Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
Page 79
| the apology of the captain of such a band to the widow of a victim of their “carelessness”; “Madam, the joke is on us.” |
| Every land has its ways. They have theirs out there, and if they are sometimes a trifle hasty, life bowls along with them at a pace we do not easily catch up with. On his recent trip across the continent, the President was greeted in a distant State by one of his old men, temporarily out of his latitude. He explained that he had had “a difficulty”; he had “sat into a poker game with a gentleman stranger,” who raised a row. He used awful language, and he, the speaker, shot him down. He had to. |
| “And did the stranger draw?” asked the President, who had been listening gravely. |
| “He did not have time, sir.” |
| The affair with the sheriff sounds as though it were a chapter of Mulberry Street in his later years. It was the outcome of the struggle to put law and order in the place of the rude lynch justice of the frontier. There was reason to believe that the sheriff leaned toward the outlaws. Men talked of it in bar-rooms; the cattle-thieves escaped. A meeting was |