The Sport of Kings Read Online Free

notice of them at all, but walked past with a torn burlap satchel and a dressing knife, staring straight ahead with wild eyes and murmuring child’s talk as he went. Forge tightened the grip on his rifle and spurred on, but the bondsman turned and watched until the man was out of sight, and a long time after.
    They came to the Gap in the afternoon, easily traversing the six level miles before it and watching the vast pinnacle loom to their right, the shallower ridge to the left and the low curtsy between. They found a stream and a cave in that open land, and they passed as quickly as possible, and though they did not see any natives, the natives saw them. They rode through the saddle passage and into the hot and humid hills that redoubled their pleating on the far side, so the trail rose and fell with maddening redundancy with no reprieve for days, and their fear was like pain. A horse was snakebit while foraging, and they bled the horse and waited three long days until he finally took the bit again. Then they continued and the next day found a scalped dog in a field of fiddle ferns, a hound. They buried it beneath a sepulchre of geodes and for another week saw no other signs of travelers, only bear, wolf, fox, and rabbit, and at night heard the womanly cries of wildcats.
    Finally the land eased, calmed, and they walked in expansive sunlight through a glade. Approaching the crest of one of the last great hills, Forge stopped and gazed back over the fraught land they’d traveled, where in a year’s time he would bring his belongings, his will the windlass by which all the packhorses and the children and the slaves and the mules would be hauled across the mountains. On this last big hill, Forge finally spied the knobs that announced the end of the mountains, and they made for them.
    Beyond the knobs, they discovered a transylvanic broadening of the land, where it rolled out its high shale hills and sloped to a distant river they could not see but expected. Forge stopped on this high meadow and reached down, scraping the soil with his finger, his heart stalling at the thin yellow soil reminiscent of clay. His slave said nothing; there was still a ways to go before they reached their destination. Forge remounted and slipped his feet into the irons that had borne him across two hundred miles of agony, and shortly they arrived at the river that snaked three hundred feet below its upper limestone cliffs. They wondered at the sheer drop and then clambered down the palisades, the horses shying and sinking into their quarters as the trail sank, the day and the heat fading. They passed the exposed musculature of the plateau’s rockbed, loose limestone shedding where cleft plates had formed the canyon; the horses stumbled on these shed innards as they walked the barely hewn path, blowing air and straining. At the cool base of the canyon, they swam the green river and remounted the ramparts on the far side. When they finally regained the summer day far above the river, they had passed the last great impediment west of the mountains, and their destination was closing. They were in Lexington by nightfall of the next day.
    But there was a bustling at this outpost and cabins with yards neatly set, and women walked there in chattering pairs on land already parceled and named, so spurred by dissatisfaction, Forge set out northeastward, and they rode quickly on the level forest with its occasional meadows of clover. They saw no one, though they followed a faint path broken largely by hooves. Soon, the underbrush grew denser all around until they dismounted and were forced to reblaze the trail.
    They crossed streams thick with fish and passed through groves of maple and black ash and finally came to a river they had heard of, though they veered south from the settlements there. They passed an outlying chimneyless cabin by a stream, where a man named Stoner offered them black bread and cream, and then there was nothing more that