mesh.triangles = short[] ?

Since Unity limits vertices to 65000, I assume internally, meshes store 16-bit unsigned ints for their index buffers. But the only way to assign it is to assign a 32-bit int array. For my terrain engine, this is wasteful, since I have a pool of index buffers I use, and I would like to half the size of it. Is there a way to assign short[]'s instead?