Part 4

The old tale of Sir Lancelot and the wicked Sir Modred, the wizard and the dragon, held them enthralled for fifteen minutes. Theodore was a slow and dramatic reader and though the book was a simplified version for children it was not too simplified and he skipped none of the long words, but enunciated each clearly, sometimes pausing to make the older ones say what the word meant and speak it several times. Ted already had a mature vocabulary for his age and the children had heard very little baby talk from their parents, though an occasional visitor was apt to gush and coo, to the boys’ thinly veiled disgust.

Archie was already asleep when the story was finished and Kermit’s eyes were glazing though he fought to keep them open. When Alice followed her father out she observed in a suave tone of superiority that reminded Theodore vaguely of his own mother. “After all, Father, we have to remember that they are only children. Archie is practically an infant yet.”

“We’ll remember that, Alice, and be very charitable in our judgments,” he answered with the same gravity. “Now you scamper before Mother scolds both of us.”

Suddenly she flung her arms around him. “Oh, Father, I don’t want to go back to New York. I hate it! Why can’t I go to Albany with you?”

“That has been all decided and explained to you. Your mother’s family are very fond of you and do a great deal for you, and you must be grateful. Not many young girls are so lucky.”

“There are so many rules,” she sighed. “Life is too bewildering and mixed up for a young girl.”

“What a young girl needs at this stage of her growth is sleep.” He gave her a fatherly smack. “Get along with you now, and be content for a few years to leave the problems to older people who love you and want the best for you.”

She was halfway down the stairs and she left him very reluctantly and backed up the rest of the flight, calling “Good night, Father.”

When she was safely in her room he went back to the library fire where Edith was sitting, on her knee a piece of embroidery stretched on a hoop.

“All should now be silent.” He dropped gratefully into a deep chair. “From the way my own eyelids feel I’ll be ready to join them in unconsciousness very soon. This has been a long day.”

“And tomorrow will be another,” she said, “but this has been a good day. For me at least. When none of the children are ailing with anything,” spoke the mother, “I am content. I hope and pray we don’t have too many visitors to usurp your time tomorrow, as no one else can sort and pack most of your personal papers.”

“Undoubtedly the locusts will descend as they usually do on a new man in office. Favors, always favors, and if they can get in a word before the other fellow they have the urge to speak it. And only one answer I can give them now, no matter how righteous their plea. When that is no longer timely I’ll have to depend on the grace of God to give me wisdom but fortunately there will be other people between me and so much importunity.” He got to his feet looking aghast. “Don’t tell me that’s somebody else! I hear a horse and wheels.”

“It may be Davis. Sometimes he borrows a horse to go to his preaching service. You assured him it was all right.” She folded her work and stood too, listening. “No, they are stopping outside, whoever it may be. I’ll go up now, Theodore. No one wants to see me at this time of night.”

The wheels outside were silent and though it was too dark and lowering to see anything, Theodore heard two persons mounting the front steps, moving very lightly. He went to the front door carrying a lamp with him, and held it high to study the faces of his visitors. One was a gaunt, middle-aged woman in a thin coat, her head tied up in a wool scarf, the other a lank boy about fifteen who clawed off his hat and ducked his head in embarrassment.

“Evening, sir,” said the woman, bobbing stiffly. Her ungloved hands were blue with cold, and her lips were blue and bitten. “I’m Dorsie Witten come from away up in Oneida. I’ve come a long way to see you, sir. Part of the ways by train and the rest with this hired rig. I sold two good cows to fetch the money to come to see you when you got elected governor and I hope you’ll listen patient to a heart-broke mother’s story.”

“Come in! Come in out of the cold.” Theodore held the door wide, the raw wind flaring the lamp. When they were inside he said, “Any woman who has come so far deserves to be heard though I can’t promise I can do anything for you. I’m not even governor of New York yet, you know.”

“Well, you will be, sir. Clint here said I should wait till you come to Albany that wasn’t so fur for us to travel, but I said there’d be so many bigwigs crowding in to see you then I’d never even get let in much less get a chance to talk to you.”

“I hope no one will be turned away who really needs to see me, madam, but the governor of a big state like New York is a mighty busy man as you can understand,” he said. “Please sit down here by the fire and tell me your business and make it brief if you don’t mind, for with five children and the Christmas holiday I’ve had a long day.”

“Is this Christmas?” she looked bewildered. “You know since Ollie got in trouble I’ve been so worried and upset I don’t know Sunday from Monday. You see, Governor, Ollie—Oliver he was named for his grandfather—is my oldest boy and my dependence. I tried to raise both of my boys good and honorable and Ollie wasn’t bad, Governor, he wasn’t a bad boy, he was just quick-tempered like his daddy. Eph, my husband, was fire and tow, he had a terrible temper and was easy to get mad, that’s how come Eph to get into trouble.”

“You’re here to see me about your husband?” he asked.

“No, sir, can’t nothing be done for Eph. I been to the other governor a’ready. He’s in Sing Sing for the rest of his life. He got mad years ago and cut a man terrible so he died and they sent him up the river for it but it’s Ollie that’s worrying me. Ollie’s only nineteen years old. Ollie killed a man, Governor, and I ain’t defending him but it was in a fair fight. Ollie shot to save his own life.”

“He did not claim he shot in self-defense? A man has a right to defend himself, in law, Mrs. Witten,” Roosevelt said.

“Well, they brought out in the trial that the other feller was shot in the back and didn’t have a gun with him. But he was heading for where it stood, Governor, Ollie said so and I believe him. Ollie was just smart and shot quick, knowing the other feller was a crack shot and would get him from a long ways off. Now they’re sending Ollie up where his father is, and I got nobody to depend on but Clint, and he ain’t just right in his head, and I got three little ones, all girls. Clint forgets everything. Come in from the field and wander off to town and leave the mules out there hitched to the plow all night if the children and I didn’t go out and fetch ’em in. I’ve finished many a field myself, leaving my children playing in a furrow.” She twisted her thin hands together, casting reproachful glances at Clint, whose stolid face showed no emotion whatever.

Roosevelt looked with some compassion at the woman’s ravaged face and thin body. How many such would he see in the next two years, harassed, frightened women, all desperately pleading mercy for violent-tempered husbands or sons? For an instant the prospect appalled him and briefly he dreaded the heavy responsibility of a great human population.

Then sober judgment came, steadying his nerves, and he spoke in a calm, fatherly voice. “Mrs. Witten, I know nothing of the facts in this case of your son. A man who shoots another in the back condemns himself from the first in the minds of all sober men.”

“I been tellin’ Ma that,” stated Clint, speaking for the first time in a voice surprisingly masculine and deep coming from such an undersized, emaciated body. “All the way down here I told her it was a waste of money comin’ way down here just to see you. Them was good cows we sold to pay for it too.”

“You know I’m not yet governor of New York,” Roosevelt reminded her. “I have no legal right to do anything about any case, especially one that has been already settled in the courts and the defendant convicted. What possible defense could your son have for shooting an unarmed man in the back? Didn’t he testify in his own defense?”

“He swore he thought that feller—Morgan Tuttle was his name—was going after his gun and Ollie knowed Morgan was a dead shot. He could have killed Ollie from a hundred yards off and Ollie knowed it. They was huntin’ together up in the mountains.”

“That was what the fight was about,” put in Clint. “Deer they shot up in them hills. Morgan wasn’t going to divide fair.”

“Was that the legal season to kill a deer?” Roosevelt asked. “I thought they were protected by law.”

“No, it wasn’t, but it come out in the trial anyway because Morgan’s wife blabbed to the law,” Clint supplied. “We ain’t paid Ollie’s lawyer yet but he didn’t do nothin’ nohow.”

“There was little he could do in the face of the evidence,” said Roosevelt.

“He said that,” she admitted, “and he said he aimed to charge us a hundred dollars when he didn’t do nothing.”

“Did he make you any promises?”

“No, sir, he wouldn’t do that. He just said he’d do his best but he didn’t do nothin’,” insisted Clint.

“It’s hard to justify any man who shoots another in the back, even if he has a weapon handy,” argued Roosevelt. “After all Ollie could have run. He didn’t have to stand still and let the other man shoot at him.”

“That’s what the judge said,” Clint added.

“My men wasn’t never no hand to run away from trouble,” remarked Mrs. Witten. “They always faced up to trouble mighty bold.”

“It’s not being bold to shoot a man in the back,” commented the hero of San Juan Hill, letting a little twinge of guilty memory come over him briefly. How many men of the Spanish troops had he shot in the back in Cuba? But that was war. The enemy had had the same chance to get him from the rear and he had known it. As Ollie had had the chance to run, so had the soldiers of Spain the chance to surrender but no man liked the thought of killing a human being and soldiers had to be hardened before they could do it, except in desperation to save their own lives. Only the toughest ones had no qualms, and it was ironic that usually they made the best infantry troops.

He had had a few timorous and squeamish fellows in his Rough Riders but when the fighting got hot they forgot their scruples and came through gallantly.

He sent the two Wittens away finally, promising to look into the case of Ollie Witten further when he came into office:

“I assume you want an official pardon for your son? There is nothing else that can be done when a man is already serving his sentence except a parole. And with Ollie’s record of violence I doubt that could be attained. A pardon on a hardship plea would be your only hope.”

“He got life like Pa,” Clint said, “and they told us he was mighty lucky.”

“He was lucky to escape the death penalty. How long has he been in prison?”

“Since October it was,” said the mother. “We a’ready been to the governor—him that was governor before you got elected, sir, but he said he couldn’t do nothin’. So I told Clint we’d wait till a new governor got elected and soon as the corn was in we got somebody to tend the place and we come here.”

“I fear you had a long, expensive and fruitless trip,” said Roosevelt dubiously, escorting them to the door. “Do you plan to go home tonight?”

“Train leaves at midnight and it’s a fur piece from here,” Clint answered. “Come on, Ma, we got to hurry. I told you he wasn’t going to do nothin’, that we was just wastin’ time and money. And a cow home fixing to come fresh any day.”

Theodore Roosevelt went back up the stairs feeling heavy and depressed. Edith looked up from the bed as he came into the room with a lighted candle.

“You look unhappy,” she said. “More office seekers? But I thought I heard a woman’s voice.”

“You did. A poor woman whose husband is in Sing Sing and her son has just been sent there, both for murder. The son killed another man, shot him in the back, but she thought I could do something about it, because she has other children and needs him on the farm. She had a boy with her about fifteen years old, she said he was not right in the head but he seemed shrewd enough, talked as intelligently as his mother and had a clearer idea of the difficulties of doing anything in a case like this than she did.”

“Mothers have too tender hearts always to have good sober judgment,” said Edith quietly. “They have a way of letting their emotions obscure their common sense, especially where their children are concerned. Aren’t you coming to bed? You have a hard day tomorrow with Heaven knows how many interruptions to frustrate you in getting things done.”

“I think I’ll walk outside a little. I don’t feel like sleeping yet. A bit of exercise will steady my nerves.”

“I didn’t know you had that sort of nerves, Theodore.”

“Now and then they take possession of me. Do you know, Edie,” he sat on the edge of the bed, “there are times when I shrink a little from this job I have set myself? After all New York is a big state, the most important state in the Union.”

“And you are a big man,” she consoled him. “And since San Juan Hill you have been about the biggest man in the Union.”

“Hero worship. Public hysteria. It can die as quickly as it flames and it leaves some mighty cold and bitter ashes. There are vast numbers of forgotten heroes in this country, men who rode the crest of a popular wave and deluded themselves into thinking it would last forever. You can be an old story overnight, and forgotten in a month if another object of exciting interest appears. And there’s nothing so forlorn and pitiable as an out-of-date and out-of-fashion hero. Well, I’ll try the open air for a little. Usually it helps my thinking to use my legs and from now on through the rest of the winter I’ll have little time or opportunity to do it.”

He went downstairs and let himself quietly out the front door, first remembering his wife’s admonition to put on a heavy jacket. Buttoning an old army coat up to his chin, he pulled on a battered old campaign hat, rain- and sun-stained and faded, with the insigne of the Rough Riders still pinned upon it, but now slightly tarnished.

A thin spit of snow was still drifting and the air was damp with the feel of the sea in it, but not bitterly freezing. He strode down the hill from the house and took a path that led through the wooded land where he had so often worked off his surplus energies by chopping down trees and carefully cutting them into firewood. There was a pile of cordwood on the edge of the timber and he stopped there and hefted a log, lifting it off the top of the pile, balancing it on his shoulder as woodsmen learn to do.

The rough bark, held close to his face, smelled sharply of acid, so he knew it was a branch from the wild cherry tree that had rotted at the heart. It had been hard and tough to cut, requiring all his muscles to shape it for sawing into logs for the fireplaces, but he had exulted in the job of conquering this old tree just as he had gloried in every strenuous task he had ever set himself.

He laid the log back on the stack, sending down a shower of dry bark, wondering when he would be free to chop wood again or wander these hills followed by his adoring children, or swim in the Bay or teach Quentin to dive off the diving board. He had instructed all the youngsters there, tossing them into deep water relentlessly, ready to fish them out if they foundered, but confident that they would conquer their fears and learn to paddle about, being his own children.

At any rate, he told himself, he was a lucky man, and if there were times when public life irked him a little, bringing a faint regret that outside affairs kept him from the quiet life he loved, he had to balance all the rewards against the slight feeling of frustration, count the honors as recompense.

Destiny had somehow set his feet upon a road and he felt at times a deep secret apprehension of where the road might lead. So far he had found himself adequate to any task that confronted him, and standing still in the quiet night air he felt the muscles of his spirit tense and a glow pervade his body.

He was not blind or deaf to certain portents in the air and, though he never spoke of them or let his mind dwell upon them, they still lingered, buried deep in his consciousness. There was always the echo of casual words spoken, of gay songs being sung.

_We’ll send you to the White House for the gallant deeds you’ve done._

All doggerel, all wishful thinking, he told himself, yet the idea lingered, and now he let it float uppermost in his mind till there came over him a sense of exhilaration, a promise of yet greater things ahead. Impatiently he put the thought down, but it kept creeping up again till his nerves tightened and he itched to do something tangible, attack something conquerable. On an impulse he strode back to the house and in a tool room found his ax, by the light of a single match.

Back at the log pile he laid a huge branch across two others and hacked away at it with the ax in the faint snow light, planting vigorous strokes and telling blows, though it was difficult to aim a tool in the thin light from the winter sky and more chips flew through the air than bespoke an expert woodsman.

When the branch was all reduced to proper lengths for burning he piled the sticks carefully, wiping the sticky sap from his hands on the sleeves of the old jacket. Then, shouldering the ax, he tramped back to the house, feeling suddenly relaxed and weary in nerve and bone. The sky, he noted, was slowly clearing and now and then a pale wisp of a moon shone fleetingly against the scud of the wind-driven clouds. Over the water a pale whiteness lighted the clouds as the moonlight increased.

Theodore Roosevelt was no mystic or fatuous dreamer, indeed the factual and actual had always been paramount in his mind. He had never had the weakness of nursing hopeful visions trying to bring them to reality. Instead he had always gone out to fight for what he believed in and let dreamers have their dreams.

But why now was that faint glow in the eastern sky slowly taking on the semblance of a great white dome towering against the horizon? In only one place in the land was reared a majestic dome like that.

Very humbly Theodore Roosevelt went back to his bed.

Transcriber’s Notes

—Silently corrected a few typos.

—Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook is public-domain in the country of publication.

—In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by _underscores_.