They had read again
and again of that gallant and hopeless fight, where a thousand American
cavalrymen led by Custer, the idol of the army, had attacked nine
thousand Indians, and fighting against these fearful odds had been wiped
out to the last man. In all the nation's history no one, except perhaps
Phil Sheridan and Stonewall Jackson, had so appealed to the imagination
of the country's youth as Custer, the reckless, yellow-haired leader in
a hundred fights, the hero of Cedar Creek and Waynesboro and Five Forks,
the Chevalier Bayard of modern times, "without fear and without
reproach," who met his death at last as he would have wished to meet it,
in that mad glorious dash that has made his name immortal, going down as
he had lived with his face to the foe. To these ardent young patriots the
place was holy ground, and their pulses leaped and their hearts swelled
as Melton pointed out the features of the field and narrated some of the
incidents of that awful, but magnificent, fight. It was with intense
reluctance that, warned by the gathering shadows, they tore themselves
away.
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