Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [202]
Mr. Perdicaris slept no better than he had on his first night, five weeks before. At 4:00 A.M. on 24 June, horses and pack mules were made ready, and soon a long cortege was snaking north to Mount Nazul. Raisuli rode beside the hostages on a gray charger. Dark cords of camel hair twisted about his turban, and a cartridge belt slapped his broad chest: “Every inch,” Mr. Perdicaris thought enviously, “a man of daring deeds.”
They crested Nazul just as the sun did, and in the bursting light, all the peaks and ridges around them, wreathed in lower mists, turned amethyst and rose, crimson and lilac. The old man reined to a halt, enraptured by one of the most gorgeous displays of color he had ever seen. Raisuli, grinning, asked if he “regretted” his involuntary mountain vacation.
Keeping to the ridge, they continued north and eventually sighted a white fleck in the blue distance, which Raisuli said was Tangier. Around noon they found themselves looking down on the town of El Zellal, where the meeting with the Sultan’s emissaries was to take place.
Many hours later, when the last stacks of silver coin had been counted and the political prisoners handed over and two ceremonial luncheons eaten, Raisuli took Mr. Perdicaris aside and said good-bye. He promised that if anyone tried to harm him, “I … will come with all my men to your rescue.”
Mr. Perdicaris was more inclined to cry than laugh. Affectionately drawn to Raisuli even as he rejoiced for himself, he mounted his black horse and rode off with the Sultan’s party. Other emotions struggled in his breast toward midnight, when Tangier came into view, and he saw in the harbor the mastheads of Admiral Chadwick’s ships, twinkling the news of his return.
As a youth, Mr. Perdicaris had thought little of his American citizenship, and bartered it away to avoid taxation during the Civil War. Too much money and travel had made him complacent and careless of formalities; there would be many awkward questions asked soon enough, before the State Department decided to forgive him; but he had no doubt now where, and to whom, his allegiance belonged.
“Thank Heaven,” he said to himself, “it is that flag, and that people—aye, and that President, behind those frigates, thousands of miles away, who have had me dug out from amongst these kabyles! That flag and no other!”
CHAPTER 22
The Most Absurd Political Campaign of Our Time
I think a lot iv us likes Tiddy Rosenfelt that wuddn’t
iver be suspected iv votin’ f’r him.
THE DIFFICULTY OF MOUNTING a serious challenge to Theodore Roosevelt’s candidacy in 1904 became apparent when the Prohibition Party gave its backing to a man named Silas Swallow. To the regret of satirists and cartoonists, Mr. Swallow was unable to choose Ezra Tipple, the General Secretary of the Methodist Conference, as his running mate. Tipple was a Roosevelt supporter.
So, by late June, were such reluctant converts as J. P. Morgan and E. H. Harriman. James J. Hill remained adamantly opposed, as did George F. Baer of coal-strike infamy. But many conservative Democrats, including George J. Gould, James Speyer, and Jacob H. Schiff, let Cornelius Bliss (who had agreed to serve as Republican campaign treasurer) know that he could rely on them for money. For such men, memories of William Jennings Bryan’s two disastrous “Free Silver” campaigns were worse than their apprehensions of Roosevelt’s Square Deal.
There was no chance that the Democratic National Convention—assembling in St. Louis as Roosevelt headed home from Washington in early July—would nominate Bryan again. When Bryan himself arrived at the local Coliseum, he found himself seated about two thirds of the way down the aisle, about where he had sunk in party esteem. Yet faded as the Commoner now seemed, with his balding head and resonant, empty voice, he was more vivid a personality than the likely nominee. Alton Brooks Parker, Chief Justice of the New York Court of Appeals, was gray enough to defeat the new science of autochrome photography. Drably