out of service, in
making their personal declarations as to their physical conditions.
Men who bore on their faces and in their forms the traces of long days
of illness, indicating wrecked constitutions, declared that nothing
was the matter with them, at the same time disclaiming any intention
of applying for a pension. It was exceptionally heroic."

When we were mustered out, many of the men had lost their jobs, and
were too weak to go to work at once, while there were helpless
dependents of the dead to care for. Certain of my friends, August
Belmont, Stanley and Richard Mortimer, Major Austin Wadsworth--himself
fresh from the Manila campaign--Belmont Tiffany, and others, gave me
sums of money to be used for helping these men. In some instances, by
the exercise of a good deal of tact and by treating the gift as a
memorial of poor young Lieutenant Tiffany, we got the men to accept
something; and, of course, there were a number who, quite rightly,
made no difficulty about accepting. But most of the men would accept
no help whatever. In the first chapter, I spoke of a lady, a teacher
in an academy in the Indian Territory, three or four of whose pupils
had come into my regiment, and who had sent with them a letter of
introduction to me. When the regiment disbanded, I wrote to her to ask
if she could not use a little money among the Rough Riders, white,
Indian, and half-breed, that she might personally know. I did not hear
from her for some time, and then she wrote as follows:

"MUSCOGEE, IND. TER.,
"December 19, 1898.

"MY DEAR COLONEL ROOSEVELT: I did not at once reply to your letter
of September 23rd, because I waited for a time to see if there should
be need among any of our Rough Riders of the money you so kindly
offered. Some of the boys are poor, and in one or two cases they
seemed to me really needy, but they all said no. More than once I saw
the tears come to their eyes, at thought of your care for them, as I
told them of your letter. Did you hear any echoes of our Indian
war-whoops over your election? They were pretty loud. I was
particularly exultant, because my father was a New Yorker and I was
educated in New York, even if I was born here. So far as I can learn,
the boys are taking up the dropped threads of their lives, as though
they had never been away. Our two Rough Rider students, Meagher and
Gilmore, are doing well in their college work.

"I am sorry to tell