officers’ mess.  This did me no good, and I told him so.  He said he was sorry, and I answered that he was not as sorry as I was.  I then “studied on it,” as Br’r Rabbit would say, and came back with a request for eleven hundred pounds of beans for the officers’ mess.  He said, “Why, Colonel, your officers can’t eat eleven hundred pounds of beans,” to which I responded, “You don’t know what appetites my officers have.”  He then said he would send the requisition to Washington.  I told him I was quite willing, so long as he gave me the beans.  He was a good fellow, so we finally effected a working compromise—­he got the requisition and I got the beans, although he warned me that the price would probably be deducted from my salary.

Under some regulation or other only the regular supply trains were allowed to act, and we were supposed not to have any horses or mules in the regiment itself.  This was very pretty in theory; but, as a matter of fact, the supply trains were not numerous enough.  My men had a natural genius for acquiring horseflesh in odd ways, and I continually found that they had staked out in the brush various captured Spanish cavalry horses and Cuban ponies and abandoned commissary mules.  Putting these together, I would organize a small pack train and work it industriously for a day or two, until they learned about it at headquarters and confiscated it.  Then I would have to wait for a week or so until my men had accumulated some more ponies, horses, and mules, the regiment meanwhile living in plenty on what we had got before the train was confiscated.

All of our men were good at accumulating horses, but within our own ranks I think we were inclined to award the palm to our chaplain.  There was not a better man in the regiment than the chaplain, and there could not have been a better chaplain for our men.  He took care of the sick and the wounded, he never spared himself, and he did every duty.  In addition, he had a natural aptitude for acquiring mules, which made some admirer, when the regiment was disbanded, propose that we should have a special medal struck for him, with, on the obverse, “A Mule passant and Chaplain regardant.”  After the surrender of Santiago, a Philadelphia clergyman whom I knew came down to General Wheeler’s headquarters, and after visiting him announced that he intended to call on the Rough Riders, because he knew their colonel.  One of General Wheeler’s aides, Lieutenant Steele, who liked us both individually and as a regiment, and who appreciated some of our ways, asked the clergyman, after he had announced that he knew Colonel Roosevelt, “But do you know Colonel Roosevelt’s regiment?” “No,” said the clergyman.  “Very well, then, let me give you a piece of advice.  When you go down to see the Colonel, don’t let your horse out of your sight; and if the chaplain is there, don’t get off the horse!”