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    â€œKelly’s scouts tell me we’re following Iron Dog’s village,” Miles explained to a hastily convened officers’ meeting that night after sundown.
    â€œHow many’s the lodge, General?” Baldwin asked, using Miles’s brevet, or honorary, rank.
    â€œCould be a hundred and twenty,” the colonel replied. “Seems they’re planning to cross the Missouri, aiming to reach Fort Peck for supplies.”
    â€œMaybe we can catch them before they do,” Baldwin said, feeling optimistic despite the weather and trail conditions.
    â€œIf we don’t get to them by the time they reach Fort Peck,” Miles assured his officers, “then, by damned, we’ll get them eventually.”
    Knowing his commander wasn’t the sort to give up a chase, Baldwin rubbed his mittens together in anticipation. “Maybe when this bunch has joined back up with Sitting Bull.”
    But unlike the Sioux traveling on horseback and on foot through the falling temperatures and deepening snow, Miles found it tough going for his wagons the following day. Struggling to squeeze their way through nearly impassable ravines, climbing up and down nearly perpendicular bluffs, the column put no more than a dozen miles behind them that Sunday of driving wind and four more inches of snow. In the shelter of a Cottonwood grove the surgeon’s thermometer read twelve below that night of the twelfth.
    So cold was it with the howling wind the morning of the thirteenth that the colonel kept his men in camp to recoup both them and the stock. After sending a courier to Fort Buford to inform Colonel William B. Hazen of his movements and asking for any word on the Hunkpapa bands, Miles had his trusted Baldwin lead a battalion comprising E and H companies to comb the snowy countryside for any sign of the enemy. Frank returned empty-handed after covering more than thirteen miles of the valley. Just before sundown thetemperature climbed all the way to sixteen degrees before it began to plummet once more.
    On the following day the men struggled valiantly to make twenty-three miles, what with their wagons continually breaking through the ice caked along the bottom of the Big Dry, or bogging down in the slushy quicksand of the creek bottom. That night the soldiers made their bivouac in country beginning to change from barren coulees and ravines to gently rolling hillsides covered with waist-high autumn-cured grasses tracked with thickly timbered water courses—a clear indication they were drawing close to the Missouri River. All day they marched in sight of growing herds of buffalo, as well as hundreds upon hundreds of antelope that dashed and cavorted on both sides of the column.
    At midmorning on the fifteenth, some of Kelly’s scouts came loping back to the head of the column with word that Indians had been spotted across the river ahead. After deploying his command into a protective square around his wagons and beef herd, Miles moved out once more, soon discovering that the enemy causing all the alarm was only agency Indians across the Missouri.
    A real disappointment to Baldwin, who had yearned to have himself and his men a good fight of it after enduring the last ten days of arduous march and horrid temperatures.
    In less than a month the lieutenant would have his wish come true.
    Johnny Bruguier did not know who those soldiers camped across the river were, but soldiers were soldiers. And white men were white men.
    For the better part of two days he did his best to lay low, and when he did have to move about the Fort Peck Agency, he did so wrapped in a blanket or with a buffalo robe pulled over his head.
    Wouldn’t be smart for him to take any chances—after all, some of those white men making camp across the Missouri just might be some of the soldiers who had attacked Sitting Bull’s camp on Cedar Creek a matter of weeks ago in the Moon When Leaves Fall.
    For most of the last month