got none. Favors were not being handed about on a round-up those days."

Merrifield gives one incident which reveals Roosevelt's stoical self-control under pain. "In his string of ten horses he had one mean brute named Ben Butler. Several of his horses bucked on occasion, but Ben Butler had the trick of falling over backwards. One afternoon as Roosevelt was starting out on 'the circle', the horse fell over with him, and Roosevelt broke the point of his shoulder. There was no doctor within a hundred miles and Roosevelt knew it. The break must have hurt him badly, but he didn't say a word about it, but just got on another horse and went on with the day's work. He didn't speak of it again and the rest of us forgot about it. The break healed up itself. It wasn't until about a year after that I realized what he must have suffered.

"It happened that I broke my ankle that winter and was unable to ride for five or six months. Then, having bought some cattle, and Sylvane and the other cowmen being away on a round-up, I had to take them out to ranch. The river was up and I had to do a good deal of riding. The second morning it was pretty hard; the third morning it was something terrible. No human being who hasn't gone through it can imagine what it is. I was en

tirely used up. That time Roosevelt got hurt I didn't realize what he was up against.

"And he wasn't the one to tell me. He was grit clear through. I was used to rough living and it never occurred to me that I might be putting a strain on him which took all the grit he had to carry. When we got back from the round-up that spring, with his shoulder scarcely healed, I didn't think anything of putting him on a horse for forty to sixty miles a day. We'd ride up to the ranch of a man named Gregor Lang, some fifty miles up the river, up one day and back again the next. Then when we'd had our supper I'd say to him, 'How about going out and getting a deer?'

"He'd say, 'All right!' So we'd get fresh horses and start out to kill a deer.

"After I had broken my ankle and had my lesson, I apologized to him for putting him up against such a foolish proposition. He laughed. 'Merrifield,' he said, 'when you'd bring out that fresh horse for me to ride, if I'd had my preference in the matter I'd rather have ridden a red-hot stove than one of those horses.'

In college, Roosevelt always had a great deal of that something which we call "influence." His opinion or wish counted. On the plains it was the same, even among men who naturally and at first viewed him with surprise and distrust.

"One night," says Merrifield, "we were camped at Andrew's Creek, just across the Little Missouri from Medora, and all the boys of our outfit and most of the other cow-punchers in the round-up rode into town and got to drinking. Roosevelt rode to town himself later in the evening and about eleven o'clock stepped into Tom Slack's saloon. The place was crowded with the boys and they were pretty noisy, having had about all they could carry, and beginning to get careless with their guns. Roosevelt greeted them and said, 'One more drink, boys,' and going to the bar set up the drinks for the crowd, though he never drank himself. Then when the men had their drinks he says, 'Come on, now, let's go,' and went out, and the boys trooped out after him like so many children."

The ranching enterprise at Medora did not yield financial success. A cold winter came on and Sewall estimated that fifty per cent. of the stock perished. But the outdoor life, the entire change of scene, had done what Roosevelt had hoped for. It had blunted the sharp edges of his grief and made life tolerable and even desirable.

At about this time - the early autumn of 1886Roosevelt was one day chatting intimately with his friend, Sewall. And he told Sewall that he was going back East "to see about a job that had been

offered him. He said it was a job he did not want. It would keep him in a row all the time."

And Sewall adds, "I heard, afterward, that what he referred to was the nomination for mayor of New York."

Roosevelt had made several short visits to New York during this ranching period. On one of these brief visits he wrote the characteristic letter which I here give, taking it from Mr. Joseph B. Bishop's exhaustive and authoritative "Theodore Roosevelt and His Time."

First, a sharp querulous letter to Roosevelt from Jefferson Davis, whilom president of the Southern Confederacy.

Mr. Theodore Roosevelt,
New York, New York.

Sir:

Beauvain, Miss.
Sept. 29, 1885.

You have recently chosen publicly to associate the name of Benedict Arnold with that of Jefferson Davis, as the only American with whom the traitor Arnold need not fear comparison. You must be ignorant indeed of American history if you do not know that the career of those characters might be aptly chosen for contrast, but not for similitude; and if so ignorant, the instinct of a gentleman, had you possessed it, must have caused you to make inquiry before uttering an accusation so libelous and false. I write to you directly to repel the unproved outrage, but with too low an

estimate of you to expect an honorable retraction of your slander.

Yours, etc.,

(Signed) Jefferson Davis.

The letter was the choleric outburst, useless and ill-advised, of a disappointed, nerve-worn old man; Mr. Davis was then seventy-seven years old. Doubtless Roosevelt should not have said what he had evidently been reported as saying. But, on receiving Mr. Davis's letter, he sent this reply, characteristic of his instinct to strike back at any man who struck or tried to strike him.

New York, October 8, 1885. Mr. Theodore Roosevelt is in receipt of a letter purporting to come from Mr. Jefferson Davis, and denying that the character of Mr. Davis compares unfavorably with that of Benedict Arnold. Assuming the letter to be genuine, Mr. Roosevelt has only to say that he would be surprised to find that his views of the character of Mr. Davis did not differ from that apparently entertained in relation thereto by Mr. Davis himself. Mr. Roosevelt begs leave to add that he does not deem it necessary that there should be any further communication whatever between himself and Mr. Davis.

I note the delightful third person in which my angry young classmate's reply was couched. But if Roosevelt had been older and Mr. Davis had been younger, neither would have written.