54 The Rough Riders 



practically all the older men had served in the Con- 

 federate Army, and where the younger men had all 

 their lives long drunk in the endless tales told by 

 their elders, at home, and at the cross-roads taverns, 

 and in the court-house squares, about the cavalry 

 of Forrest and Morgan and the infantry of Jackson 

 and Hood. The blood of the old men stirred to the 

 distant breath of battle; the blood of the young 

 men leaped hot with eager desire to accompany us. 

 The older women, who remembered the dreadful 

 misery of war the misery that presses its iron 

 weight most heavily on the wives and the little ones 

 looked sadly at us ; but the young girls drove down 

 in bevies, arrayed in their finery, to wave flags 

 in farewell to the troopers and to beg cartridges and 

 buttons as mementos. Everywhere we saw the Stars 

 and Stripes, and everywhere we were told, half- 

 laughing, by grizzled ex-Confederates that they had 

 never dreamed in the bygone days of bitterness to 

 greet the old flag as they now were greeting it, and 

 to send their sons, as now they were sending them, 

 to fight and die under it. 



It was four days later that we disembarked, in a 

 perfect welter of confusion. Tampa lay in the pine- 

 covered sand-flats at the end of a one-track railroad, 

 and everything connected with both military and 

 railroad matters was in an almost inextricable tangle. 

 There was no one to meet us or to tell us where we 



