On they went, however, enduring the dangers and hardships they encountered like the true explorers they were. They had to wade through water for days at a time. Their shoes were never dry. Insect bites became festering wounds in their bodies. Poisonous ants, biting flies, ticks, wasps and bees never ceased to torment them. Under these circumstances the temper of the men was sorely tried. At last came a tragedy. Julio, one of their attendants, a powerful fellow but a rogue, shot Paishon, a good-natured negro sergeant. The murderer escaped into the wilderness and was never found. At last, exhausted and almost broken by their terrible hardships, they reached their destination. They had put on the map a river of some 1,500 kilometers’ length from its highest source to its confluence with the Amazon. Some of his statements on the subject of his explorations and discoveries were twisted and ridiculed by the press. The fact remains that he rendered a great service to geographers by locating the mouth of this river exactly. Other explorers had discovered its source but they possessed neither the courage nor endurance to follow it to its mouth. It was a real River of Doubt, because nobody knew where it led until Colonel Roosevelt cleared away the mystery. Colonel Rondo, chief of the Brazilian mission which had accompanied the Colonel’s party, told later how the Colonel’s leg had become infected. While the party was shooting the rapids in the River of Doubt, he said, the boat came near being capsized, and in trying to save it Colonel Roosevelt received a wound in the leg. Poison spread from this to the blood and impeded the Colonel’s walking. When he returned to New York, highly honored by the Brazilian government and praised for his achievements by explorers who knew the greatness of his undertaking, he was a sick man. Fever burned within him. His constitution was undermined. He admitted now that he had waited too long to undertake the hardest and most perilous task of his life. These facts lead inevitably to the conclusion that the trip to South America marked the beginning of the end for the Colonel. Friends and physicians point to the fact that from that time began the series of maladies that attacked him recurrently until his death. Viewing the terrible hardships Roosevelt experienced on this journey of exploration it is not going wide of the mark to say that he laid on the altar of science a score of what would have been his most fruitful years. XVII Roosevelt’s Part in the World War When America entered the world war Theodore Roosevelt stood among the first of those who volunteered their services. He had dealt with the grasping Prussian spirit in the Venezuelan incident in 1902, and made the sword-clanking junkers back down. He was fervently anxious to help do it again.