GHOSTS OF PALO DURO CANYON

By Award-winning author, Terry Spear

 www.facebook.com/terry.spear

Night Sky

 Imagine camping out in the dark of night with the cold autumn air surrounding you as you attempt to doze off in an Army sleeping bag, where the night goes on forever, the black sky covered in sparkling stars as far as the eye can see.  There are no artificial lights, no city, or campfires, or lights from campers, only what God created. And it’s vast and beautiful and awe-inspiring.

But the ground is covered in rocks. Every inch.  And I was thinking rattlesnakes and scorpions seek warmth when it’s that cold out.  A body in a sleeping bag seemed a nice place for the poisonous critters to curl up.

I’m cold natured and I am a light sleeper, so while all the other cadets in our West Texas A&M AROTC program were sleeping to be ready for a day of orienteering (finding points on a map using a compass) before we had to go to camp the next summer, I was awake. Pushing rocks out from under my sleeping bag, trying to get comfortable. Trying to get warm. Annoyed everyone else could sleep like a bunch of logs. I knew the next day I’d have a devil of a time orienteering if I didn’t get any sleep that night.

Some hours passed and I finally closed my eyes, attempting to force sleep. And then I heard them. Wild mustangs headed straight for us. They snorted, whinnying and neighing and stampeded, pounding the ground, headed in our direction.
I was terrified.

I knew that herd animals would run straight through something like our camp without diverting out of our way. When I was a kid, we slept on a boat while our friends slept on an island at a California lake and deer ran through their big tent. Screams and shouting and then laughter resounded. The deer had not run around the tent, but straight through it, collapsing it on top of our friends. 

No one was injured then, but I figured horses were heavier, they sounded like tons of them, and so I tried to wake my sister sleeping next to me. She grumbled at me to go to sleep.

So I lay back down, buried in my blanket, listening to the horses growing nearer. But one thing that seemed in our favor, I didn’t FEEL the ground shake. So I assumed they had to be some distance off, even though they sounded so close. And then they veered off and faded into the distance. I still didn’t sleep, afraid they’d return, but they didn’t.

The next morning, I asked my cadre and fellow cadets if anyone heard the horses. Did they have wild mustangs in the area? One of the cadre said it was very likely, but no one had heard a thing. Not surprising since everyone was asleep.




Palo Duro Canyon
near Amarillo, Texas

 Years later, I wanted to write an article about the wild mustangs of Palo Duro Canyon, and discovered there were no articles about them, but several accounts of people having heard the horses—they were ghosts of the past.

When the US Cavalry was trying to stop the Indians from fighting, several tribes had gathered in the Palo Duro Canyon to make a last stand. The only way the Army could stop them was to destroy the horses. An unmounted pony soldier couldn’t flee to fight another day. And so the Cavalry drove the horses off the cliffs. That’s what I heard that night. The horses, a whisper of the past.

Stagecoach Inn at Salado, Texas

I live in the heart of Texas now, though I lived in Amarillo back then, and I love the history of the west. I’m originally from California, so I also loved the stories of the Gold Rush and the settling of the west. But here, I’d visit a town called Salado. It’s a quaint town where they once had a stagecoach run. And every time I’d visit there with my mother, I would wonder what it would have been like in the 1870s.

Some of the buildings are haunted. What if the Stagecoach Inn had been? What if the heroine had a connection there? And she stayed in the same room after a harrowing divorce from her husband? And what if she woke up to a man in her bed, not her husband, and she’s not even in her own time?

Yep. That’s what happened in A GHOST OF A CHANCE AT LOVE. How can something so simple as taking a breather from the place she lives to a place she loves become so…complicated? But not only complicated. Dangerous.

My question to you is if you were stuck back in time, and the man was handsome, chivalrous, and was falling in love with you, would you choose to stay back in his time? What if you had no choice? But staying there wasn’t an option either? Poor Lisa, she’s in one pickle of a mess.

Thanks so much to Sweethearts of the West for having me here today!

"Giving new meaning to the term alpha male where fantasy IS reality."

Award-winning author Terry Spear is the author of urban fantasy romances, medieval Highland romances, and a western historical time travel romance. She received Publishers Weekly's Best Book of the Year in 2008 for HEART OF THE WOLF. A retired officer of the U.S. Army Reserves, Terry is a librarian by day. She lives in Crawford, Texas.



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Buy link for A GHOST OF A CHANCE AT LOVE is http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Chance-Love-ebook/dp/B005LHO9U4