Armstrong by H. W. Crocker

Author:H. W. Crocker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Fiction

CHAPTER SIX

In Which Things Go Kaboom!

Less than twenty-four hours later, I stood in the parlor of the hotel. Miss Saint-Jean and Rachel were there to see me off. Isabel was at my side. Miss Saint-Jean wore a black felt fez with a red tassel, a sparkling black corset with red pinstripes, black silk stockings, and of course her black high-heeled shoes that could drive both nails and a hard bargain.

“When Isabel and I return,” I said to Miss Saint-Jean, “we’ll have a wagonload of new talent for you. Isabel assures me that the women on these farms are not hard and plain and best-suited to stand behind a plow, but handsome migrants from the better areas of Sweden and Norway and thereabouts. They have plenty of potential as cancan dancers.”

“Thank you, Marshal, that was my foremost thought.”

“I assumed so. As for the younger girls at the Blake homestead, they can be put to work mending, sewing, cooking, whatever you see fit. I leave them to you.”

“I had no doubt you would.”

“We’ll be back before dawn with every woman from every farm in greater Bloody Gulch, and with every girl held hostage at the Blake homestead. Goodbye, Rachel, my ward.” I gripped her shoulders and kissed her on the check. “If I don’t return, I will die gratified that I at least gave you a profession of which you can always be proud.” She looked baffled, so I added, “The theatre, dear girl, the theatre.”

“Oh, yes, thank you, General.”

I would have extended my remarks, but Rachel and Miss Saint-Jean seemed distracted, which was understandable, I suppose, given that I wore nothing but a breech clout, a yellow bandana (once a cavalryman, always a cavalryman), and my Indian medicine pouch tied with a leather thong around my neck. A black wig hid my blond locks, and mud caked my skin so that I would look and smell more like an Indian.

Isabel’s disguise was more modest. She wore a tight-fitting, knee-length, deer-skin tunic with matching moccasins, which Rachel assured us was the height of fashion with the Boyanama Sioux. She too had her blonde hair tucked up into a wig, but we refrained from covering her natural, radiant, sun-kissed skin with mud; it would have seemed, somehow, sacrilegious.

Waiting for us in the farmyard were Beauregard and Billy Jack. Beauregard had declined the breech clout option and instead disguised himself as one of the Indian bounty hunters we had met at Isabel’s farm. He wore a flat-brimmed, large-domed, black hat, black pants, and a black vest over a red and white check shirt. He had removed his eyepatch and kept it in his pocket as a good luck charm. Billy Jack, meanwhile, had ditched his bowler hat and shirt, tied his hair in two long braids, and wore a vest, dark pants, and went barefoot. Isabel was unarmed, but Beauregard, Billy Jack, and I each carried a Winchester rifle.

Our first challenge was to leave our fortified position without being spotted. By Billy Jack’s calculations,

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