Calhoun’s troop was posted on the left, followed by those of Keogh, Smith, and Yates, with Tom Custer’s on the extreme right. The last three troops happened to have the best defensive position upon the highest hill. With them was Custer. The Indians attacked at once. Riding at full gallop along the front of the line on their ponies, they poured a heavy fire from their long-range rifles upon the soldiers, to which the latter made a brave, steady, but not very effective reply with their inferior carbines. Keogh’s and Calhoun’s horses were stampeded at the first fire. The force menacing them was so great that Custer dared not leave his position on the hills. To retreat was hopeless, to advance impossible. They must stand on the defensive and pray that the advance of Reno’s command up the valley, which they probably hoped that Benteen would reinforce, would compel the withdrawal of the Indians from their front. They fought on, therefore, coolly and resolutely, husbanding their ammunition and endeavoring to make every shot tell on their galloping, yelling foemen. They were, I imagine, by no means without ultimate hope of victory. The Indians in their accounts speak of the cool, deliberate courage of numbers of the officers and men, whom they singled out for their bravery. Yet the troopers suffered great loss as the afternoon wore on. Their ammunition began to run low, and the contracting, whirling circle of Indians drove them closer and closer together. The remaining horses of the other three troops were at last stampeded, and with them went all of the reserve ammunition. The situation had evidently become so serious that Custer, in the vain hope that Reno would understand his peril at last, fired the two volleys which have been referred to. It appears at this time that he must have endeavored to send a message to Reno, for the body of a solitary soldier, Sergeant Butler, was found after the battle at a point half way between Custer’s and Reno’s commands. A little heap of cartridges lay near his body, evidencing that he had sold his life dearly. The Indians were acute enough—so they say, and probably with truth—to pick out the officers with Custer, and the mortality among them was fearful. It was evident to all on the hill, as the afternoon drew toward its close, that they were doomed. It was hardly possible that a counterattack by Reno would save them now, and there were no evidences whatever that he was anywhere in the vicinity. “Where, in God’s name,” they must have asked themselves in their despair, “can Reno be?”