Lanier of the Cavalry; Or, a Week's Arrest

Fort Cushing sits where the frontier meets civilization, and the sun bleeding over the Platte River finds Lieutenant Bob Lanier and Trooper Rawdon riding home to the arms of Dora Mayhew. But welcome turns to tension the moment Sergeant Fitzroy, a man whose aggression has carved him a reputation as dangerous as any enemy,fixes his gaze on Rawdon. The confrontation that erupts between them cracks open the simmering resentments of garrison life: who truly commands respect, who earns love, and what happens when duty and desire collide in a world where a single week's arrest can reshape every life around it. Charles King, drawing on his own military service, paints the cavalry post not as a romantic frontier postcard but as a pressure cooker of rivalry, loyalty, and the fragile hierarchies that keep men in line. The opening pages set the table for conflict that is both deeply personal and bound up in the cold machinery of military authority. For readers who crave historical fiction with grit, who want their Westerns to carry real human weight beyond gunfights and sagebrush.