Though St. Louis was a Union city by a very substantial majority there nevertheless existed there a strong though suppressed Southern sentiment; but Al was even less inclined to be influenced by it than his father would have been, or than he would have been himself before his father's death. The reason was that public opinion in the North and West at this time held that the outbreak of the Indians in Minnesota had been instigated and encouraged by agents from the Southern Confederacy, who hoped, by precipitating an Indian war upon the Northwest, not only to divert a good many Union troops from the South but even possibly to effect a Confederate conquest of the Northwestern Territories. Happily for the fair fame of American civilization, it has in later years been quite clearly established that the Confederates had nothing to do with inciting the barbarous outbreak, but at the time it was firmly believed in the Northwest. Therefore it seems but natural that a person in Al's position, grieving for a father murdered and a brother carried away captive by the red fiends, should entertain bitterness toward those whom he believed to be largely responsible for his bereavement. This feeling but added to his interest in the military preparations of those who were going to fight the Southerners, and increased his desire to be a partaker in their toils and trials and triumphs. When he found an opportunity to do so, as he did on Sunday afternoons and his other infrequent holidays, he occasionally went down to the river front where were to be seen the big transport steamers, starting out loaded to the guards with troops or coming in with cargoes of sick and wounded men, and where, also, were generally to be found one or more of the pugnacious-looking iron-clad gunboats which had been and still were fighting their way foot by foot down the battery-lined rivers of the South, carrying the flag of the Union into regions where it had been outcast for two years past. But more frequently his steps turned toward Benton Barracks, for there on the great parade ground between the huge barracks, each seven hundred and fifty feet in length, were always to be found swarms of troops at drill. Here he would see a squad of four or eight recruits receiving from a corporal instructions in the rudiments of tactics, such as the salutes, the facings, or the manual of arms. A little further on would be a regiment executing ponderous evolutions in company or battalion front.