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stayed behind.
    Having been raised by his mother on the Standing Rock, Bruguier thirsted to see this Fort Peck, to hear the familiar sounds, smell the familiar fragrances, maybe cure a little of his own homesickness. For more than a week now he had stayed among the agency Indians, neglecting to return to Sitting Bull’s camp, eating and talking, singing and flirting with the young doe-eyed women.
    For many years the place had been a fur-trading post before becoming the agency for the Yanktonais, Gros Ventre,Assiniboine, and any assorted Lakota bands who wandered about in search of buffalo north of the Yellowstone in Missouri River country. Rough-hewn log cabins stood fortresslike on the riverbank, themselves shadowed by the bluffs towering more than a hundred feet over the stockade walls. Mitchell provided annuities for more than seven thousand Indians, not to mention the recent additions who were scattering to the four winds, fleeing the soldiers in this year of the Great Sioux War.
    Curious, Johnny watched the arriving soldiers work from dawn to dusk that Wednesday and Thursday snaking their supplies to their bivouac on the south bank using a rope and baskets suspended from a system of pulleys because the river ice was not yet thick enough to support the weight of loaded wagons. Then on Friday the white men continued their labors as a small band of riders came down to the bank to cautiously cross the Missouri’s frozen surface.
    The closer the soldiers came to the stockade, the more certain Bruguier grew that he had seen some of those bearded fur-wrapped white men during those Cedar Creek parleys. * Especially the long-haired white scout, those two dark-skinned half-breeds who rode with him, and that tall soldier chief now known among the Lakota as the “Bear Coat.” Johnny snorted, readily recalling just how angry the soldier chief had become during the inconclusive, roundabout talks with Sitting Bull and the other Lakota headmen.
    At least the Bear Coat was true to his word, Johnny brooded. The soldier chief had promised the Sioux they would get no rest. He had promised he would make war on them again soon if they did not go in to their reservations, even if it meant fighting through the coming winter.
    Bruguier adjusted the blanket over his head and watched the soldiers approach from the shadows he made over his face. As the group ascended the icy riverbank and approached the stockade’s open gates, the long-haired scout gazed in Johnny’s direction. Then looked away. And then glanced again. But the white man did not stop as the horsemen passed on by. Instead, it looked as if the long-haired one murmured something to the two half-breeds who rode on either side of him.
    Johnny waited for the riders to enter the gate before he turned to follow, keeping to the shadows as the wind kicked up the old snow around his wool leggings. He stopped, hugging the stockade wall as the soldiers dismounted. Then his belly flopped. Bruguier grew frightened as the long-haired scout handed his reins over to one of the soldiers and stepped up to Bear Coat, saying something as he nodded toward Johnny.
    The soldier chief turned slowly, raising a hand to shade his eyes, and peered at the gate they had just entered. He said something to the scout, and together the two of them started in Bruguier’s direction.
    With his heart rising in his throat, Johnny’s eyes flicked this way, then that—not certain where he could go or how he would escape.
    Now the rest of the soldiers in the group were following the Bear Coat, their hands on their belt weapons. If Johnny tried to run, it was certain one of them would shoot.
    Perhaps that fate was better than hanging at the end of a rope for killing a worthless white man.
    As Bruguier was slipping his hand inside the blanket, wrapping his fingers around the butt of the big army pistol he had stuffed into his belt, the soldier chief said something to the scout.
    Gesturing, the