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 tree-tops. 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 common-place 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.
"I went and sat down behind the stove," said the President, "as far from him as I could get; and hoped to escape his notice. The fact that I wore glasses, together with my evident desire to avoid a fight, apparently gave him the impression that I could be imposed upon with impunity. He very soon approached me, flourishing his two guns, and ordered me to treat. I made no reply for some moments, when the fellow became so threatening that I saw something had to be done. The crowd, mostly sheep-herders and small grangers, sat or stood back against the wall, afraid to move. I was unarmed, and thought rapidly. Saying, 'Well, if I must, I must,' I got up as if to walk around him to the bar, then, as I got opposite him, I wheeled and fetched him as heavy a blow on the chin-point as I could strike. He went down like a steer before the axe, firing both guns into the ceiling as he went. I jumped on him, and, with my knees on his chest, disarmed him in a hurry. The crowd was then ready enough to help me, and we hog-tied him and put him in an outhouse." The President alludes to this incident in his "Ranch Life," but does not give the details. It brings out his mettle very distinctly.
He told us in an amused way of the attempts of his political opponents at Albany, during his early career as a member of the Assembly, to besmirch his character. His outspoken criticisms and denunciations had become intolerable to them, so they laid a trap for him, but he was not caught. His innate rectitude and instinct for the right course saved him, as it has saved him many times since. I do not think that in any emergency he has to debate with himself long as to the right course to be pursued; he divines it by a kind of infallible instinct. His motives are so simple and direct that he finds a straight and easy course where another man, whose eye is less single, would flounder and hesitate.
One night he entertained us with reminiscences of the Cuban War, of his efforts to get his men to the firing line when the fighting began, of his greenness and general ignorance of the whole business of war, which in his telling was very amusing. He has probably put it all in his book about the war, a work I have not yet read. He described the look of the slope of Kettle Hill when they were about to charge up it, how the grass was combed and rippled by the storm of rifle bullets that swept down it. He said, "I was conscious of being pale when I looked at it and knew that in a few moments we were going to charge there." The men of his regiment were all lying flat upon the ground, and it became his duty to walk along their front and encourage them and order them up on their feet. "Get up, men, get up!" One big fellow did not rise. Roosevelt stooped down and took hold of him and ordered him up. Just at that moment a bullet struck the man and went the entire length of him. He never rose.
On this or on another occasion when a charge was ordered, he found himself a hundred yards or more in advance of his regiment, with only the color bearer and one corporal with him. He said they planted the flag there, while he rushed back to fetch the men. He was evidently pretty hot. "Can it be that you flinched when I led the way!" and then they came with a rush. On the summit of Kettle Hill he was again in advance of his men, and as he came up, three Spaniards rose out of the trenches and deliberately fired at him at a distance of only a few paces, and then turned and fled. But a bullet from his revolver stopped one of them. He seems to have been as much exposed to bullets in this engagement as Washington was at Braddock's defeat, and to have escaped in the same marvelous manner.
The President unites in himself powers and qualities that rarely go together. Thus, he has both physical and moral courage in a degree rare in history. He can stand calm and unflinching in the path of a charging grizzly, and he can confront with equal coolness and determination the predaceous corporations and money powers of the country.
He unites the qualities of the man of action with those of the scholar and writer,—another very rare combination. He unites the instincts and accomplishments of the best breeding and culture with the broadest democratic sympathies and affiliations. He is as happy with a frontiersman like Seth Bullock as with a fellow Harvard man, and Seth Bullock is happy, too.