“You should see some of the broncho busting that has been going on daily in camp;--the most surprising horsemanship, and though it cost about a man a day at first, knocked clean out, the busted-rate is now diminishing. The men, as you can imagine, are well satisfied with their commanders; Theodore has a great hold on them, and before long he will be able to do anything he likes with them. The Army officers said they had never seen such a body of men. One of the troops from Arizona came almost entirely from one large ranch; they all know each other and will fight shoulder to shoulder. Our own troop--‘K’ was rather a gay affair at first, a little gang of Fifth Avenue ‘Dudes’ having constituted themselves as leaders before Theodore arrived, but now it has a large number of first rate cow-punchers and sheriffs drafted into it, and has been increased one-third beyond its normal strength. We are more or less intelligent, and are looked to as the possible crack troop.” It is interesting to look back and remember that that Company “K” was indeed a “crack troop,” and the writer of the above lines became one of its most gallant officers. What a body of men they were! The romance of mediæval days was reborn in that regiment, and the strange part of it all was that they had so much of chivalry about them, in spite of the roughness of the cowboys, in spite of the madness of the bronco-busters, in spite, perhaps, of another type of madness injected into the regiment by the Fifth Avenue “Dudes”; still, that body of men, as a whole, stood out for gallantry and courage, and gentleness of spirit wherever gentleness of spirit was needed in the hard days to come. There was a poem written at that time, “The Yankee Dude’ll Do,” and I remember the little thrill with which I read it, realizing how the names that up to that time had been connected with rather gay and useless lives became bywords for hard, persistent work “to make” good in the various companies. Theodore himself writes to me on June 7 in camp near Tampa, Florida: “First Regiment, U. S. Volunteer Cavalry.