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The men who were with him sprang on the assailant. Roosevelt sank back in the automobile. But in an instant he was on his feet again. "Stop!" he called to the men who were struggling with the assassin. "Don't hurt him. Bring him to me." The man was lifted up. For an instant the assail

ant and the man he had sought to kill stood face Then the assassin was turned over to the

to face.

police.

"Now to the hospital!" some one cried.

"You get me to that speech!" ordered Roosevelt, with savage emphasis. "It may be the last one I shall ever make.'

His friends protested, but he stood firm. In an anteroom of the Auditorium he consented to have a clean handkerchief tied over the wound. Then he walked to the stage. Ten thousand men and women roared a welcome. The chairman quietly told the audience that the ex-President had been shot, and a roar of anger shook the hall that was succeeded by a deafening roar of applause as Roosevelt came forward to speak.

He drew the manuscript of his speech from his right-hand breast pocket. A shudder ran through the audience. There were two bullet holes in each sheet. The manuscript had been folded. One hundred thicknesses of paper had served to save his life.

He began his speech a little ramblingly, for the sight of the manuscript had for an instant shaken even his iron nerves. Then he proceeded with his speech. His friends on the platform, one after another, tried to interrupt him, to persuade him to

allow himself to be taken to the hospital to have the wound attended to. He insisted on saying what he had to say. For an hour and a half with a bullet in his breast he defended the principles of the progressive cause.

"I tell you with absolute truthfulness," he said, "I am not thinking of my own life, I am not thinking of my own success. I am thinking only of the success of this great cause."

When he had finished, he consented to be taken to the hospital. The bullet, he found, had passed within half an inch of his right lung. The man who had fired it was a poor insane wretch who had been led by the denunciation of Roosevelt in the newspapers to believe that he had a call from Heaven to remove this "menace to American liberties."

Governor Wilson offered at once to cease campaigning, but Roosevelt refused to allow himself thus to be favored.

"The welfare of any one man in this fight is wholly immaterial," he answered. "This is not a contest about any man; it is a contest concerning principles. . . . I shall be sorry if Mr. Wilson does not keep on the stump."

The campaign went on.

Roosevelt's extraordi

nary constitution asserted itself and in a fortnight he was once more speaking to the American people.

The election was held on November 5th. Woodrow Wilson was elected.

CHAPTER XIX

HE GOES OUT AFTER NEW ADVENTURES AND NEARLY FINDS THE GREATEST OF ALL

ONC

NCE more Theodore Roosevelt had been defeated. Being a wise observer of political currents, he had scarcely expected to win. It was a Democratic year, with the Democratic party everywhere overwhelmingly victorious. Republicans blamed Roosevelt bitterly for the Democratic landslide and for the complete disruption of their own party, refusing to see that the party had been disrupted not by Roosevelt, but by the reactionary forces which had turned it from the course in which Roosevelt as President had led it to success. The winds of controversy continued to beat about his head. Roosevelt let them blow and sat down and wrote his autobiography. Through the Outlook he continued to swing his broadsword for progressive principles; and once in court he swung it most effectively in defense of his own personal reputation. For an editor in Michigan had rashly expressed in print the charge that had been current here and there during the campaign, that Roosevelt was a hard and habitual drinker. Roosevelt sued him

for libel, supported by an array of "character witnesses" that included former Cabinet ministers and ambassadors, ministers of the Gospel, social workers and temperance workers, soldiers, editors, journalists, naturalists, hunters, secret service men, and household servants. That lie he was determined to nail, and he nailed it.

He disposed of the Michigan slanderer in June. A month later he was on the rim of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado with his younger sons, Archie and Quentin, hunting cougar. He himself this time carried no gun. This was their own particular holiday, and he who wished his sons to serve their apprenticeship in the great world of hardship and adventure was glad to leave the thrills of it to them. From the gorgeous country above the cañon, fresh with pine and spruce and clear springs, he led them into the grim desolation of the Navajo Desert. It was a world of incredible wildness and desolate majesty, savage, grotesque, terrible. Lizards and rattlesnakes were there, the only living things. Only at the water-holes, ten or fifteen miles apart, they met an occasional group of Indians, watering their flocks.

At Tuba they rested for a day, then moved northward through the parched, mountainous landscape to the upper reaches of cedar and pine at March Pass; and on, with their pack-train, past villages of the cliff-dwellers in ruins, through emerald valleys of magical luxuriance, to the foot of the Navajo Mountains; and again on, through an eerie wilderness over a perilous trail that was no trail at all,

by ghastly precipices, to the gorge of the Natural Bridge. To right and left loomed enormous cliffs bounded each to each by a triumphal arch of inconceivable majesty.

They bathed in the dark pool beneath.

For three days they retraced their steps, then crossed the Black Mesa to climb at last the steep and narrow rock-ridge on whose summits in bold outline against the blue sky rose the three rock villages of the Hopi.

In one of them a snake-dance was to be held.

The villages were crowded with visitors, but of the men not of the tribe Roosevelt alone, as a former Great Chief at Washington, was admitted to the sacred room, the kiva, in which the snake-priests had for a fortnight been preparing for the sacred dance. He entered the chamber through a hole in the roof. Squatting on the floor were eight or ten priests, lithe, sinewy, naked, copper-red. On a dais against the wall near by lay intertwined a moving mass of thirty or more rattlesnakes.

A priest spread a blanket for him, and he sat down with his back to the snakes, scarcely three yards away. A snake glided sinuously toward him. He pointed him out to the guardian of the snakes, who stroked it gently with a fan of four eagle feathers until it turned and crawled back. A half-dozen times other snakes drew silently near and were quietly repulsed. One escaped the eye of the watcher and passed within six inches of Roosevelt's knee. A priest on the other side threw a pinch of dust in its face. The watcher stroked it, and it too withdrew.

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