It is difficult for me to withstand the temptation to tell what has befallen some of my men since the regiment disbanded; how McGinty, after spending some weeks in Roosevelt Hospital in New York with an attack of fever, determined to call upon his captain, Woodbury Kane, when he got out, and procuring a horse rode until he found Kane’s house, when he hitched the horse to a lamp-post and strolled in; how Cherokee Bill married a wife in Hoboken, and as that pleasant city ultimately proved an uncongenial field for his activities, how I had to send both himself and his wife out to the Territory; how Happy Jack, haunted by visions of the social methods obtaining in the best saloons of Arizona, applied for the position of “bouncer out” at the Executive Chamber when I was elected Governor, and how I got him a job at railroading instead, and finally had to ship him back to his own Territory also; how a valued friend from a cow ranch in the remote West accepted a pressing invitation to spend a few days at the home of another ex-trooper, a New Yorker of fastidious instincts, and arrived with an umbrella as his only baggage; how poor Holderman and Pollock both died and were buried with military honors, all of Pollock’s tribesmen coming to the burial; how Tom Isbell joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and how, on the other hand, George Rowland scornfully refused to remain in the East at all, writing to a gallant young New Yorker who had been his bunkie:  “Well, old boy, I am glad I didn’t go home with you for them people to look at, because I ain’t a Buffalo or a rhinoceros or a giraffe, and I don’t like to be stared at, and you know we didn’t do no hard fighting down there.  I have been in closer places than that right here in United States, that is better men to fight than them dam Spaniards.”  In another letter Rowland tells of the fate of Tom Darnell, the rider, he who rode the sorrel horse of the Third Cavalry:  “There ain’t much news to write of except poor old Tom Darnell got killed about a month ago.  Tom and another fellow had a fight and he shot Tom through the heart and Tom was dead when he hit the floor.  Tom was sure a good old boy, and I sure hated to hear of him going, and he had plenty of grit too.  No man ever called on him for a fight that he didn’t get it.”

My men were children of the dragon’s blood, and if they had no outland foe to fight and no outlet for their vigorous and daring energy, there was always the chance of their fighting one another:  but the great majority, if given the chance to do hard or dangerous work, availed themselves of it with the utmost eagerness, and though fever sickened and weakened them so that many died from it during the few months following their return, yet, as a whole, they are now doing fairly well.  A few have shot other men or been shot themselves; a few ran for office and got elected, like Llewellen and Luna in New Mexico, or defeated, like Brodie and Wilcox in Arizona; some have been trying hard to get to the Philippines; some have returned to college, or to the law, or the factory, or the counting-room; most of them have gone back to the mine, the ranch, and the hunting camp; and the great majority have taken up the threads of their lives where they dropped them when the Maine was blown up and the country called to arms.