Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
Page 78
| with bronzed, set faces and keen eyes that look all the world straight in the face without flinching.” I know how it is. You cannot help taking to them, those Western fellows, and they need not be cowboys either. The farther you go, the better you like them. My oldest son, who spent a year on a ranch, never wanted to come back. He was among Roosevelt’s men, whose talk was still of his good-fellowship in camp and on the hunting trail, his unflinching courage, his even-handed justice that arraigned the sheriff of the county as stoutly before his fellows when he failed in his duty, as it led him in the bitter winter weather on a month’s hunt down-stream through the pack-ice after cattle thieves—a story that reads like the record of an Arctic expedition. But he got the thieves, and landed them in jail, much to the wonderment of the ranchman at Killdeer Mountains, who was unable to understand why all this fuss “instead of hanging them offhand.” The vigilantes had just had a cleaning up in the cattle country, and had despatched some sixty-odd suspects, some of them, Mr. Roosevelt says, through misapprehension or carelessness. One is reminded of |