Manifest Destiny

The train came in on time and there was a crowd of men with the President: Westerners, most of them—Roosevelt’s avid Colorado and Wyoming boosters from the Rough Rider regiment, but strangers to Pack. Right from the outset Pack felt himself pushed to the back of things; there was no chance to get close, and in any event he felt a troublesome responsibility to watch the horizons for any hint of Jerry Paddock.

He was not able to get close to the President during most of the day, especially at the begi

After that it was all Pack could do to keep up; Roosevelt made a thundering race of it.

Half an hour downriver the President slowed the pace to breathe the horses. They dismounted and led the animals. Someone said something that brought out Roosevelt’s peculiar chattering bark of laughter. “We’ll send half a dozen gunboats and the Colombians won’t know the difference. It takes four weeks on muleback to reach their capital—and in any event they’re in the midst of what appears to be an interminable and perpetual civil war, with the result that it’s impossible to know whom to treat with. Only one solution, by George. The Panamanians will declare their independence under our protection and we’ll make a canal-building treaty with them and then you may mark my words, boys, I shall make the dirt fly.”

With jaundiced suspicion Pack regarded the costume worn by the President of the United States. It managed somehow to be both calculated and ingenuous. The outfit had seen hard service: slouch campaign hat, dark coat, soft negligee shirt with turndown collar, brown corduroy riding pants, soft leather leggins and stout stovepipe boots. It was the uniform of a hard-riding fighter—a man of the people—a working-man.

Yet Roosevelt had been born into a fortune, tutored for a life in the aristocracy, trained at Harvard in law and crew. By birth and heritage he was as much a working-man as Louis XIV. But he wore the rough clothes naturally—because he had earned them; even his enemies must concede that.

Someone else spoke; Roosevelt replied with his back turned, so Pack couldn’t hear it; then the President strolled nearer and Pack heard him address Joe Ferris:

“And how’s the hunting, old man?”

“Not much game left nowadays, sir. Everything’s near extinct.”

“I’m doing what I can about that in Washington, you know. We’ve got to protect these animals or future generations will never get a crack at them, will they now.”

It was a topic that provoked Pack to drag his horse forward, prying a place amid half a dozen trudging strangers, to plunge in with a question: “What do you think of this new Teddy Bear they’ve put on the market?”

“An abomination,” said the man who hated to be called Teddy. “I’m not yet fool enough to believe what you boys say about me in the newspapers.” Never slowing his quick pace he gri

“Those cartoons haven’t appeared in my newspaper, sir.”

“But your editorials have.”

Pack tried to reply to the President’s broad grin in kind but he was no match for those teeth. And then he was squeezed back when the leader indicated, by climbing back aboard his horse, that it was time to resume the run.

Down along the riverbank Roosevelt galloped in a whirl of dust. On his heels drummed the gallant company of old friends. The President rode heavily, bristling, tipping pugnaciously forward in the saddle.

The final dash was a mad confused gallop, the horses strung out in a loose bunch, with Colonel Roosevelt a nose ahead of his old friend Huidekoper. The President rode into the clearing on the run, his horse heaving. Huidekoper, who had to be near sixty, riding like an Indian, slithered his horse to a pirouette and Roosevelt glowered at him. “You old rascal—tried to beat me!”

“I tried,” Huidekoper agreed.

“Oh, boys, this is the life. Look at that stand of cottonwoods. By George it is still the loveliest spot in the Bad Lands.” The President got off his horse and led it about. “This horse is breathing some—and then some.”

The Elkhorn ranch house was gone, broken up for lumber, but there was still the great stand of trees to which he had referred, and beyond them on all sides the magnificent multi-colored slopes and buttes of the Bad Lands. Now Roosevelt whipped off his hat to drag a sleeve across his brow. In that dreadful choppy irritating voice he said, “‘Thank God I have lived and toiled with men.’ So spake my friend Kipling. By Godfrey, boys, I know every crease of this country. I’ve ridden over it, hunted in it, tramped it in all weather and every season. And it looks like home to me.” He drew an immense breath into his barrel chest, slapped both palms against his breast in manly satisfaction, then poked a finger toward Huidekoper, then Eaton, then Joh

And finally the poking finger turned toward Pack. When Pack looked up, the President’s big square face was gri

“You too, Arthur,” said the President. “I’ll win your vote yet, by George, or die trying!”

With a hearty bellow of laughter the President slapped him on the shoulder and Pack felt a flush of heat suffuse his face all the way down into his shoulders.

Roosevelt moved on to the next crony. After a moment Pack swung away, awkward and uncertain, to stride to the edge of camp. His heart was pounding.

He felt weight beside him and turned to see Joe Ferris peering into the trees.

Pack felt the edge of the same fast-traveling thought that must have goaded Joe. “A nice spot for an ambush.”

Joe nodded slowly. Then his expression changed and he began to shake his head. “No. Not Jerry Paddock. He’s killed from ambush before, I guess, but this is a matter of pride. He’ll come in straight up if he comes at all.”

“And you are aiming to be ready for him.”

“If it comes to that,” Joe agreed with even-voiced gravity. “We lost one President to an assassin two years ago and I don’t believe it would be seemly to have it happen again.”

Joe left him then. Pack wandered the edge of the wood, a

There was no doubt in Pack’s mind that in the days since Roosevelt had become famous by rough-riding his way up San Juan Hill and dispatching the fleet to the Philippines and swaggering his way into the White House at the unheard-of unseasoned age of forty-one, his past life had moved from the province of actuality to that of legend. Joe Ferris and these others were remembering the Roosevelt they wanted their hero to have been. They seemed conveniently to have forgotten the foolish ridiculous loudmouthed dude who had stepped off the train at that same spot exactly twenty years ago.

Pack sat down with his back to the bole of a tree and tried to remember how things really had been.