He told off his fours and ordered the horses sent to the rear.
The fours led their horses back toward where they had left their packmules when they had stopped for coffee at three o’clock.
But the fours had not gone half a mile when they were surrounded by a mob of Indians that just closed in on them. Every man was killed—the horses were galloped off by the women and children.
Custer now realized that he was caught in a trap. The ridge where his men lay face down was half a mile long, and not more than twenty feet across at the top. The Indians were everywhere—in the gullies, in the grass, in little scooped-out holes. The bullets whizzed above the heads of Custer’s men as they lay there, flattening their bodies in the dust.
The morning sun came out, dazzling and hot.
It was only nine o’clock.
The men were without food and without water. The Little Big Horn danced over its rocky bed and shimmered in the golden light, only half a mile away, and there in the cool, limpid stream they had been confident they would now swim and fish, the battle over, while they proudly held the disarmed Indians against General Terry’s coming.
But the fight had not been won, and death lay between them and water. The only thing to do was to await Reno or Terry. Reno might come at any time, and Terry would arrive without fail at tomorrow’s dawn—he had said so, and his word was the word of a soldier.
Custer had blundered.
The fight was lost.