ps. The rain was blowing in Roosevelt's eyes as he pulled
the trigger. He missed clean, and the whole band plunged into a hollow
and were off.

What Joe Ferris said upon that occasion remains untold. It was "one of
those misses," Roosevelt himself remarked afterwards, "which a man to
his dying day always looks back upon with wonder and regret." In wet,
sullen misery he returned with Joe to the horses.

The rain continued all day, and they spent another wretched night.
They had lived for two days on nothing but biscuits and rainwater, and
privation had thoroughly lost whatever charm it might have had for an
adventurous young man in search of experience. The next morning
brought sunlight and revived spirits, but it brought no change in
their luck.

"Bad luck followed us," Joe Ferris remarked long after, "like a yellow
dog follows a drunkard."

Joe's horse nearly stepped on a rattlesnake, and narrowly escaped
being bitten; a steep bluff broke away under their ponies' hoofs, and
sent them sliding and rolling to the bottom of a long slope, a pile of
intermingled horses and men. Shortly after, Roosevelt's horse stepped
into a hole and turned a complete somersault, pitching his rider a
good ten feet; and he had scarcely recovered his composure and his
seat in the saddle, when the earth gave way under his horse as though
he had stepped on a trap-door, and let him down to his withers in
soft, sticky mud. They hauled the frightened animal out by the lariat,
with infinite labor. Altogether it was not a restful Sunday.

More than once Joe Ferris looked at Roosevelt quizzically, wondering
when the pleasant "four-eyed tenderfoot" would begin to worry about
catching cold and admit at last that the game was too much for him.
But the "tenderfoot," it happened, had a dogged streak. He made no
suggestion of "quitting."

"He could stand an awful lot of hard knocks," Joe explained later,
"and he was always cheerful. You just couldn't knock him out of sorts.
He was entertaining, too, and I liked to listen to him, though, on the
whole, he wasn't much on the talk. He said that he wanted to get away
from politics, so I didn't mention political matters; and he had books
with him and would read at odd times."

Joe began to look upon his "tenderfoot" with a kind of awe, which was
not diminished when Roosevelt, blowing up a rubber pillow which he
carried with him, casually remarked one night that his doctors back
East had told him that he