ned straight up the
mountain. They followed the bloody trail where it went up the sharpest
and steepest places, skirting the cliffs and precipices.

Roosevelt, intent on the quarry, was not what Bill Sewall would have
called "over-cautious" in the pursuit.

He was running along a shelving ledge when a piece of loose slate
with which the ledge was covered slipped under his foot. He clutched
at the rock wall, he tried to fling himself back, but he could not
recover himself.

He went head first over the precipice.

Roosevelt's luck was with him that day. He fell forty or fifty feet
into a tall pine, bounced through it, and landed finally, not
uncomfortably, in a thick balsam, somewhat shaken and scratched, but
with no bones broken and with his rifle still clutched in his hand.

From above came the hoarse voice of John Willis. "Are you hurt?" he
asked.

"No," answered Roosevelt, a trifle breathless.

"Then come on!"

Roosevelt "came on," scrambling back up the steep height he had so
swiftly descended, and raced after the guide. He came upon the goat at
last, but winded as he was, and with the sweat in his eyes, he shot
too high, cutting the skin above the spine. The goat plunged downhill
and the hunters plunged after him, pursuing the elusive animal until
darkness covered the trail.

"Now," said Willis, "I expect you are getting tired."

"By George," said Roosevelt, "how far have we gone?"

"About fifteen or twenty miles up and down the mountains."

"If we get that goat to-morrow, I will give you a hundred dollars."

"I don't want a hundred dollars. But we'll get the goat."

Roosevelt brought him down the next day at noon.

Roosevelt spent two weeks with Willis in the mountains. It was a rich
experience for the Easterner, but for the tall Missourian it proved to
be even more. Willis was a child of the frontier, who had knocked
about between the Rio Grande and the Canadian border ever since his
boyhood, doing a hundred different things upon which the law and
civilized men were supposed to look with disapproval.[22]

[Footnote 22: Willis was a great teller of tales. See
_Hunting the Grizzly_, by Theodore Roosevelt (The
Sagamore Series, G. P. Putnam's Sons, page 216 ff.), for
the most lurid of his yarns.]

To this odd child of nature, bred in the wilderness, Roosevelt opened
the door to a world which John Willis did not know existed.

"He was a reve