General Custer did not delay. He never did. Within less than a week, on the last morning of September who should come racing into the post, accompanying the ambulance from the railroad station at Hays City, but Maida and Blucher and Flirt the stag hounds, and Rover the old fox hound, and Fanny the little fox-terrier, and all the other Custer dogs; and who should spring out of the ambulance, before it had stopped at headquarters, but the general himself! There he was, with his yellow hair and his shining eyes and his quick voice and his lithe, trim figure, ready for business again.

Behind the ambulance followed, led by an orderly, the horses Phil Sheridan and Custis Lee.

From beyond the headquarters office seeing this, Ned’s heart leaped into his throat.

“Custer’s come! Custer’s come!” seemed to run through the post a glad hum. To Ned it was like a bugle-call; and he instantly resolved that where the general went, he was going too. No more clerkship duties for him; no! Suddenly he felt strong and well, ready for anything. That was how the general made everybody around him feel; he was so full of energy and enthusiasm.

Now was it positively known that General Sheridan planned a winter’s march against the Indians, to catch them in their villages while there was no grass for their ponies and they could not travel at will. Many heads were shaken, over this scheme, as being a fool-hardy one; and clear from St. Louis came out to Hays a tall, lean, leathery-faced, squint-eyed man—“old Jim Bridger” the celebrated trapper and mountaineer—expressly to tell General Sheridan that the whole command would be snowed in and lost.

But five hundred freighting wagons were busy taking supplies from Fort Harker and Fort Leavenworth to the posts south in the Arkansas River country; and with these supplies on hand, for the soldiers and the horses, and with the men well clothed, General Sheridan reasoned that the white men would do better in the winter than the red men.

“The only way to bring those Indians to terms is to give them a good thrashing. I rely on you for this, Custer,” Ned heard him say. “We’ll carry the war into the enemy’s country, when he isn’t expecting it.”

Nothing loth was General Custer; no, not “Old Curly.” He acted as happy as if he were starting out on a buffalo hunt or a ride with Mrs. Custer and the dogs. He stayed only a couple of days at Hays, for instructions and final preparations; and when out he rode, southward bound, eager to resume command of the Seventh, Ned rode with him, as his orderly again.

Fort Hays was well stripped of its scouts whom Ned knew: California Joe, Jack Stillwell, Jack Corbin, Trudell, Romeo—they were south on the Arkansas; Buffalo Bill was out with some of the Fifth Cavalry; Wild Bill was carrying dispatches on the trail: and with them gone, and with the Seventh gone, Ned had been feeling lonesome and neglected. Now all was changed: he was riding again with Custer. Hurrah!

The rendezvous of the Seventh Cavalry was on Bluff Creek, about thirty miles southeast of Fort Dodge. Fort Dodge was up the Arkansas from Fort Larned, and was of stone like Larned and Riley. General Custer paused here only to report to General Sully, commanding the district. The next day he proceeded on; and in the afternoon were sighted the familiar white army tents of the Seventh Cavalry.

What a welcome there was, as the troops turned out to receive him, and the dogs barked, and as soon as they might the officers flocked to shake his hand.

There were some new officers and many new men, for recruits had been rushed to fill the ranks to war strength. However, there were enough old friendly faces to make the camp of the Seventh feel like home to Ned; and he was almost as busy shaking hands as was the general.

“Back again, are ye?” greeted Odell, heartily.

“Yes,” grinned Ned.

“Wance more orderly, then, I take it.”

“Guess I am, for a while.”

“Well, the gen’ral sticks to those he likes, an’ to those he doesn’t like, the same. He’s got a big heart. What’s the news from Hays? Is Gen’ral Sheridan comin’, too?”

“Yes. He says the Indians are to be found and threshed.”

“B’gorry, with Phil Sheridan an’ ‘Old Curly’ workin’ together, this’ll be no paper campaign, I reckon.”

“Right you are,” agreed Sergeant Walter Kennedy—who, Ned noted, wore the chevrons of a sergeant-major. “Because they turned Sully and the rest of us back into Dodge the Injuns think they’re the bosses. But when once Sheridan and Custer get after ’em in earnest, they’ll change their minds.”

California Joe was here, in all his glory.

“Is Shuridan comin’, young feller?” he asked. “Wall, he can’t do wuss’n those other high-up gen’rals have done. But I sorter bet on Shuridan.”

“Do you know him, Joe?” queried Ned, politely.

“Do I know him, young feller? Know Shuridan? Why, bless my soul, I knowed Shuridan ’way up in Oregon more’n fifteen years ago, an’ he was only a second lootenint of infantry. Quartermaster of the foot, or somethin’ of that sort. I had a sneakin’ notion if ever they turned him loose he’d hurt somebody. Say, warn’t he old lightnin’, in the war! I tell ye!” And Joe wiped his hairy face with a piece of gunnysack that he used as a handkerchief. “I jest been app’inted by Gen’ral Custer chief o’ scouts down here; but I told him I wouldn’t serve if this was to be ary ambulance campaignin’. He said no; him an’ Shuridan was goin’ to chase the Injuns horseback, so as to ketch ’em. That hit the nail squar on the head. A column on wheels, with the wagons piled full o’ soldiers like as if they was goin’ to a town fun’ral in the States, stands ’bout as many chances of ketchin’ Injuns as a six-mule team would of ketchin’ a pack of coyotes. Why, that sort o’ thing is only fun for the Injuns.”

While waiting for instructions from General Sheridan, the Seventh Cavalry worked hard to arrive at what Odell called their “fighting weight.” Five hundred fresh horses arrived by trail from Leavenworth. The general chose for himself a lively bay which he named Dandy. The others were apportioned out, and then the troops or companies were “colored.” That is, the horses were divided by colors; so that one troop was composed of the grays, another of the blacks, another of the bays, and so forth. The junior company commander must be content with the brindles—the mixed colors left over.

Target practice was made an order of the day, for some of the recruits never had fired a gun. Forty of the best shots at all distances were formed into a company of sharpshooters, under Lieutenant “Queen’s Own” William Cook, he with the long English side-whiskers.

There were scouting expeditions, and plenty of hunting. The camp fairly lived on wild turkey and deer and elk and buffalo and rabbit and grouse. The general’s dogs chased wolves and antelope.

October wore away. Soon the Indians of the plains would be retiring into their villages, for the winter. They would eat dried buffalo meat and their horses would eat cottonwood bark and willows; and they would not expect to be interfered with. Then in the spring they would issue forth again, to ride hither-thither, three miles to the cavalry’s one.

By the reports which Scout Buffalo Bill had brought up to Fort Hays from Fort Larned, the families of the Indians had been moving southward. Therefore General Sheridan believed that the main winter villages would be found down in the Indian Territory, toward Texas. This was a wild rugged country, where white men rarely penetrated. But the Cheyennes and the Kiowas and the Comanches knew it well.

General Sully and Uncle John Smith, an old trader who had married into the Cheyennes, had located a good rendezvous place for the expedition, where, forming the North Canadian River, Wolf Creek and Beaver Creek joined, about one hundred miles south of Fort Dodge. With a huge supply train of four hundred wagons and with five companies of the Third Regular Infantry under Major John H. Page, the eleven companies of the Seventh arrived there, to wait for the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry. Governor Crawford of Kansas had resigned to be its colonel in the field; and General Sherman’s last dispatch had said that the regiment was on its way.

The camp was named Camp Supply, because the supplies were to be stored here. It is in present Woodward County, northwestern Oklahoma.