Swift Horse

“Dances of my people are called obangas in our Creek language,” Swift Horse said, twining an arm around her waist. “Do you wish to learn today, or another day?”

Marsha gazed up at him and saw how he looked so wistfully into her eyes and knew why. “Later,” she murmured, placing a gentle hand on his cheek. “We have a lifetime of obangas to join.”

Smiling broadly, he took her hand, swung her away from the crowd, and led her to the horses he had already prepared for riding.

“Where are we going?” Marsha asked as he helped her into her saddle.

His only response was to smile at her.

Chapter 28

Love and harmony combine,

And around our souls entwine....

>

—William Blake

With dusk falling all around them, Marsha and Swift Horse rode up a slight incline, and then across a straight stretch of land again.

She was familiar now with where they were traveling, having been there one other time with Swift Horse.

She gazed over at him, smiling, when she now heard the splash of water and knew that the waterfall was close. She would never forget her other time there with him. It had been so wonderful to sit with him, talking and kissing.

Soon she would even be his bride. She knew the hardships that came with a white woman loving a man with copper skin—that she would be cast from the white world as someone contagious, for it was taboo for a white woman to marry an Indian.

“You are so quiet,” Swift Horse said, turning his eyes to Marsha and catching her gazing at him.

“Yes, I’m quiet, but my mind is spinning with thoughts of so many things,” she said, smiling at him.

“Your brother and my sister?” Swift Horse asked, smiling, too.

“Yes, and you and me,” Marsha said. She would not admit to all of those negative things that she was thinking. She only wanted to think and feel positive about everything.

“I, too, have been thinking about you,” Swift Horse said, sidling his horse over closer to hers. “Since we met, it has been hard for me to think about much else.”

“But you are a powerful chief whose mind must not stray too long from your duties,” Marsha said, the roar of the falls so much closer now.

“In the life of a chief, his people do come ahead of anyone else, until a woman enters this chief’s heart and life,” Swift Horse explained. “And then the woman comes first. A chief’s people would not deny their leader the part of his heart that is given away to a woman that he loves and plans to marry. It is known that a man leads better if he has a woman who feeds his needs other than those placed in his life by his people. A woman ofttimes makes a leader even stronger, for the man feeds from this love of a woman, which in turn makes him stronger in mind and body.”

“I hope your people accept me as that woman,” Marsha murmured. “When I become your wife I do not want to ever get in the way of your duties to your people.”

“You will never be seen as someone being in the way,” Swift Horse said, then saw how she again gazed ahead, spotting where a campfire and blankets awaited their arrival.

He had come before the ceremony and prepared things for their time together, having made a fire large enough to ensure it would still be burning upon their arrival. He saw that it had now burned down to how he wished it to be while they sat by the falls discussing things and then . . .

And then made love, he thought.

They rode onward and drew a tight rein beside the falls, the campfire warm against Marsha’s flesh as she dismounted near it.

She held on to her reins and watched Swift Horse take his horse to a tree a short distance from the camp and secure his reins to a low limb, then come and take her horse and do the same.

Dusk was sending sprays of various colors of pink across the horizon in the distance. A coyote barked on the other side of the falls, waiting for dark.

Marsha shivered at the sound. “Are we safe here after it is dark?” she asked Swift Horse as he knelt and placed more wood in the fire.

“While you are with me, you will always be safe,” Swift Horse said. He rose and took her by a hand and led her down beside the fire.