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]
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 revelation to me," said Willis long afterward. "He was so well posted on everything. He was the first man that I had ever met that really knew anything. I had just been with a lot of roughnecks, cowpunchers, horse-thieves, and that sort. Roosevelt would explain things to me. He told me a lot of things."