The beloved first book in the middle grade Phantom Stallion series about a girl, her horse, and the beauty of the American West returns with a brand-new, stunning cover and bonus material! Perfect for fans of Canterwood Crest and classic horse stories like Black Beauty and My Friend Flicka . When thirteen-year-old Samantha returns home to her family’s cattle ranch in Nevada, she’s nervous. She moved away two years ago to recover from a bad fall off her beloved mustang, Blackie, and she’s still not sure she can get back in the saddle. She’s having trouble bonding with her new horse, Ace, the other ranchers treat her like the boss’s spoiled daughter, and Blackie has been missing since the day of Sam’s fateful accident. But that’s just the beginning. On a moonlit night, a mustang comes to Sam. Is it Blackie grown up and gone wild—or the legendary phantom stallion? When Sam suddenly finds the fate of the horse resting in her hands, she has to be a real cowgirl, ready or not. Terri Farley has always loved horses and is overjoyed that she outgrew her childhood allergy to them. She taught middle school and high school language arts and journalism in inner-city Los Angeles before moving to the cowgirl state of Nevada. Now she rides the range researching the books that have made her an award-winning author and an advocate for the West’s wild places and wildlife—especially wild horses. Through school and library visits, Terri continues to work with young people learning to make their voices heard. She lives in a one-hundred-year-old house with her family, which includes her dog, Willow. In true collie fashion, Willow rescued the youngest member of the Farley family, an orphaned kitten named Tamarack. Chapter 1 Chapter 1 AT FIRST, SAM THOUGHT SHE was seeing things. The windshield of Dad’s truck was pitted by years of windblown dust. Maybe she’d been away from the ranch so long, the desert sun was playing tricks on her eyes. Suddenly, she knew better. Mustangs stampeded over the ridgetop. They ran down the steep hillside. As their hooves touched level ground, a helicopter bobbed up behind them. It hovered like a giant dragonfly. As she watched the herd, Sam saw one creamy mane flickering amid the dark necks of the other horses. She saw a black horse shining like glass and two roans running side by side. Here and there ran foals, nostrils wide with effort. Sam wondered if the men hovering above could see each running horse, or only a flowing mass of animals. The mustangs ran for the open range. Sam knew the horses would find little shade and less water ahead, but they seemed to think of nothing except outrunning the men and their machine. The herd swung left. The helicopter swooped, ten feet off the sand, to block them. The herd galloped right. With a whirring sound, the helicopter followed. Then, from the back of the herd, a silver stallion raced forward. Sam never imagined a horse could be so beautiful, but there he was. He nipped and screamed, turning the mares in a wide U back under the helicopter’s belly, running to the hills and safety. The helicopter pulled up. It banked into a turn and followed, but it was too late. “Wow! Where did they go?” Sam’s thigh muscles tensed. She sat inside her dad’s truck, but her knees shook as if she’d been running with the wild horses. “Mustangs have their secret getaway trails. They go places even a chopper can’t.” Dad took one hand off the steering wheel to pull his Stetson down to shade his eyes. Sam cleared her throat and looked out the window at dull, brown Nevada. Could she have felt homesick for this? Yes. Every day of the past two years, an ache had grown under her breastbone. She just wished Dad would talk more. She wanted to hear about the ranch and the horses and Gram. But the nearer they got to the ranch, the more he acted like the dad she remembered. Relaxed and quiet, he was completely un like the awkward man who’d come to visit in Aunt Sue’s polished San Francisco apartment. Since he’d picked Sam up—literally off her feet in the middle of the airport—their conversation had bumped along just like this old truck. Slow, but sure. “Shouldn’t use helicopters and trucks,” Dad muttered. “They just don’t savvy mustangs.” Translated, that meant he had no respect for men who didn’t understand the wild horses they were capturing and taking off the range. Dad really talked like a cowboy. And his first name was Wyatt, a cowboy name if she’d ever heard one. Plus, he walked with the stiff grace of a man who’d ridden all his life. When he’d first sent her to the city, Sam had been so angry, she’d tried to forget Dad. For a while, it had been easy. After her accident, the doctors had said Sam might suffer “complications.” When a girl fell from a galloping horse and her head was struck by a hoof, that was bad. When she lost consciousness as well, they explained, it was far worse. Fear made Dad agree to send Sam away from t