Generals Crook, Merritt, and Carr were in rough hunting rigs, utterly without any mark of their rank.  Deerskin, buckskin, corduroy, canvas, and rags indiscriminately covered the rest of the command, so that unless you knew the men it was totally impossible to distinguish between officers and enlisted men.  However, every one in the commands knew every one else, and there was no confusion.

A great part of that night was spent in swapping stories of recent experiences.  All of them were thrilling, even to veteran campaigners fresh from the trail.  There was no need of drawing the long bow in those days.  The truth was plenty exciting enough to suit the most exacting, and we sat about like schoolboys, drinking in each other’s tales, and telling our own in exchange.

A story of a personal adventure and a hairbreadth escape in which Lieutenant De Rudio figured was so typical of the fighting days of the West that I want my readers to know it.  I shall tell it, as nearly as I can, just as it came to me around the flickering fire in that picturesque border camp.

De Rudio had just returned from his adventure, and he told it to us between puffs of his pipe so realistically that I caught several of my old friends of the Plains peering about into the darkness as if to make sure that no lurking redskins were creeping up on them.

In the fight of a few days before De Rudio was guarding a pony crossing with eight men when one of them sang out: 

“Lieutenant, get your horse, quick.  Reno (the commander of the outfit) is retreating!” No trumpet had sounded, however, and no orders had been given, so the lieutenant hesitated to retire.  His men left in a hurry, but he remained, quietly waiting for the call.

Presently, looking behind him, he saw thirty or forty Indians coming full gallop.  He wheeled and started to get into safer quarters.  As lie did so they cut loose with a volley.  He leaned low on his horse as they shot, and the bullets sang harmlessly over his head.

Before him was a fringe of thick underbrush along the river, and into this he forced his unwilling horse.  The bullets followed and clipped the twigs about him like scissors.  At last he gained the creek, forded, and mounted the bank on the other side.  Here, instead of safety, he found hundreds of Indians, all busily shooting at the soldiers, who were retreating discreetly in the face of a greatly superior force.  He was entirely cut off from retreat, unless he chose to make a bold dash for his life right through the middle of the Indians.  This he was about to do, when a young Indian, who had observed him, sent a shot after him, and his horse fell dead under him, rolling over and over, while he managed to scramble to his feet.

The shot had attracted the attention of all the Indians in that immediate neighborhood, and there were plenty of them there for all offensive purposes.  De Rudio jumped down the creek bank and hid in an excavation while a hail of bullets spattered the water ahead of him and raised a dozen little clouds of dust at his feet.