On another tour, when I was running for Vice-President, a member of the regiment who was along on the train got into a discussion with a Populist editor who had expressed an unfavorable estimate of my character, and in the course of the discussion shot the editor—­not fatally.  We had to leave him to be tried, and as he had no money I left him $150 to hire counsel—­having borrowed the money from Senator Wolcott, of Colorado, who was also with me.  After election I received from my friend a letter running:  “Dear Colonel:  I find I will not have to use that $150 you lent me, as we have elected our candidate for District Attorney.  So I have used it to settle a horse transaction in which I unfortunately became involved.”  A few weeks later, however, I received a heartbroken letter setting forth the fact that the District Attorney—­whom he evidently felt to be a cold-blooded formalist—­had put him in jail.  Then the affair dropped out of sight until two or three years later, when as President I visited a town in another State, and the leaders of the delegation which received me included both my correspondent and the editor, now fast friends, and both of them ardent supporters of mine.

At one of the regimental reunions a man, who had been an excellent soldier, in greeting me mentioned how glad he was that the judge had let him out in time to get to the reunion.  I asked what was the matter, and he replied with some surprise:  “Why, Colonel, don’t you know I had a difficulty with a gentleman, and . . . er . . . well, I killed the gentleman.  But you can see that the judge thought it was all right or he wouldn’t have let me go.”  Waiving the latter point, I said:  “How did it happen?  How did you do it?” Misinterpreting my question as showing an interest only in the technique of the performance, the ex-puncher replied:  “With a .38 on a .45 frame, Colonel.”  I chuckled over the answer, and it became proverbial with my family and some of my friends, including Seth Bullock.  When I was shot at Milwaukee, Seth Bullock wired an inquiry to which I responded that it was all right, that the weapon was merely “a .38 on a .45 frame.”  The telegram in some way became public, and puzzled outsiders.  By the way, both the men of my regiment and the friends I had made in the old days in the West were themselves a little puzzled at the interest shown in my making my speech after being shot.  This was what they expected, what they accepted as the right thing for a man to do under the circumstances, a thing the non-performance of which would have been discreditable rather than the performance being creditable.  They would not have expected a man to leave a battle, for instance, because of being wounded in such fashion; and they saw no reason why he should abandon a less important and less risky duty.