So Ned, understanding that it was the custom, evidently, to obey whatever the man with the yellow hair directed, gingerly lifted the fragment of dirty blanket, and approached the bugler’s stirrup. With one foot upon it, and the trooper hauling him stoutly, he right soon was seated before the low pommel, where he tucked the blanketing around his legs.
“Ready?” queried the bugler. “Here we go, and you’d better hang tight, for the general won’t wait. That hoss o’ his is a tarrer.”
“The general? Is he a general! He said he was colonel,” stammered Ned, perplexed, as following the man with the yellow hair away they went, at jolting trot which speedily broke into a smoother gallop.
“Who? General Custer? Sure, he’s left’nant-colonel o’ regulars, commandin’ the Sivinth Cavalry; but he was brigadier-general and brevet major-general o’ the volunteers in the war, and the youngest one in the whole army, too. Yes, and it’s brevet o’ major-general o’ regulars he’s just been given. So ‘general’ he’s to be called, and don’t you forget it.”
“General Custer! Oh, I know General Custer! He was the ‘boy general’!” exclaimed Ned, excited. “My father knew him, I mean. He was my father’s general. Now I remember. I didn’t think, at first.”
“Well, he’s a good soldier and a fine man,” commented the bugler, succinctly; “and of the Sivinth Cavalry he’s goin’ to make a regiment, or I’m much mistaken.”
The carcass of the dead buffalo bull had been left behind. The prairie before was free of other buffalo, for all the great fleeing herd had vanished. General Custer, riding superbly, his crimson tie ends and his yellow hair streaming together, his dogs panting on either side and at his heels, was rapidly increasing his lead; his young horse was a racer and a thoroughbred, and the trooper’s horse was heavy and ordinary. Clinging tight to the mane with his hands and to the saddle-flaps with his shins, Ned, secure and not a whit afraid (he had ridden bare-legged and bare-back too often, with the Indians) enjoyed the gallop, but wished that they might be nearer to “the general.”
Black specks, moving about over the surface of the prairie, appeared before. The general slackened pace, and as the bugler and Ned approached he ordered, over his shoulder:
“Sound the rally.”
Bugler Odell attempted to salute, to pull his horse down to a trot, and to raise his bugle to his mouth—all in a moment. But the horse shook its head and champed and tugged, and the bugle, swinging between the man rider and the boy rider, wedged fast. Odell muttered several angry, chagrined remarks.