would come out." Dow's report completely satisfied his curiosity.

He called the two men into his room. He told them that he too had been "figuring up things." He would stand by his agreement, he said, if, facing an uncertain outcome, they wished to remain. But, if they were willing, he thought they had "better quit the business and go back."

Sewall and Dow did not hesitate. They said they would go back.

"I never wanted to fool away anybody else's money," Sewall added.

"Never had any of my own to fool away."

"How soon can you go?" asked Roosevelt.

Sewall turned and went into the kitchen "to ask the womenfolks." It happened that three or four weeks previous the population of Elkhorn had been increased by two. Baby sons had arrived in the same week in the families of both Sewall and Dow. The ministrations of Dr. Stickney had not been available, and the two mothers had survived because they had the const.i.tutions of frontierswomen rather than because they had the benefit of the nursing of the termagant who was Jerry Tompkins's wife. The babies--known to their families, and to the endless succession of cowboys who came from near and far to inspect them, as "the Bad Lands babies"--were just six weeks old.

"The womenfolks say they can go in three weeks," Sewall reported.

"Three weeks from to-day," answered Roosevelt, "we go."

And so the folks from Maine, who had made a rough and simple house in the wilderness into a home, began to gather together their belongings and pack up. Wise old Bill Sewall had been right.

"You'll come to feel different," he had said, two years before, when Roosevelt had been lonely and despondent. "And then you won't want to stay here."

Life, which for a while had seemed to Roosevelt so gray and dismal, had, in fact, slowly taken on new color. At times he had imagined that Dakota might satisfy him for a permanent residence, but that fancy, born of grief and disappointment, had vanished in the radiance of a new happiness. He had become engaged to Edith Carow, and he knew that the world for him and for her was that busy world where his friends were, and hers, and where he and she had been boy and girl together.

The lure of politics, moreover, was calling him. And yet, during those last weeks at Elkhorn, he was not at all sure that he wished to reenter the turmoil. He rode out into the prairie one day for a last "session" with Bill Sewall shortly before the three weeks were up. He told Sewall he had an idea he ought to go into law.