Summary: Theodore Roosevelt recounts the story of one of his friends telling him the story of one of his scars.<br> ⁓The Voice before the Void<br> “The Ending of a Desperado”<br> from The Wilderness Hunter<br> Theodore Roosevelt<br> One of my valued friends in the mountains, and one of the best hunters with whom I ever travelled, was a man who had a peculiarly light-hearted way of looking at conventional social obligations. Though in some ways a true backwoods Donatello, he was a man of much shrewdness and of great courage and resolution. Moreover, he possessed what only a few men do possess, the capacity to tell the truth. He saw facts as they were, and could tell them as they were, and he never told an untruth unless for very weighty reasons. He was pre-eminently a philosopher, of a happy, sceptical turn of mind. He had no prejudices. He never looked down, as so many hard characters do, upon a person possessing a different code of ethics. His attitude was one of broad, genial tolerance. He saw nothing out of the way in the fact that he had himself been a road-agent, a professional gambler, and a desperado at different stages of his career. On the other hand, he did not in the least hold it against any one that he had always acted within the law. At the time that I knew him he had become a man of some substance, and naturally a staunch upholder of the existing order of things. But while he never boasted of his past deeds, he never apologized for them, and evidently would have been quite as incapable of understanding that they needed an apology as he would have been incapable of being guilty of mere vulgar boastfulness. He did not often allude to his past career at all. When he did, he recited its incidents perfectly naturally and simply, as events, without any reference to or regard for their ethical significance. It was this quality which made him at times a specially pleasant companion, and always an agreeable narrator. The point of his story, or what seemed to him the point, was rarely that which struck me. It was the incidental sidelights the story threw upon his own nature and the somewhat lurid surroundings amid which he had moved.<br> On one occasion when we were out together we killed a bear, and after<br> skinning it, took a bath in a lake. I noticed he had a scar on the side<br> of his foot and asked him how he got it, to which he responded with<br> indifference:<br> “Oh, that? Why, a man shootin’ at me to make me dance, that was all.”<br> I expressed some curiosity in that matter, and he went on:<br> “Well, the way of it was this: It was when I was keeping a saloon in New<br> Mexico, and there was a man there by the name of Fowler, and there was a<br> reward on him of three thousand dollars—-”<br> “Put on him by the State?”<br> “No, put on by his wife,” said my friend; “and there was this–”<br> “Hold on,” I interrupted; “put on by his wife did you say?”<br> “Yes, by his wife. Him an her had been keepin’ a faro bank, you see, and<br> they quarreled about it, so she just put a reward on him, and so–”<br> “Excuse me,” I said, “but do you mean to say that this reward was put<br> on publicly?” to which my friend answered, with an air of gentlemanly<br> boredom at being interrupted to gratify my thirst for irrelevant detail:<br> “Oh, no, not publicly. She just mentioned it to six or eight intimate<br> personal friends.”<br> “Go on,” I responded, somewhat overcome by this instance of the<br> primitive simplicity with which New Mexico matrimonial disputes were<br> managed, and he continued:<br> “Well, two men come ridin’ in to see me to borrow my guns. My guns was<br> Colt’s self-cockers. It was a new thing then, an they was the only ones<br> in town. These come to me,
