Do you blanch at their fate? (Who would hesitate?) Two hundred and sixty-two Immortals in blue, Standing shoulder to shoulder, Like some granite boulder You must blast to displace-- (Were they of a valiant race?) Two hundred and sixty-two, And never a man to say, “I rode with Custer that day.” Give the savage his triumph and bluster, Give the hero to perish with Custer, To his God and his comrades true. Closing and closing, Nearer the redskins creep; With cunning disposing, With yell and with whoop, (There are women shall weep!) They gather and swoop, They come like a flood, Maddened with blood, They shriek, plying the knife, (Was there one begged for his life?) Where but a moment ago Stood serried and sternly the foe, Now fallen, mangled below. Down the Little Big Horn, (Tramp of hoof, champ of the bit,) A single steed in the morn, Comanche, seven times hit, Comes to the river to drink; Lists for the sabre’s clink, Lists for the voice of his master, (O glorious disaster!) Comes, sniffing the air, Gazing, lifts his head, But his master lies dead, (Who but the dead were there?) But stay, what was the muster? Two hundred and sixty-two (Two thousand and more the Sioux!) Went into the fight with Custer, Went out of the fight with Custer; For never a man can say, “I rode with Custer that day--” Went out like a taper, Blown by a sudden vapor, Went out at a breath, True to the death! FRANCIS BROOKS. (By special permission of Dr. Almon Brooks.) 48 THE BOND OF BLOOD The words of a rebel old and battered, Who will care to remember them? Under the Lost Flag, battle-tattered, I was a comrade of Allan Memm. Who was Allan, that I should name him Bravest of all the brave who bled? Why should a soldier’s song proclaim him First of a hundred thousand dead? An angel of battle, with fair hair curling By brown cheeks shrunken and wan with want; A living missile that Lee was hurling Straight on the iron front of Grant; A war-child born of the Old South’s passion, Trained in the camp of the cavaliers; A spirit wrought in the antique fashion Of Glory’s martial morning years. His young wife’s laugh and his baby’s prattle He bore through the roar of the hungry guns-- Through the yell of shell in the rage of battle, And the moan that under the thunder runs. His was the voice that cried the warning At the shattered gate of the slaughter-pen, When Hancock rushed in the gray of morning Over our doomed and desperate men. His was the hand that held the standard-- A flaring torch on a crumbling shore-- ’Mid the billows of blue by the storm blown landward, And his call we heard through the ocean roar: