without the other horses. Inside I began to panic - I had never been left alone before, there had always been another horse for me to stand by. I needed the others, and they were somewhere out there, roaming the West.

Over the next weeks a mission began to retrieve the lost stock. I was ridden by the colonel to collect a group that had been wrangled in a town. The glares I received when we arrived shook me, the looks of utter hate made me feel cold to the marrow. Alone I was scared, but when I was with them I was unwelcome. After that first group was taken back things sped up nicely and soon our numbers were back to normal, save for a few unbranded horses that we couldn't claim from farmers and towns people, and a few horses had - like I had predicted - been killed.

After a while the bullying died down and my life returned to some form of normality. The colonel had said to his men that the stallion had achieved nothing but some slight disorder and a few bruises, and that he would be recovered. There was little to do in the fighting sense, so a small band of us were ridden out on long treks to track the golden stallion. We were unsuccessful.

For a few months.

Finally, another battle was planned and we rained down on the Lakota village like a storm from hell. I noticed in the confusion a buckskin and tried to follow him, but the colonel spotted the same boy from the post on a pinto mare by the river. He urged me over there to cut them off and he aimed his gun to shoot the Lakota. But the mare reared to protect her human and was hit in the shoulder. I tensed. This fight was between humans, not us. A wave of guilt washed over me as the couple fell into the torrenting river. The mare was swept downstream and the boy clung to a rock while the colonel aimed once more.

My guilt was forgotten as a considerable weight slammed straight into me. The shot missed and I recovered to see the stallion racing after the pinto and jump in after her. The colonel cursed and pushed me back into the village for another wave of attack.

There was a week inbetween the attack and our next scout. We left in the middle of the night and rode out to the remains of the village and crossed the river. The waters were calmer now and the men made a makeshift bridge for us to use as a crossing. We travelled along the river until the evening, where we rested at the foot of a hill for the night. The next morning we were saddled late and we crested the hill to see a golden buckskin stallion and a Lakota boy playing in the water. The five soldiers and five warhorses stared in disbelief. Just like that, we had been brought together again. The two saw us below. The chase was on.

The horse ran ahead of the boy. Shots were fired and he tripped. I expected the wild animal to keep on running, he had no idea what it was like to care for humans. But he surprised me, and turned back to let the boy ride him through the canyon. I knew their game, the channels were narrow and overlapping, they hoped to lose us in the natural maze. I kept on their trail and sprinted after them through gullies and across a ledge. We lost them around and corner though, and saw it was a dead end. Two soldiers arrived behind and one of them spotted them climbing a stack. The soldiers shot upwards and missed, then began to climb up after them.

Seconds later I heard the scrabbling of hooves on rock and looked up to see the stallion leap right off the edge of the stack. It wasn't possible, it was only suicide! But still I saw Spirit soar, something that even he couldn't describe to his children. I have seen a legend. They landed with the grace of a black bear falling out of a tree and tumbled to the ground on the other side. We stared in awe. One of the soldiers raised his gun, but the colonel held up his hand. Then he did the most amazing thing.

He nodded to the stallion. He gave up on the chase, just like that, he had learned that he couldn't always control. Sometimes he had to just let things go. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen.

My life went on, uneventful for years. I trained and and fought until I was the finest warhorse in the West. I saw death and destruction so often that I believed that it was simply a part of life. My heart and soul grew harder than any granite or marble when it came to mercy and pity. I never killed, but I never stopped my rider from doing so, which could be seen as the same thing. For five years the days merged into one. Then I saw her.

One late afternoon a palomino mare was tied to Murphy's posts. She was clipped, cleaned and shoed. Rumor had it that she had been bought by the colonel from some cowboys. She had been tamed and trained on a ranch in the green plains and two men had got good money out of her. I was about to ask the other horses what the men looked like, with a dim glimmer of hope that it could have been Speedy, Boss and Bear, but suddenly there was a neighing and the distinct "Oof!" sound that told us that Murphy had taken yet another beating. The mare had reared when he tried to brand her, so they decided to wait until her spirit had been broken to try again.

She was placed in the long stables in the North-East corner of the base and retrieved by the colonel a few hours later, who rode her around the arena. Since the day that he had nodded to Spirit he no longer used his crop and spurs, so she trusted him and did as she was asked. At the time, I was annoyed to hear that she was to be the colonel's horse like me. I panicked, fearing that I was too old to do my job, that i was being replaced. She was taken into my stable and I resolved to ignore her until the morning.

We didn't see eye to eye straight away. I approached her furiously, explaining how it was my stall and my rider, and how she couldn't just suck up to him just to steal the luxuries I had. When I snapped, she did the same back. i was horrified to realise that I had met my match - in the form of a female.

When I was taken out for training I had time to think, and decided that i had been to hard on her. If the colonel didn't want me any more he wouldn't be riding me. When I was taken back into my stall she moved away so I could have a drink and pushed some hay towards me. I gave up my fight for control and told her about Maralyn, how she was ground down by man and then killed in a fire, and how I wanted her to stay as wonderful and beautiful as she already was (not in those precise words, though) and how I thought it was best for her to escape. We exchanged names, and her's was Jade.

We understood each other from then on. The colonel rode both of us, switching back and forth between two mounts. When we were in the pasture we ate together and chatted about ourselves. I told her what work we would do and about my childhood, and when I questioned her on the wild she answered my every query. I told her of the stallion, whose name I didn't know at the time, who had let out the other horses, and that if I had followed then we would never have met.

Captain Stirr had been chosen to finish off her training, so I had more time being ridden by the colonel. A while later when Jade was back in the hut I told her a little about Tony Stirr's service and how he was close to the colonel. She was shocked to learn that I wasn't close to any human, even the colonel, despite me being his horse for years. I didn't want to upset her, but I tried to explain that no human was special to me because it hurt to get attatched. If I had been clearer, I could have saved her from so much pain.

A couple of weeks later we had battle practise in the desert. When the first guns fired Jade ran off with the colonel on her back. I knew that he would bring her back so I kept on going. I jumped a log and I felt Stirr, who was on my own back, sag and fall. I stopped and stood by his body, knowing only too well what had happened. I no longer felt guilt or remorse, I was a warhorse, hardened by battle and bathed in blood.

We walked back to camp and Jade thought I looked miserable. I said that I knew it wasn't my fault and that it couldn't be helped. We walked in silence after that and I thought about my last remark. It had happened because it was going to happen, it was no one's fault, and no one could have prevented it.

I just kept telling myself that.

Time began to merge again, but this time I had something to look forward to every morning when I woke up. i found myself growing closer and closer to Jade. She was beautiful, in body and soul. She had not been battered down like I had first feared, and I wanted to tell her how I felt.

But something always held me back. Deep down, I had cared about Tony. This was the army, and I knew that people died regularly. So did horses. A war of my own raged inside my head for days on end until I finally decided, my heavy granite heart weighing my chest down, that I had to stop her from getting any closer to me than I could see she already was. So that evening in the meadow I was harsh with her, I told her I wasn't interested. I lied, saying that I had pitied ehr when we had first met and that i had been playing her along all this time and that she was disgrace to my name. Her wild blood was a stain on my authority and I was a laughing stock to the others. So we parted. She has never looked so dejected and torn in all her days, and to this day I still feel guilty for it.

That night there was a fire. I was rescued with the other horses, a young lad that Jade knew had sounded the alarm and saved us all, but when I searched for her outside the blazing camp in the dead of night I couldn't find her. I feared the worst. I was reliving my worst nightmare. The horse I loved was inside a burning building.

I raced to the gates but stopped. My world frose and there were only memories. I was now standing infront of the ranch barn, my mother calling me to come back to her. Up ahead I could only see