While Tarlton and Kermit returned for the camp equipment and the supplies required in caring for the elephants, Colonel Roosevelt and I sat together resting in the shade of an acacia. We were alone in the heart of Africa and he talked to me of his wife and children at home. He had not seen any one from the United States, excepting the members of his own party, for a good many months, while I was fresh from the States, fresh from Oyster Bay. In those three hours I got a new vision and a new view of Theodore Roosevelt. It was then that I learned to love him. It was then that I realized that I could follow him anywhere; even if I doubted, I would follow him because I knew his sincerity, his integrity, and the bigness of the man. Since his death those qualities that I caught a glimpse of in Africa under the acacia tree—those qualities that made Theodore Roosevelt what he was—I have seen more fully and completely as they are reflected in his children and his children's children.
Our remaining days together were comparatively uneventful. A grass fire, fortunately not one of the most persistent, came down upon our camp that night and all hands fell to and fought it. Lions roared about our camp all night, too. At daybreak the Colonel and I went out in our pyjamas, hoping to find them. We saw no lions, but on our return, as we approached the carcass of one of our elephants, a hyena stuck his head up on the other side. The Colonel fired but the shot was unnecessary. The hyena was trapped. In his greediness, he had rammed his head through a wall of muscle in the elephant's stomach and could not get it out. The hair was worn thin on his neck by his efforts to escape, but he was literally tied up in the thing he loved best.
A day or two later Roosevelt went on to Uganda and down the Nile.
CHAPTER IX INVENTIONS AND WARFARE
Soon after my return from my 1905 trip to Africa I got my attention turned away from taxidermy for a little while in a curious fashion. The Field Museum was still in the old Columbian Exposition Building in which it had started. The outside of this stucco building kept peeling so that it had a very disreputable appearance. The Park Department protested to the museum authorities. I happened to be in the museum one day when one of the officers had this on his mind and he said:
"Akeley, how are we going to get the outside of this building respectable at a reasonable cost?"
I got to thinking about it. In the many experiments of one kind and another that I had tried in working out methods for manikin making I had among other things used a compressed air spray. It occurred to me that it would be possible to make an apparatus on this principle that would spray a very liquid concrete on to the side of a building. I set to work and rigged up a somewhat crude apparatus and set it up outside the museum building. It was not a finished piece of mechanism and it had the further disadvantage of having its compressed air come quite a long way in a hose. Nevertheless it worked, and the old building was repaired with this apparatus. The Field Museum never used the cement gun any more but some friends came along and offered to put money enough behind the idea to perfect, manufacture, and sell it. As with all such things the first money went and then a second like amount, but in the end the cement gun succeeded, and during the war it, among other things, was used to make the concrete ships. This occupied most of my time between 1907 and 1909. In fact, I drove the first motorized cement gun down to the house of its chief financial backer on Long Island in 1909, and went back to New York to go again to Africa.