With flags and guidons flaunting proudly in the breeze, the sunlight dancing on sabre scabbards and carbine barrels, men cheering and horses prancing under the impulse of excitement on all sides of the great martial square, the army rolled forward across the swelling, verdant hills, a huge living engine of destruction moving onward to crush, or to be crushed by, the barbaric host in its front. Al, riding in the centre, behind the General, looked around him with flashing eyes, for never before had he viewed so inspiring and majestic a scene. It was, in fact, by far the largest and best appointed army which ever went into battle against the hordes of the great Sioux Nation, not even excepting the columns that followed Terry and Crook and Gibbon twelve years later when, in 1876, the gallant Custer and five troops of the Seventh United States Cavalry lost their lives in the battle of the Little Big Horn. More than twenty-two hundred men were in battle formation on that twenty-eighth day of July, 1864. As Wallace Smith exclaimed to Al, riding along beside him, "By George, Al, isn't this a sight worth seeing and worth remembering, too? I'm glad I'm here." "See!" cried Al, too startled to reply, suddenly pointing ahead. "There they are!" Over the crest of a hill which the skirmish line was ascending, a dense, confused mass of mounted warriors came pouring like a torrent. Farther and farther to the right and left its flanks spread with lightning rapidity, breaking over the hill as an ocean roller curls and breaks upon a beach; farther and farther, till it stretched far beyond the utmost extremes of the line of battle. The hundreds of ponies were running at topmost speed, heads down and necks outstretched, the ground shaking beneath their thundering hoof-beats; the hundreds of warriors were brandishing guns and revolvers and plumed lances above their heads, their many-colored war bonnets streaming behind them in the hurricane of the charge, their voices upraised in a tempest of terrific, blood-curdling yells. So the savage host came on, straight for the thin thread of skirmishers and the solid line of battle behind it, as if they would sweep over them both and engulf the whole army at once in utter destruction. It seemed that nothing could stand before them, and they towered above the skirmish line like a wall. Wallace clutched Al's arm, exclaiming, hoarsely, "My God, what will the skirmishers do?" "Watch them! Watch them!" answered Al, his whole mind centred on the impending collision.