The Ghost of The Choctaw Woman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dallas, Texas 1894

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Colin was looking at the horse with the large spots on his rump. The stud was tied to the hitching post in front of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The Scot’s head was swimmy, and he was wondering if too much rye whiskey hadn’t seeped into his brain, and he was seeing things. The day was bright and he was dead certain he was awake as he watched the streetcars pass each other on their tracks, horse-driven carriages moving off the rails in the nick of time as the conductor rang his bell at them.

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Dallas, Texas had become a big, electric city and it was loud. He opened his eyes and the horse was still there. It was her horse. The day she died five years ago came back to him as he remembered pulling at the horse’s rope, pulling it away from that beautiful Indian woman, trying to steal it, to sell for twenty dollars. He watched her fall in front of that schooner wagon, heard her bones crunching in his ears, and he closed his eyes hard, tears fighting their way out. He heard her child scream from the back of her wagon as the tears streamed down his ruddy cheeks which were red and veined from too much liquor.

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He had attempted horse thieving and it had killed a beautiful, innocent woman. And there wasn’t enough whiskey in the world to make him stop remembering that fact. Now God had brought that horse here to remind him of that day. He had been hiding out in saloons since the Oklahoma Land Rush, the day he killed a little girl's mother.

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But God found him.

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Excerpt from "Little Bird" by Mare Loch on Amazon and KU https://a.co/d/bedhrgP

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From the American Cowboy & Indian era of 1889 and the Land Rush to acquire native lands, to the Edwardian era of the 1900s, Suzu ‘Little Bird’ embraces her multi-racial heritage, progress and family as a woman of the horse, and a woman of faith.