Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| no longer any Vice-President hastening to his bedside—will never be told. But for a frightened deer that sprang now and then from the roadside, stopping in the brush to watch wide-eyed the plunging team and the swaying lantern disappear in the gloom, no living thing saw it. The two in the wagon—the man on the driver’s seat and the silent shape behind him—had other thoughts: the one for the rough trail which he vainly tried to make out through the mist; at any moment the wheels might leave their rut or crash against a boulder, and team and all be flung a hundred feet down a precipice. As for the other, his thoughts were far away at a bedside from which a dying man was whispering words of comfort to his weeping wife. Mechanically, when the driver turned to him with warning of the risks they were taking, he repeated, as if he had scarcely heard: “Go on—go right ahead!” |
| The new day was an hour old and over when the vehicle stopped at the lower club-house, mud-splashed from hub to hood. Here Mr. Roosevelt heard for the first time from his secretary, who had watched sleepless at the other end of the wire, the tragedy then passing |