eal to you to help
me avenge the death of my husband by punishing his
assassins. I am a woman. Vengeance cannot be wreaked by my
own hand. For this reason I inform you, and swear to you,
by the one Almighty God, that to whosoever shall capture and
deliver to the authorities at El-Qued, at Ouargia, or at
El-Goleah one of my husband's assassins I will give 1000
douros ($750), 2000 douros for two assassins, 3000 douros
for three assassins. As to the principal assassins, Bechaoui
and Sheik Ben Abdel Kader, I will give 2000 douros for each
of them. And now, understand, make yourselves ready, and may
God give you success.

Marquise de MORES

The murderers were captured, convicted, and executed. Then the little
American woman, with her hair of Titian red, whom the cowboys of
Little Missouri had christened "The Queen of the West," quietly
withdrew from the public gaze; and the curtain fell on a great
romantic drama.

Theodore Roosevelt was just coming into national eminence as Police
Commissioner of New York City when the Marquis de Mores died beside
the well of El Ouatia. As a member of the Civil Service Commission in
Washington he had caught the imagination of the American people, and a
growing number of patriotic men and women, scattered over the country,
began to look upon him as the leader they had been longing for. He
came to Medora no more for the round-up or the chase.

In May, 1897, Roosevelt became Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Less
than a year later the Spanish War broke out. The dream he had dreamed
in 1886 of a regiment recruited from the wild horsemen of the plains
became a reality. From the Canadian border to the Rio Grande, the men
he had lived and worked with on the round-up, and thousands of others
whose imaginations had been seized by the stories of his courage and
endurance, which had passed from mouth to mouth and from camp-fire to
camp-fire through the cattle country, offered their services. The
Rough Riders were organized, and what they accomplished is history.
There were unquestionably more weighty reasons why he should become
Governor of New York State than that he had been the successful leader
of an aggregation of untamed gunmen in Cuba. But it was that fact in
his career which caught the fancy of the voters, and by a narrow
margin elected him a Republican Governor of his State in what, as
everybody