The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [100]
Harry walked toward the schooling area. Chapot and Diamant were already there, schooling over a big oxer under Miss Sears’s watchful eye.
No matter. Snowman was rested and fresh, and he’d always risen to the challenge before. Harry was ready.
The stands were full as the fifty-third Piping Rock Show drew to its close. The table that held the silver trophies, crowded on Friday, was now empty but for the big gold Blitz cup, winking in the September sun. During the past three days, many familiar names had paraded through the winner’s circle. But the final class of the Blitz Memorial Gold Challenge had kept the spectators from packing up and going home. It was such a challenging course that even the best horses—First Chance and Andante—were getting faults. Harry watched the other performances, seeing where the pitfalls lay. Thankfully, the brush-wall-gate obstacle was not there, but the floating triple bar, the aiken, and the parallel bars all presented major challenges of their own.
In this class, Snowman would go before Diamant. He would have to perform at his very best, not knowing how the other horse would fare.
Harry heard the announcer call his name over the PA; he was on deck, up next. Snowman stood still on a loose rein, his ears lopped to each side in his trademark relaxed pose. Harry surveyed the crowds, catching sight of Eleo Sears and Johanna, his children, and others he knew who were awaiting his turn. It was a hot day, the last gasp of summer, and Harry was uncomfortably warm under his hunt coat. But the sun was nothing to him. Better to be sitting here, broiling in a woolen coat, than to be bent over in a tobacco field.
“Snowman, owned by Mr. and Mrs. Harry de Leyer, ridden by Harry de Leyer,” said the announcer, summoning the pair into the ring. Harry slid his hands up the laced reins and squeezed his calves gently around the horse’s barrel.
“This is it, Teddy Bear,” he whispered to the horse, and one gray ear flicked back, attuned to his master’s voice.
Snowman walked into the ring, and Harry gave him a chance to look up at the crowd. Let’s make it a good one, he thought, and then all thought disappeared. At a controlled gallop, Harry headed toward the first fence, and he all but vanished into the flow—hoofbeats, fast, shifting turns where the horse made flying lead changes, up and over, thump, thump, up and over. With each fence the crowd seemed to hold its collective breath.
It was over in a moment. Only then did Harry realize they had done it. Snowman had gone clean. Now he was the horse to beat.
Maybe living through a war makes a man philosophical, but Harry figured that he and his horse had done all they could do. He could control how well he rode and how well he cared for his horse, but he could not control what others did, and so he kept Snowman moving in the schooling ring so that he would not stiffen up. Harry watched the big brown horse Diamant head into the main ring, but only out of the corner of his eye. However, as the horse approached the first jump, Harry stopped to watch. He was as tightly coiled and precise as a German-engineered car—a marvel of machinery; he made the American horses look like cow ponies by comparison. It was hard to believe anyone could beat this horse.
Chapot rounded the course with care, and the horse leapt over each fence with the same methodical jumping style. Finally, they headed toward the last fence. Harry knew how crucial it was to keep a horse together on the last fence of the last class of the last day of the show—but especially in a big-money class that promised a huge gold cup as the prize. Chapot let Diamant out a hair. The horse bore down on the final fence just a little faster than before, just a shade, showing his tremendous impulsion. He sank down on his hocks, then sprang up, his hindquarters shooting off like well-oiled pistons. But before it had actually happened, before the crowd knew, before the press had finished mentally composing the “DIAMANT TRIUMPHS” headline, Diamant flattened his arc