Half an hour the colonel spent looking over and answering private telegrams, dictating always in a clear, strong voice. When he had done he talked with the newspaper men of former experiences of the kind he had just gone through and of cranks at Sagamore Hill and at the White House. "But I never had a bullet in me before," he said. CHAPTER VI. GETS BACK INTO CAMPAIGN. October 17, convinced that he was beyond all possible danger, Col. Roosevelt resumed the active campaign from his sick room in Mercy Hospital by dictating a statement in which he requested his political opponents to continue the fight as if nothing had happened to him. The colonel awoke feeling as he expressed it, "like a bull moose." In the afternoon he overcame Mrs. Roosevelt's objections to work long enough to send for Stenographer Martin and dictate the statement that put him back into politics. Then he answered dispatches from President Taft, Cardinal Gibbons, and several other of those who had sent messages of sympathy. He carefully reread the dispatch from President Taft and dictated this reply: "I appreciate your sympathetic inquiry and wish to thank you for it." "Sign that Theodore Roosevelt," he said to Martin. To Cardinal Gibbons he sent this: "I am deeply touched by your kind words." To Woodrow Wilson: "I wish to thank you for your very warm sympathy." His statement dictated to Stenographer Martin asking the campaign to continue despite Schrank's shot was as follows: "I wish to express my cordial agreement with the manly and proper statement of Mr. Bryan at Franklin, Ind., when in arguing for a continuance of the discussion of the issues at stake in the contest he said: "'The issues of this campaign should not be determined by the act of an assassin. Neither Col. Roosevelt nor his friends should ask that the discussion should be turned away from the principles that are involved. If he is elected President it should be because of what he has done in the past and what he proposes to do hereafter.' "I wish to point out, however, that neither I nor my friends have asked that the discussion be turned away from the principles that are involved. On the contrary, we emphatically demand that the discussion be carried on precisely as if I had not been shot. I shall be sorry if Mr. Wilson does not keep on the stump and feel that he owes it to himself and to the American people to continue on the stump. "I wish to make one more comment on Mr. Bryan's statement. It is of course perfectly true that in voting for me or against me, consideration must be paid to what I have done in the past and to what I propose to do. But it seems to me far more important that consideration should be paid to what the progressive party proposes to do.