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_.