The Officer Had Spent
Years In The Banda Oriental, In Guerilla Warfare, And Had Ridden Zango
In Every Fight In Which He Had Been Engaged.
Coming back to Buenos
Ayres he brought the old horse home with him.
Two or three years later
he came to my father, whom he had come to know very well, and said he
had been ordered to the upper provinces and was in great trouble about
his horse. He was twenty years old, he said, and no longer fit to be
ridden in a fight; and of all the people he knew there was but one man
in whose care he wished to leave his horse. I know, he said, that if
you will take him and promise to care for him until his old life ends,
he will be safe; and I should be happy about him - as happy as I can be
without the horse I have loved more than any other being on earth. My
father consented, and had kept the old horse for over nine years when
he was killed by the hail. He was a well-shaped dark brown animal,
with long mane and tail, but, as I knew him, always lean and old-
looking, and the chief use he was put to was for the children to take
their first riding-lessons on his back.
My parents had already experienced one great sadness on account of
Zango before his strange death. For years they had looked for a
letter, a message, from the absent officer, and had often pictured his
return and joy at finding alive still and embracing his beloved old
friend again.
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