A Promise of Thunder

1893
    Grady Stryker viewed the territorial capital of Oklahoma with a jaundiced eye. He had arrived the day before purely out of curiosity, and now he pushed and shoved his way through the crowded streets and wondered what in the hell he was doing in Guthrie four days before the biggest land rush in the country’s history. He’d heard that six million acres had been purchased from the Cherokee tribes and that 100,000 people were expected in Guthrie to participate in the run. If the crowded streets were any indication, Grady suspected most of those 100,000 souls were already in town.
    Pausing a moment to get his bearings, Grady was jostled from behind as someone plowed into his broad back. Gaining his balance, he turned to scowl at the man. It took only one look at Grady’s dark visage to make the man turn and flee. Grady gazed after him, a lopsided grin hanging on one corner of his mouth. He wondered what the man would have done if he’d seen him six months earlier, wearing only breechclout and moccasins, his muscles rippling beneath his smooth, sun-bronzed skin.
    In deference to civilization, he was wearing buckskin trousers now, made especially for him by Laughing Brook, and a butter-soft shirt of the same material. But he stubbornly clung to the moccasins and adamantly refused to cut his shoulder-length hair, which he wore tied back with a leather thong. His features were proud and intrepid, his Indian ancestry evident in the bold slash of his cheekbones, finely chiseled nose, and sun-bronzed skin. Only the deep blue of his eyes, inherited from Shannon, his Irish-American mother, marked him as having white blood.
    There was no denying that Grady Farrell Stryker was handsome, as handsome as his father, Swift Blade. And dangerous. There was a dark, brooding sensuality about him that most women found irresistible. As for his heart, Grady had none. From the moment his pregnant wife, Summer Sky, had been killed by irresponsible white men looking for a good time, he had erected a shell of bitterness aroundhimself and disavowed his white heritage. Then he had fled to the People with his small son, where Jumping Buffalo, Summer Sky’s father, had welcomed him. From that day until the day on the mountaintop when Grandfather spoke to him, advising him to leave the reservation, he had been known as Thunder, most feared of all the renegades roaming the plains.
    Snorting in disgust, Grady wondered again what he was doing in Guthrie. It wasn’t as if he intended to take part in the rush for land. Had he wanted land he could have gotten it from his own father, who owned countless acres in Wyoming. Thinking about his family gave Grady an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach. He hadn’t seen his father or mother in over three years and assumed that they had heard of his lawless existence by now and disowned him. Until the day Summer Sky was killed he had been a most dutiful son.
    He had been but twenty-two years old that fateful day and had grown up instantly as he held his dying wife in his arms. Before then his life had been idyllic, with nothing to overtax him but the changes in the weather. He had married his childhood playmate at age nineteen and by twenty-two had one child with another on the way. He knew no hardships, encountered no difficulties, faced no challenges. Until his wife had been taken from him in a single act of violence.
    Grady ambled down the street, his mind a thousand miles away, to a place where onlyhappiness existed. Fortunately he had grown older and wiser since then and had learned that happiness was only a myth. Distracted by his thoughts but ever aware and watchful for potential danger, his attention was captured by an errant ray of sunlight as it caught a reflection and sent it back to him, nearly blinding him.
    If it wasn’t such a clear, sunny day, Grady would have sworn a flash of lightning had descended from the sky. But there wasn’t a storm cloud in sight. When his vision cleared he saw that the brilliant light was the result of sunshine reflecting off a woman’s long shiny hair. And what hair it was! The color of molten gold, it cascaded down her shoulders to her waist, hampered only by a length of ribbon to keep it from flying around her face. He couldn’t see her features, for her back was turned as she peered down the street as if waiting for someone, but instinctively Grady knew she would be beautiful.
    He watched her, arrested, unable to turn away from the spectacle of her