Armstrong

by H. W. Crocker

  Amidst all this activity, my mind was constantly at work on an audacious military stratagem, and one night, after Miss Saint-Jean’s rehearsal, I stayed behind in the saloon, stein of Alderney in hand, and asked Beauregard to abide with me.

  “Major, you’ve done a tremendous job fortifying the town; now we go on the offensive.”

  “Abducting Larsen?”

  “Think bigger and bolder, Major—more Moses than Mosby.”

  “Well, Yankee General, sir, I count myself a religious man—but what the Sam Hill are you talking about?”

  “We can capture Larsen later. We have a more urgent, pressing need. We need to increase our manpower, Major. That’s our biggest weakness. It’s not so much that we’re surrounded, it’s that we have so few men.”

  “So, you want me to go recruiting?”

  “No, Major, I intend to dismantle Larsen’s empire through a series of lightning raids. We’re going to liberate the men, women, and children of greater Bloody Gulch and bring them here. The women and children we’ll keep safe. The men we’ll enlist.”

  “Well, Yankee General, sir, it would be daring to infiltrate the enemy and seize Larsen. But liberating the farms, mine, and foundry, and bringing those people here—that’s a different order of magnitude.”

  “It’s important to think big, Major.”

  “Each of those positions is guarded, sir . . .”

  “No more so than the Trading Post.”

  “. . . and even if we achieved this miracle, our supply situation would be untenable.”

  “Major, never let logistics deter audacity. The men we liberate will give us an army equal to Larsen. We won’t have to endure a siege. We’ll break out.”

  “Begging, your pardon, Yankee General, sir, but assuming we take one objective at a time, how do we keep our sole advantage?”

  “You mean me?”

  “I was thinking of surprise, sir.”

  “And so was I. We will operate incognito, Major, just as you suggested. Indians patrol between the farms, don’t they?”

  “Such was my reconnaissance, sir.”

  “Then we will be a small detachment of Indians going from one farm to the next. We’ll take our objectives in stages—starting with the women.”

  “I believe you said, sir, that our chief need was manpower.”

  “Indeed, Major, but never forget—duty before necessity.”

  “I’ll remember that, sir.”

  I pulled the plans I had sketched from my pocket. The most important document was a map I had drawn—not to scale and not including terrain, but it neatly depicted the general idea. In an arc above the town I had written, “Farms with Women.” I had our position marked by two adjacent rectangles labeled “Saloon” and “Hotel” and two small adjacent squares labeled “Church (defunct)” and “School (defunct).” From the rear of the rectangle labeled “Hotel” I neatly marked a path with dashes to the farms and back to the hotel front. At the first dash I had sketched my own profile with the inscription “Rescuer Hero Starts Here.” At the last dash, my profile crowned the words “Rescuer Hero Finishes Here.”

  I watched Beauregard closely as he examined the plan. He was so taken by it that he flipped up his eyepatch, revealing the steely blue eye beneath, absorbed in the details before it.

  “Are you all right, Major?” I said, pointing to his eyepatch.

  He flipped it down and said, “Yes, sir—just ensuring I hadn’t missed anything.”

  “The plan’s central components are all there.”

  “Your plan, sir, is truly redolent of the North’s strategic genius.”

  “Well, Major, I was, at one point, the army’s youngest general.”

  “You don’t say, sir? Remarkable, sir, truly remarkable.”

  “You, Major, will accompany me on the rescue mission, as will Sergeant Bill Crow, and Miss Johnson.”

  “Miss Isabel, sir?”

  “We’ll need her to guide us to the farms. We’ll start on foot—easier to sneak out that way. At the first farm, I hope to find a wagon and horses. Then it’s just a matter of making one call after another, picking up our passengers at each stop—sort of like a stagecoach.”

  “Genius, sir, genius.”

  “Thank you, Major. If the plan works, we will share the glory.”

  “And our disguises, sir? Will we share those?”

  “Miss Saint-Jean’s dancers have already sewn our Indian costumes. Their work is never far from my thoughts.”

  “I’ve never had any doubt of that, sir.”

  “Mathis, Llewellyn, Ives, and Smithers will stay here under the command of Miss Saint-Jean.”

  “Under her command, sir?”

  “She would accept nothing less. The Chinamen will be sentries; she will prepare the saloon for those we rescue.”

  He looked around. “Yes, sir, just the place for a bevy of farm women.”

  “Frontier farm women, Major. And given the situation, I expect they will not faint at the thought of residing in a saloon.”

  Beauregard stood, saluted, and said, “It is an honor, Yankee General, sir, to serve under your command. Will you join me in a toast, sir?”

  I raised my stein of Alderney as he pulled his flask from his hip pocket. “To you, sir, and to our sacred, chivalric mission: saving the women of Bloody Gulch! May God have mercy on us all!”

  “Hear, hear!” I said. And I hoped He did.

  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 bowl
er 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, the enemy scouts had a blind spot, extending at a 45 degree angle west from the farmyard’s northwestern corner. That invisible line would be our path. We had taken the trouble to dig a tunnel beneath the farmyard’s enclosing wall so that we could creep beneath it under cover of darkness and emerge, we hoped, without being seen.

  We slipped quietly down the tunnel and crawled out the other side, leaving the safety of the fortification behind us. We slithered along, avoiding moonlit strips, and inched across the planks covering the whiskey-filled trench. My main concern, of course, apart from not succumbing to the alcoholic fumes, was protecting Isabel’s knees from splinters and scrapes. About my own skin—tough and leathery as an old cavalryman’s should be—I cared not a whit. I checked on her continually as we crept along, ensuring that her tunic was stretched as far over her knees as possible to give them maximum protection. But she was a self-reliant trooper, boldly slapping away my hand at one point when I tried to provide assistance. That little scuffle caused Billy Jack to turn around and say, “Shh! In Spanish: Silencio! In French. . .” I crawled forward, and the translations ceased.

  After that little diversion, we moved as stealthily as teetotal lizards until we reached a wedge of tall grass next to a line of fir trees. Here we paused and caught our breaths. Billy Jack stood up slowly, like a crane rising from shallow water. Satisfied that we were unobserved, he motioned for us all to stand. Now we moved more swiftly, darting from fir to pine, deft feet stirring the underbrush as little as possible.

  We made good time to the outskirts of the first farmhouse—“the Foster place,” Isabel called it—with Billy Jack guiding us into another semi-concealed position behind rocks and scrub where we could observe our target without much exposure. The guards, if they were there, were not visible. Billy Jack assumed they were inside and asleep. We trotted—slowly and crouched—to the farmyard. There was a wagon, perfectly suited to our purposes, just inside the front gate. We left Isabel there and advanced on the farmhouse. I took the point; Beauregard and Billy Jack covered my flanks.

  I approached the front stoop with catlike tread and ascended the steps to the front door. Fortune favors the bold, so I tested the handle and found it turning in my hand, unlocked and inviting me in. I accepted fortune’s invitation, easing the door open. Directly in front of me, asleep in a chair, was a big bearded galoot, a shotgun resting on his lap, a candle burning on the table beside him. I gambled that he was alone and entered the room. No one shouted or shot at me, so I tiptoed over, slipped the shotgun from his loose-fingered grasp, and crept to what I assumed must be the bedroom door. I opened it without hesitation, and there, lying on a bed, was a young woman—in her twenties, I reckoned—asleep, her golden tresses splashed over her pillow like sunbeams across the clouds, her beauty like that of a goddess from ancient Greece. Instinctively, I knelt, reached for my Indian medicine pouch, withdrew the toothbrush and a pinch of salt, cleaned my teeth, then returned the brush to the pouch and stood—ready now for anything that might happen. I came over and touched her gently by the shoulder. She stirred, vaguely, and I gripped her shoulder with more force. Her eyes revealed themselves, a bright—panicked, in fact—blue; and I clapped a hand over her mouth before she could scream. I lowered my lips to her ear and whispered, “Fear not, I am not an Indian. I have come in disguise to rescue you. I am Marshal Armstrong from town. You may have heard of me.” She nodded; I suspected I had been the subject of gossip. I gently helped her rise. She was dressed in a beautiful white sleeping garment, almost like a wedding dress in its stylish cut. She slipped her feet into white deerskin moccasins at the foot of the bed.

  “The guard is sleeping. I need to gag him and tie him up. Can you help me?”

  She nodded and soon returned from the kitchen with a rag to stuff into his mouth, and some twine stout enough to bind his hands and feet. I asked for one more item: work gloves. These she procured from a drawer in her bedroom, and while they were tight on my hands, they would offer my knuckles some protection if I had to bust the villain’s nose.

  He lay snoring in his chair until I rammed the gag home. His eyes shot open and the rag stifled his tongue. I put my fingers over my lips, jabbed the barrel of the shotgun into his gut—and he got the idea. The young golden-haired lady tied him up and did a right good job of it; she had hog-tied beeves before. For good, if superfluous, measure we blindfolded him and I growled in his ear: “Sioux hate you fat white man.” I hoped those words and my mud-covered body would throw him off our scent.

  I took the young woman by the hand and we dashed to the wagon like eloping young lovers. Seeing Isabel there, however, reminded me that this was no romantic dream but a martial reality of search and rescue. Beauregard and Billy Jack stood by with horses from the barn—a team of two for the wagon, and mounts for each of us cavalrymen.

  Isabel was all nursely comfort, saying, “Judith, are you all right?”

  “Isabel, oh, Isabel, thank goodness it’s you—yes, I’m fine. What’s going on?”

  “You are delivered, madam,” I said. “Think of me as Moses and you as my people. But we must make haste, there are many more to rescue.”

  For the sake of our imposture, Billy Jack had not saddled our horses, only draping them with a blanket; and though I managed, grabbing two fistfuls of mane, to leap aboard, I confess that landing on the horse’s bare back wearing only a breech clout was a very different feeling from what I was used to—and a not altogether comfortable one.

  I will not bore you with all the details of our mission of mercy, save to say that I was struck by how each femme du farmhouse seemed more beautiful than the last, though perhaps it was the moonlight, and none of course could compare, dearest one, to the image of you engraved on my arm, let alone the reality of you!

  At each farmhouse, with the help of the farm-lady-fair, we tied, gagged, and blindfolded Larsen’s blackguards, and I soon became quite proficient at it. As expected, we passed several Indian patrols during our midnight ride of liberation, but Sergeant Bill Crow did an excellent job of spinning the Indians a yarn.

  The interrogation went something like this:

  “What are you doing?”

  “Taking the white women to one farm; Larsen is worried about raids from the mighty warriors at the hotel.”

  “Mighty warriors?”

  “Have you not seen them?”

  “We have seen the marshal”—you can bet they had!—“and the little yellow men. They are not mighty warriors.”

  “Did you not hear about the Battle of Johnson Farm?”

  “Yes, there is a dangerous Crow. That man is beyond mighty.”

  Or so Billy Jack told me. I never actually heard any of these conversations, because he would ride ahead to meet the Indian patrols, guarding us from curious eyes. Whatever yarn he spun them, we had no trouble with the Indians.

  The Blake homestead, however, was a different challenge; it was the toughest nut to crack because it had three guards over eleven young children. There we approached openly, parking our wagon next to another on the property. Isabel and her fellow femmes du farm waited while Beauregard, Billy Jack, and I dismounted and walked straight to the house. The three guards eyed us skeptically from their rocking chairs on the porch.

  “A patrol said you were coming; never heard that from Mr. Larsen.”

  “He decided at supper,” said Billy Jack. “He tell us, ‘Move quickly.’ He fear men at hotel and saloon. Great warriors, he say. He fear they come for women and children. Must move.”

  “Well, we got the little varmints ready. They’re all dressed and holdin’ their dollies and whatnot. Haven’t hitched the horses to the wagon; reckon you can do that. Didn’t have time. Horses are in the barn.”


  Billy Jack turned to Beauregard. “Sightless Southern Eagle, get horses.”

  “Yes’m, big chief.”

  The guard added, “Them girls are your responsibility now. And you’re welcome to it. I’d rather be working in the mine than minding these little, lazy, no-good layabouts; all they do is whine and complain even though we feed ’em and treat ’em proper.”

  A troop of nervous little girls were led onto the porch.

  “No need worry,” I said, in my best Indian uncle voice—but my manly appearance, so consoling to grown women, affrightened these little ones.

  “Naked Warrior Who Talks, take children to wagon.”

  I led them—like a breech-clouted, Winchester-toting, mud-spattered, tattooed, Boyanama Sioux Pied Piper. At the wagon, Isabel smiled, encouraged them with pleasantries, and got them settled, while Beauregard brought up the horses.

  Billy Jack mounted up, and I, more carefully this time, did the same. Isabel took the reins of the children’s wagon, Judith Foster acted as wagon master for the femmes du farm (or Miss Saint-Jean’s future cancan dancers, as I preferred to think of them), Beauregard leapt aboard his horse, and we were off. There was a moment of extreme risk when we circled back to the hotel, of course. We halted at the ditch, hurried the women and children across the planks, stowed the wagons by the abutting line of firs, and unhitched the horses and brought them across. We were vulnerable to attack at any moment, but apparently our Indian watchers were too baffled to act.

  All was now hustle and bustle. With the horses stabled in the farmyard, I took it upon myself to introduce the femmes du farm to the cancan dancers who were eager to help, bless their hearts, get them situated at the hotel. I entrusted the children to Miss Saint-Jean in the saloon. They were noisy and harder to herd than chickens, but she soon had them boarded in Larsen’s office and adjacent rooms on the second floor.