In one of Mrs. Custer’s letters to me, narrating what took place during the days of preparation for the General’s departure, she wrote: “A day before the expedition started, General Terry was in our house alone with Autie (the General’s pet name). A.’s thoughts were calm, deliberate, and solemn. He had been terribly hurt in Washington. General Terry had applied for him to command the expedition. He was returned to his regiment because General Terry had applied for him. I know that he (Custer) felt tenderly and affectionately toward him. On that day he hunted me out in the house and brought me into the living-room, not telling me why. He shut the door, and very seriously and impressively said: ‘General Terry, a man usually means what he says when he brings his wife to listen to his statements. I want to say that reports are circulating that I do not want to go out to the campaign under you.’ (I supposed that he meant, having been given the command before, he was unwilling to be a subordinate.) ‘But I want you to know that I do want to go and serve under you, not only that I value you as a soldier, but as a friend and a man.’ The exact words were the strongest kind of a declaration that he wished him to know he wanted to serve under him.” That was Custer all over. And to any one who knew him—to any one who can form a reasonable conception of the kind of a man he must needs have been to have done for eighteen years what he had done and as he had done it, and won the place and fame he had won—that statement ends debate. Whatever of chagrin, disappointment, or irritation he may have felt before, however unadvisedly the sore-hearted, high-spirited man may have spoken with his lips when all was undetermined, and his part and responsibility had not been assigned, this true soldier, knowing the gossip of the camp, conscious possibly it was not wholly without cause, however exaggerated, but facing now his known duty and touched by the confidence of his superior as Custer never failed to be touched, could not part from his commander with a possible shadow resting between them. He knew the speech of men might have carried to Terry’s mind the suggestion of a doubt. And yet Terry had trusted him. He could not bear to part without letting General Terry know that he was right to trust him. That statement to Terry was a recognition of whatever folly of words he might before have committed in his grief and anger; it was an open purging of an upright soldier’s soul as an act honorably due alike to superior and subordinate; it was, under the circumstances, the instinctive response of a true man to the confidence of one who had committed to him a trust involving the honor and fame of both. Disobedience, whether basely premeditated, or with equal baseness undertaken upon after-deliberation, is inconceivable, unless one