"They will be throwing rotten apples at me soon," Theodore had said to his sister, on the day when New York went frantic in placing him among the gods. His treatment, after he championed Progressivism, showed him to be clairvoyant. Not only did his political opponents belabor him--that was quite natural--but his friends, having failed to persuade him not to take the fatal leap, let him see plainly that, while he still had their affection, they had lost their respect for his judgment. He himself bore the defeat of 1912 with the same valiant cheerfulness with which he took every disappointment and thwarting. But he was not stolid, much less indifferent. " It is all very well to talk with the Crusading spirit," he said after the election, "and of the duty to spend and be spent; and I feel it absolutely as regards myself; but I hate to see my Crusading lieutenants suffer for the cause." He was thinking of the eager young men, including some of his kinsmen, who had gone into the campaign because they believed in him. His close friends did not follow him, but they still loved him. And it was a sign of his open-mindedness that he would listen to their opinions and even consult them, although he knew that they entirely rejected his Progressivism. General Luke E. Wright, who remained a devoted friend but did not become a Progressive, used to explain what the others called the Colonel's aberration, as being really a very subtle piece of wisdom. Experienced ranchmen, he would say, when their herds stampede in a sudden alarm, spur their horses through the rushing cattle, fire their revolvers into the air, and gradually, by making the herds suppose that men and beasts are all together in their wild dash, work their way to the front. Then they cleverly make the leaders swing round, and after a long stampede the herd comes panting back to the place it started from. This, General Wright said, is what Roosevelt was doing with the multitudes of Radicals who seemed to be headed for perdition. Just as he had absented himself in Africa for a year, after retiring from the Presidency, so Roosevelt decided to make one more trip for hunting and exploration. As he could not go to the North Pole, he said, because that would be poaching on Peary's field, he selected South America. He had long wished to visit the Southern Continent, and invitations to speak at Rio Janeiro and at Buenos Aires gave him an excuse for setting out. As before, he started with the distinct purpose of collecting animal and botanical specimens; this time for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which provided two trained naturalists to accompany him. His son Kermit, toughened by the previous adventure, went also.