The Race [antikvár]

Friday ONE Once íhere had been open fields here. From time imme-morial, this had been a great, rolling, grassy plain on which* perhaps—long before the Whiíe Man had moved that far West—even the Indians had raced their horses, descendants of the ranaways from the herds of the Conquistadores, to see which was the swiftest and therefore the most valuable. For then as always, competition was the cracible of a horse's courage, stamina, breeding, spint Before men had íamed him to their own uses, the horse raced, galloping across vast meadows in an ecstasy of speed, giorying ín his strength and freedom. Man had saddled him, bridled him, made him a part of his world, perhaps the most important part for over 2,000 years, during which the horse was king and a man marked his rank by calling himself a cavalier, proclalming his nobility by the symbol of the spiir, measuring the world by the powerfui strides of his steed's legs, thrilling to the thunder of his hooves. Man lived to the horse's rhythm. Here, in the limitless grasslands from which the Indians had only recently been driven, men set themselves to raise heroic horses, imported famous sires to improve the stock, raced them to determíne their quality and to discover whether they possessed that intangible attribute of heart that carries the great horse past the edge of physical exhaustion to that last spurt of effort which is the price of victory. Here men raced horses, loved them for their grace, their beauty, the effortless ease of their movement, valued them