The Other Teddy Roosevelts Read Online Free Page A

and meet the residents of the area. He needed to talk to them, get to know them, and learn their opinions, which, he was sure, would be worth more than the police’s.
    He walked over to a decrepit coat rack, then paused and smiled. He crossed the room to his steamer trunk, opened it, and a few moments later was dressed in the fringed buckskin he wore at his Dakota ranch. (It had been designed by his favorite New York haberdasher, since all the Dakotans were busily trying to look like New Yorkers.) He took off his shining black shoes and pulled on a pair of well-worn boots. Then he tucked a knife and a pistol into his belt.
    He considered a coonskin hat, but decided to wear a stetson instead. He looked at himself in the fly-specked mirror and grinned in approval. As long as he was going to be identified as an American the moment he opened his mouth, he might as well dress like one.
    He walked out the door of his shabby building and was immediately aware that he had become an object of notoriety. Every pedestrian within sight stopped to stare at him. Even horse-drawn carriages slowed down as they passed by.
    He grinned at them, waved, and began making his way to the Black Swan, next to where Annie Chapman’s body had been found. A number of curious onlookers had followed him, and most of them entered the tavern when he did.
    He walked up to the bar, staring approvingly at his image in the mirror that faced him.
    “I didn’t know the circus had come to Whitechapel!” laughed a burly man who was standing a few feet away.
    Roosevelt smiled and extended his hand. “Theodore Roosevelt. Pleased to meet you.”
    “Hey, you’re a Yank!” said the man. “Ain’t never met one before.” He paused and frowned. “Don’t rightly know if I like Yanks.”
    “Them the duds you fight Indians in, guv?” asked another.
    “We don’t fight Indians any more,” answered Roosevelt.
    “Killed ‘em all, did you?”
    “No. Now we live side by side with them.”
    “I heard they was all killers,” said the burly man. “They go around cuttin’ people’s heads off.”
    “Most of them are pretty decent people,” said Roosevelt, seeing an opportunity to bring up the subject he wanted to discuss. “And even the bad ones couldn’t hold a candle to your Saucy Jack.”
    “Old Jack?” said the burly man with a shrug. “He’s off the deep end, he is. Mad as a hatter and ten times as vicious.”
    “Has anyone here seen him?” asked Roosevelt.
    “The only people what’s seen him is lying in the morgue chopped up in bits and pieces,” said a woman.
    “They say he eats their innards,” offered another, looking scared as she downed her drink.
    “He only goes after women,” added the burly man. “Men either fight too hard or don’t taste so good.”
    “Maybe your women should go armed,” suggested Roosevelt.
    “What good would it do?” responded a woman. “If you’re with a John, you don’t need no weapon—and if you find you’re with old Jack, you ain’t got time to use it.”
    “That’s muddled thinking,” said Roosevelt.
    “Who are you to come in here and tell us how to think?” said the burly man pugnaciously.
    “I’m a friend who wants to help.”
    “Not if you don’t live in Whitechapel, you ain’t,” said the man. “We ain’t got no friends except for them what’s stuck here.”
    “You didn’t give me a chance to answer,” said Roosevelt. “Yes, I live in Whitechapel.”
    “I ain’t never seen you around,” said a man from the back of the tavern.
    “Me neither,” chimed in another.
    “I just arrived.”
    “This ain’t a place where you ‘arrive’, Yank,” said the burly man. “It’s a place where you get dumped while the rest of London pisses on you.”
    “Bloody right!” said another of the women, “I’ll bet the coppers are probably cheering for old Jack. Every time he strikes, there’s less of us for them to worry about.”
    “If the police won’t hunt him down, we’ll