The soldier nodded, saluted, and dashed off through the deep snow that swirled up in cascades around his knees.
Now not only did he have the Hunkpapa hostiles to worry about on his front, but he had these Yanktonais to worry about at his rear. Although they were considered friendly upriver at their agency, he wasn’t about to gamble that the red bastards wouldn’t leap at this chance to help out their distant relatives.
“Damn!” he muttered under his breath.
He had been surprised, a third of his men caught in the open on the frozen Missouri, with no telling just how many were facing him and no telling how many ready to jump his rear.
Jesus! What a dilemma.
If he pursued, he had only two companies to engage the hostiles, because one company had to watch their rear for the Yanktonais.
And if he countercharged and forced his way across the frozen Missouri, engaging the hostiles in close quarters … what if it turned out he had bitten off more than his three companies could chew? After all, he remembered suddenly, there had been rumors at Fort Peck that Sitting Bull now had close to two hundred lodges gathered around him once more—which made for some six hundred warriors.
After he had limped away from the Yellowstone with no more than thirty lodges only a month ago!
The firing was growing steadily heavier on his front. The Sioux were again attempting another sweep across the Missouri on his left flank, but I Company was holding strong. For how long, no man could say right then.
What if he pushed back and got his men over to that south bank, then got them pinned down and the river ice broke up again? His battalion would be cut off from their supply base at Fort Peck—burdened with their wounded and hamstrung by a limited supply of ammunition. It could be a Little Bighorn all over again.
“Holy Mary, Mother of Grace.”
Baldwin listened to a nearby soldier from Lyman’s I Company begin reciting his rosary. And then Frank knew what he had to do.
He had no choice but to retreat.
The very word caught in his throat the way a chicken bone might get stuck in a dog’s gullet.
He turned and looked upstream, then down. And once he had spotted the right place, he remembered that his duty lay not just to his commander; he was the sort of soldier who knew his duty rested with his men.
He could hear them cry out in fear or frustration, hear the old files curse, doing what they could to buck up the shavetails as the bullets whistled in among them. Frank owed these men more than to let them get chewed up like Custer’s bunch.
“Withdraw!” he suddenly bellowed, whipping his horse around and shouting it again.
Many of the men turned around to look at Baldwin, surprised.
Pointing downriver, he gave his order. “To the high ground!”
“The high ground!” a sergeant repeated somewhere upstream on the right flank. “You heard the lieutenant —now, get your ever-living arses humping for the high-by-God ground!”
By some favor of fate’s fickle hand, Baldwin’s battalion made it to that thumb of high bluff on the north bank, fighting their way through the thick, leafless brush as much as they fought a rear-guard action against the warriors who dared venture out on the ice and those who kept up a continuous barrage from the far bank.
At the top the lieutenant spun around on those first few who followed him. “Breastworks!”
That one-word order was immediately taken up by other officers, the sergeants directing their men to drag what logs, deadfall, and river trash they could get up the icy slope behind them. In less than twenty minutes they had themselves a substantial barrier that would stop many of the Sioux bullets.
Yet as good as that accomplishment made him feel, Baldwin took a good look at his men. They had now gone more than twenty-four hours without sleep, without much rest to speak of. And their march hadn’t been a country walk, either. If these men had been on their feet, they had been moving, and moving meant struggling through snow anywhere from their ankles all the way up to their knees.
No two ways about it—this battalion that had jumped the rear guard of Sitting Bull’s fleeing village was at the end of its string: no sleep nor food in more than a day. There seemed to be no end to the torture as the temperature continued to drop.
“Gentlemen,” Frank quietly instructed his fellow officers as they gathered about him, most kneeling wearily on one knee, “rotate the men in your companies. Put half at picket duty at the breastworks. Relieve the others for an hour to build fires and eat what they still have along in their haversacks.”
“Thank God!” Lieutenant Hinkle gushed in a whisper. Then his eyes found Baldwin’s, and there was a smile where before there had been only despair.
“Yes,” Frank croaked, his voice cracking with emotion. The wind burned his eyes, making them water. “Thank God we got here when we did, gentlemen. If the men wish to sleep during their hour at ease, they can do so—but in an hour we rotate to allow our pickets to have a chance at the warmth of the fires, and something hot in their bellies.”
“A little sleep,” said Lieutenant Rousseau, “some coffee, and a hot fire. Why, there ain’t nothing can go wrong now, sir!”
Throughout the rest of that morning and into the afternoon the Sioux ventured forth from time to time to try the stalwart soldiers in their riverbank fortress. Most times the warriors scampered back out of range whenever a platoon here or there fired a volley, scattering the enemy like a covey of flushed quail. It was cold work, lying there in the snow, hunkered down behind the cottonwood deadfall, watching the icy river and that far bank, shivering with one’s rifle cradled between one’s arms—teeth chattering uncontrollably as the thermometer continued to slide past zero.
Then, at midafternoon, the worst that could happen loomed on the lowering western horizon. For long minutes the soldiers watched the dark front race closer and closer as the sky seemed to drop visibly with that incoming wave of grayish-white clouds. The first flakes they spat were icy, like shards of splintered glass hurled against the men, stinging their faces and flesh as they hunkered down in the collars of their wool coats, making themselves as small as they could behind the breastworks walls as the wind gave its call.
In the space of twenty minutes a prairie blizzard suddenly howled about them.
Should a man find he could stand to open his eyes in that gale of icy splinters, he discovered his visibility cut to less than ten feet, if that far. Frosty, frozen snow built up layer by layer on the western side of their fortress, thickly crusting the windward side of every hat, face, and coat until it looked as if Baldwin’s battalion had been given half a coating of whitewash.
By the time Frank stared down at the face of the turnip pocket watch trembling in his mitten—seeing the hands closing on five o’clock in the waning daylight—he finally realized it had been more than half an hour since the Sioux had last fired at his position.
“Companies, report your status!” he cried out against the wailing of the rising gusts, turning his back to the wind that shouldered him this way, then that.
“I Company, left flank, Lieutenant,” Lyman’s voice cried out downstream. “No sign of the enemy from here!”
“Company G,” came the call from Rousseau near the center of their breastworks. “No firing on our position, Lieutenant!”
“H Company, sir!” Hinkle’s voice sang out from Frank’s right as Baldwin turned slowly into the wind now, the better to hear the report. “Not a goddamned redskin in sight.”
Then an old sergeant hollered from among H Company’s soldiers, “And we ain’t seen one of them bastards on the far bank in over a hour—pardon my French, sir!”
“You’re damn well excused, Sergeant!” Baldwin declared. “Officers’ call! Officers’ call!”
They came out of the swirling, brutally icy mist to surround him like half-white, half-woolen ghosts, shivering and stamping, slapping their arms around themselves, most faces no more than a pair of eyes peeking out from above a wool muffler.
With one of his muskrat gauntlets Baldwin pulled down his thick scarf so he could speak again. “Gentlemen— I’m of the mind that the Hunkpapa are no longer a threat should we elect to retreat from our breastworks.”
“W-where to, Lieutenant?” Hinkle asked plaintively.
“Only one place to go, men.”
Rousseau inquired, “Back to Fort Peck?”
