One night in camp he told us the story of one of his Rough Riders who
had just written him from some place in Arizona. The Rough Riders,
wherever they are now, look to him in time of trouble. This one had
come to grief in Arizona. He was in jail. So he wrote the President,
and his letter ran something like this:--
"DEAR COLONEL,--I am in trouble. I shot a lady in the eye, but I did
not intend to hit the lady; I was shooting at my wife."
And the presidential laughter rang out over the treetops. To another
Rough Rider, who was in jail, accused of horse stealing, he had loaned
two hundred dollars to pay counsel on his trial, and, to his surprise,
in due time the money came back. The Ex-Rough wrote that his trial
never came off. "_We elected our district attorney_;" and the laughter
again sounded, and drowned the noise of the brook near by.
On another occasion we asked the President if he was ever molested by
any of the "bad men" of the frontier, with whom he had often come in
contact. "Only once," he said. The cowboys had always treated him with
the utmost courtesy, both on the round-up and in camp; "and the few
real desperadoes I have seen were also perfectly polite." Once only
was he maliciously shot at, and then not by a cowboy nor a _bona fide_
"bad man," but by a "broad-hatted ruffian of a cheap and commonplace
type." He had been compelled to pass the night at a little frontier
hotel where the bar-room occupied the whole lower floor, and was, in
consequence, the only place where the guests of the hotel, whether
drunk or sober, could sit. As he entered the room, he saw that every
man there was being terrorized by a half-drunken ruffian who stood in
the middle of the floor with a revolver in each hand, compelling
different ones to treat.