Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [253]
“Villa,” Roosevelt said, “is a murderer and a rapist.”
Reed tried to provoke him. “What’s wrong with that? I believe in rape.”
But Roosevelt only grinned. “I’m glad to find a young man who believes in something.”
Not even an invoice from Bowers & Sands for $31,159.64 affected his good humor. Court costs and the expenses of scores of witnesses were sure to raise this total above $40,000. Coincidentally, Congress owed him a nearly identical sum: it had never gotten around to spending the Nobel Prize money he rolled over in 1906, to establish “a foundation for industrial peace.” That cause seemed almost quaint now, in view of the war.
Friends offered to help him with his legal bill, but he declined. George Meyer visited him at Sagamore Hill and asked how the trial had gone.
“Why, I won it.”
“Oh, I know that, but I can’t remember how much damages you got.”
“Would you mind saying that again, George?”
Meyer did, and Roosevelt, twinkling, placed a fatherly hand on his head.
“My dear fel-low, I was the de-fend-ant.”
IN THE SECOND WEEK of June, he treated himself to a short vacation in an environment so airy and unpopulated as to purge all memory of the stuffy courtroom in Syracuse. His trip to the barrier islands of Louisiana was a pilgrimage of a sort, because in 1904 he had designated part of the sandy, crescent-shaped archipelago just east of New Orleans as Breton National Wildlife Refuge. He sailed there aboard a yacht belonging to the state Conservation Commission, accompanied by three local friends and a photographer. Two members of the Louisiana Audubon Society trailed behind in an underpowered motorboat.
Roosevelt might have been unaccompanied for all the attention he paid to anyone else, as skein after skein of birds rose to protest his invasion of the sanctuary he had given them. Each island gave off its alarmed guard, flashing and fluttering, croaking and bleating, until the sky seemed alive with graceful long-winged things. No doubt they reacted in the same way to visitors less disposed to exult in their clamor: the eggers and poachers and plume-hunters looking for feathers, or even whole birds, to ornament the hats of fashionable ladies (such as Mrs. Edith Bolling Galt of Washington, D.C.).
The waters of the Gulf were calm, but they too were full of movement. Silver shrimp undulated back and forth. Schools of mullets and sardines drifted darkly, like cloud shadows. Always, it occurred to him, the animal world was in flight from death, or was pursuing other life with deathly intent. “Nature is ruthless, and where her sway is uncontested there is no peace save the peace of death; and the fecund stream of life, especially of life on the lower levels, flows like an immense torrent out of non-existence for but the briefest moment before the enormous majority of beings composing it are engulfed in the jaws of death, and again go out into the shadow.”
Having only one good eye did not prevent him observing, with the accuracy of the field naturalist he had once hoped to be, a big humming hornet pursue a greenhead horsefly and light on it from behind. Poor little Belgium! The greenhead managed to turn before it was stung, and sink its lancet into the marauder’s body. Fly and hornet grappled frantically for a few minutes, and then the sting found its target. The fly fell dead. But it had given a good account of itself before yielding to superior power. Roosevelt watched the hornet rubbing its sore spot with a spare pair of legs, and stagger off hunchbacked, evidently “a very sick creature.”
He saw the same aerial warfare operate on a thousandfold larger scale, as three man-of-war birds pursued a royal tern with a fish in its claws. The tern was a strong flier, and ascended almost out of view, but its pursuers were even stronger, their enormous wings beating and finally engulfing it. Out of the mêlée, the