Waitey McColl is a young adult working as the night clerk of the Sequoyah House hotel, in the Cherokee Badlands of eastern Oklahoma. A Native American of mixed blood, he was born in the Cherokee Nation of Indian Territory, a few years before the region became the 46th state of Oklahoma in 1907. He is smart and ambitious; and, as a direct descendant of riders on the Cherokee Trail of Tears - a pejorative among Native Americans describing the forcible removal of ancestors from the United States - he harbors a deep resentment toward the white society. The angst of his ancestors has been passed down through generations to him. During a fierce winter storm in the town of Seymour, where the respectable hotel is located, the notorious outlaw Henry Starr appears like a specter from the past. Although he spent several years on the FBI's most wanted lists, he has been on parole for five years and out of public view. Waitey considers him the last of the really bad actors, such as Jessie and Frank James, the Daltons, Quantrill, Cole Younger and others, who fled to the Cherokee Badlands to escape federal law officers and justice. On the stormy night visit, Henry Starr introduces himself to Waitey as a cousin and a wolf clansman, and coerces the intimidated night clerk into providing lodging for him and his gang. They are traveling in a snazzy Stutz Bearcat automobile, a zeitgeist of the Roaring Twenties. They leave at dawn, as Henry Starr promised, but Waitey's troubles are far from over. He becomes embroiled in a police manhunt for the gang, after they rob a bank in a neighboring state. In doing so, mayhem breaks out and they kill a customer, employee and a deputy sheriff. In the getaway, Henry Starr is also killed. In the dramatic climax, which causes Waitey to re-examine some engrained beliefs, a gunfight breaks out in the hotel lobby. The violence endangers hotel guests, Waitey's relatives and his beautiful sweetheart, whom he loves passionately. Suddenly thrown into the role of a guardian of Christian values, Waitey must choose between aiding the iconic town sheriff or the renegade outlaws, who consider him a traitor to the cause of Native Americans. He makes a coming-of-age decision that will liberate him or haunt him forever.
About the Author: After editing a daily newspaper and then the investment newsletter that became Standard & Poor's weekly Outlook, I wrote investment reports and directed industry research for Wall Street firms. In the 1990s, I operated Howard Bonham Research, an independent research firm in Houston, Texas. That opportunity arose because scandals of corrupt re-search on Wall Street had created a demand for independent opinions. I was very much off-Wall Street, yet advantageously located in the hubbub of oil and gas happenings in Houston. I published other industry reports as well. When the bubble burst on Internet stocks and stocks in general in the 1990s, I completed and sold my investment and financial dictionary, and resolved to concentrate on freelance and creative writing. Presently, I live in Maryland, a few miles from the Chesa-peake Bay. The eastern shore is one of my favorite places and I go there as often as possible. After a career of writing struc-tured reports on portfolios, companies and industries, I have broken free and am no longer a danger to the investment public. However, I look forward to tackling investment topics again; my cowering CFA muse, whose pinstriped suit was taken to the cleaners in the recent financial crash, still hangs around, waiting for his good -as-new duds to be ready.