Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Mulvaney, in one of Kipling's stories, proved that he knew something
about Shakespeare, for he put this advice into his own language so as
to express the meaning perfectly:
"Don't fight wid ivry scutt for the pure joy av fightin', but if you
do, knock the nose av him first an' frequint."
Roosevelt tried to keep out of the fight,--but this is the way it
happened. He was out after lost horses, and had to put up at a little
hotel where there were no rooms downstairs, but a bar, a dining-room
and a kitchen. It was late at night, and there was trouble on, for he
heard one or two shots in the bar as he came up. He disliked the idea
of going in, but it was cold outside and there was nowhere else to go.
Inside the bar, a cheap "bad man" was walking up and down with a cocked
revolver in each hand. He had been shooting at the clock, and making
every one unhappy and uncomfortable.
When Roosevelt came in, he called him "Four eyes," because he wore
spectacles, and announced "Four eyes is going to set up the drinks."
Roosevelt tried to pass it off by laughing, and sat down behind the
stove to escape notice, and keep away from trouble. But the "bad man"
came and stood over him, a gun in each hand, using foul language, and
insisting that "Four eyes" should get up and treat.
"Well," Roosevelt reluctantly remarked, "if I've got to, I've got to!"
As he said this, he rose quickly, and hit the gun-man with his right
fist on the point of the jaw, then with his left, and again with his
right. The guns went off in the air, as the "bad man" went over like
a nine-pin, striking his head on the corner of the bar as he fell.
Roosevelt was ready to drop on him if he moved, for he still clutched
the revolvers. But he was senseless.
The other people in the bar recovered their nerve, once the man was
down. They hustled him out into the shed, and there was no more trouble
from him.
Roosevelt hunted geese and ducks, deer, mountain sheep, elk and grizzly
bear during his stay in the West. It was still possible to find
buffalo, although most of the great herds had vanished. The prairie was
covered with relics of the dead buffalo, so that one might ride for
hundreds of miles, seeing their bones everywhere, but never getting a
glimpse of a live one. Yet he managed, after a hard hunt of several
days, to shoot a great bull buffalo.
An encounter with a grizzly bear is much more exciting, and he was
nearly killed by one bear. In later years Roosevelt killed almost every
kind of large and dangerous game that there is on the earth,--lions,
elephants, the African buffalo, and the rhinoceros. The Indian tiger
is perhaps the only one of the large savage animals which he never
encountered. Yet after meeting all these and having some close shaves,
especially with a wounded elephant in Africa, he said that his
narrowest escape was with this grizzly bear.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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