When morning dawned the Sioux opened fire, and the day which followed was one of fevered sorties and galling waiting. On the stronghold that day Reno’s men lost eighteen killed and had fifty-two wounded, and they spent a second anxious night. But on the morning of June 27th General Terry raised the siege and rode into camp. Terry, in his journey, had come across more than a hundred dead, and that an awful tragedy had been enacted he knew. But he did not know the full extent of the slaughter. On the 28th the army marched to the battle-field of the Little Big Horn. Scattered on the slope of the hill they found 212 dead. General Custer, his brother--Captain T. W. Custer--Captains Keogh and Yates, Lieutenants Cook, Crittenden, Reily, Calhoun, Smith, and other officers of their men were found, each scalped and mutilated except Custer himself. He lay apparently as he had fallen, the Indians refraining from wreaking vengeance on the leader, who was well known to “Sitting Bull” and others of the chiefs. The bodies of Lieutenants Porter, Harrington, and Sturgis, and Dr. Lord, were never found. The killed of the entire command was 265, and the slaying of Custer and his men was the crimson spot of the first Centennial Year of the United States. It is also rendered memorable as being the last great victory the Red man achieved over the White in the fight for the American continent. For as though frightened at the thoroughness of their victory, and fearing as harsh a retribution, the followers of “Sitting Bull” afterwards flitted from place to place, refusing to join issues with the armies sent to catch them, and gradually melted away, breaking up into small bands, or returning to the agencies from which they had surreptitiously marched but a few weeks before. The great armies which, immediately the news of Custer’s massacre reached Washington, were sent to trap the Indians, marched up and down the Bad Lands; but in all their marching and countermarchings were never able to find an Indian to fight. [Illustration] [Illustration: WELLINGTON WATERLOO BY D.H. PARRY NAPOLEON] The great Imperial Eagle of France had been caught and caged at Elba, and after close on twenty-five years of storm and tumult, Europe was at peace. The armies which had driven the Eagle out of France had marched home again, robbing the Eagle’s nest of many ill-gotten trophies and leaving in his place a horde of vultures who claimed the nest as theirs.