onfronted with any other
enemy. An experience in following in the trail of an enemy who might
flee at one stretch through fifty miles of death-like desert was a
good school out of which to come with profound indifference for the
ordinary hardships of campaigning.

As a rule, the men were more apt, however, to have had experience in
warring against white desperadoes and law-breakers than against
Indians. Some of our best recruits came from Colorado. One, a very
large, hawk-eyed man, Benjamin Franklin Daniels, had been Marshal of
Dodge City when that pleasing town was probably the toughest abode of
civilized man to be found anywhere on the continent. In the course of
the exercise of his rather lurid functions as peace-officer he had
lost half of one ear--"bitten off," it was explained to me. Naturally,
he viewed the dangers of battle with philosophic calm. Such a man was,
in reality, a veteran even in his first fight, and was a tower of
strength to the recruits in his part of the line. With him there came
into the regiment a deputy-marshal from Cripple Creek named Sherman
Bell. Bell had a hernia, but he was so excellent a man that we decided
to take him. I do not think I ever saw greater resolution than Bell
displayed throughout the campaign. In Cuba the great exertions which
he was forced to make, again and again opened the hernia, and the
surgeons insisted that he must return to the United States; but he
simply would not go.

Then there was little McGinty, the bronco-buster from Oklahoma, who
never had walked a hundred yards if by any possibility he could ride.
When McGinty was reproved for his absolute inability to keep step on
the drill-ground, he responded that he was pretty sure he could keep
step on horseback. McGinty's short legs caused him much trouble on the
marches, but we had no braver or better man in the fights.

One old friend of mine had come from far northern Idaho to join the
regiment at San Antonio. He was a hunter, named Fred Herrig, an
Alsatian by birth. A dozen years before he and I had hunted mountain
sheep and deer when laying in the winter stock of meat for my ranch on
the Little Missouri, sometimes in the bright fall weather, sometimes
in the Arctic bitterness of the early Northern winter. He was the most
loyal and simple-hearted of men, and he had come to join his old
"boss" and comrade in the bigger hunting which we were to carry on
through the tropic midsummer.

The temptation is great to