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    Armstrong SAMPLE
    Armstrong SAMPLE
    Armstrong SAMPLE
    Ebook59 pages51 minutes

    Armstrong SAMPLE

    By H. W. Crocker

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    About this ebook

    A FREE chapter from the new western alternate-history thriller by H.W. Crocker!

    Did you know that George Armstrong Custer survived the Battle of the Little Big Horn and became a gunslinging knight-errant in the West—aided by a troupe of Chinese acrobats, can-can dancing girls, a rebel-flag-eyepatch-wearing Southern gambler, and a multilingual Crow Indian scout? H. W. Crocker's rollicking, witty, adventurous new novel Armstrong is an alternative history like you've never read before.

    "Droll satire, this is the West as it might have been if the Sioux hadn't saved us." —Stephen Coonts, national bestselling author of The Flight of the Intruder and Liberty's Last Stand
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRegnery Fiction
    Release dateJul 30, 2018
    ISBN9781621579236
    Armstrong SAMPLE
    Author

    H. W. Crocker

    H. W. Crocker III is the bestselling author of the prize-winning comic novel The Old Limey, the Custer of the West series, and several historical works, including Triumph, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire, The Yanks Are Coming!, and Robert E. Lee on Leadership. His journalism has appeared in National Review, the American Spectator, Crisis, the National Catholic Register, the Washington Times, and many other outlets. A native of San Diego and educated in California and England, he is married to a former cheerleader and lives in seclusion in the Deep South.  

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      Book preview

      Armstrong SAMPLE - H. W. Crocker

      CHAPTER ONE

      In Which I Reveal How I Was Born to Ride

      Dear Libbie,

      I realize it must be quite a shock to learn that I am not dead, but by these tokens you will know that it is true. First, the bearer of this packet will be a man over six feet tall, well-groomed, dark of hair, with a pleasing countenance and Southern manner and eyepatch embroidered with the rebel flag (it could be over either eye; he doesn’t actually need it but uses it as a signaling device: on the left eye it means Indians or desperadoes to the west; on the right eye, to the east; one if by land, two if by sea).

      He should answer to the name of Beauregard Gillette. When it comes to cards he is sharp as a razor. Don’t let your friends play with him. With women he is as smooth as a bar of soap but a moral man all the same. I trust him implicitly.

      Besides the manuscript you hold in your hands, he will give you a curl of my golden hair, a clipping from my moustache, and a tintype of me disguised as a Chinaman (though you, Libbie, will no doubt see through the disguise).

      I cannot come back to you myself, my dearest, though I long to do so, until I can show that the massacre at the Little Bighorn River was through no fault of my own. We were betrayed, as surely as the Spartans at Thermopylae. But I must be able to prove it. And I am in the process of doing so, though I don’t know how many weeks, or months, or even years it may take. I will restore the name of your husband to the ranks of military glory.

      How did I survive? I will write more about that later, but for now suffice it to say that I grieve for the loss of my men, my brothers Tom and Boston, young Autie and Lieutenant Calhoun, and even my gallant horse Vic. (I assume he perished, though Dandy was kept back and is likely safe. If you have my staghounds Bleuch and Tuck—I left them behind; the Army may have returned them to you—I’d appreciate it if you’d send them to me through Beauregard. As you know, it can be lonely out here in the vast expanses of the West.)

      One moment I was in the center of an ever-receding circle of my Seventh Cavalry, amidst the crack of gunfire, the stench of gun smoke, the shouting of the men, the crazed yelping of the Indians, the stinking sweat of our men and theirs, and then one massive Indian crashed into me like an enraged bear, and I rolled on the ground with him—he clubbing and missing with his stone-headed ax, me striking his snarling primeval face with my gloved left fist while my right hand, holding a revolver, was pinned to the ground in his vicious grip.

      Then a sudden darkness.

      When I awoke, I saw a striking pair of brown eyes, the classical features of a beautiful woman—only the bottom half of her face was that of a skull, a bone-white jaw and sugar-cube white teeth in a rictus grin. As my bleary eyes cleared, I realized the skull was the design on a neckerchief that she wore over her nose like a cowboy does on a dusty trail.

      She removed the neckerchief, revealing the fullness of her beauty, and said in a variant of the Sioux language that I could understand because, I later realized, it was Sioux-accented English, Your hair is as radiant as the sun, your eyes as blue as the dawn of a happy day, a son of the morning star—the usual thing. But then she added, An Apollo, an Adonis in his prime. I’d never reckoned a Sioux to know Greek mythology. So, I tried my luck.

      Begging your pardon, ma’am, but are you white?

      Why, yes, of course. Are you delirious?

      But you speak Sioux, or at least a Sioux dialect.

      Yes, Boyanama Sioux.

      My head, neck, and shoulders ached with a dull throbbing pain, and I stared at her, my mind still somewhat hazy, as though she were a ministering angel and felt for my Indian medicine pouch, the gift of a Ree scout that hung

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