The Path of the Wicked Read Online Free PDF Page A

it.
    â€˜Odd business they were talking about.’
    â€˜Oh?’
    â€˜Gentleman and his horse disappeared clean off the face of the earth.’
    â€˜Snatched up to heaven?’
    He laughed. ‘Not unless Saint Peter likes long odds.’
    I waited while he persuaded Senator to walk quietly past a rattling harvest cart. Then he told the story.
    â€˜Two local sporting gentlemen dropped more than they could afford on the Derby this year – that and a few other races. They’d pretty well got to the end of their credit and the legs were pressing them to pay up.’
    â€˜Legs?’
    â€˜Short for blacklegs. The bookmakers.’
    â€˜How much did they owe these legs?’
    â€˜Depends who you ask, but not much less than ten thousand apiece.’
    â€˜Ye gods! Ten thousand?’ A family might live very comfortably for ten years on that sum.
    â€˜From what I was told, they could hardly drum up enough credit between them for a bottle to drown their sorrows in,’ Amos said. ‘But they manage it somehow, and they’re sitting in their club, drinking and complaining about their bad luck. One of the gentlemen takes his last sovereign out of his pocket and says to his friend, “Double or quits.” Meaning they should toss the coin and the one who wins’ll take on the debts of the other as well as his own.’
    â€˜I’d guess they’d drunk more than the bottle of wine by then.’
    â€˜You might be right. Well, their cronies are egging them on and telling the other man he’s got to accept. Then somebody comes up with a better idea. You see, both of the men had been nattering on about how good their horses were, and what a loss it would be if they had to sell them. So somebody says that first thing next morning they should all go up on the racecourse and the two men should race their horses one against the other – the gentlemen themselves up, no jockeys – and the one that loses takes on both lots of debts. So it’s decided, the two men shake hands on it, and first thing next morning they’re up on the racecourse, ready for the off.’
    We rode on for a while without saying anything. I’d seen a lot of the casual attitude of the upper classes to debt, but something about the brutality of this affair sickened me.
    â€˜Whoever won, they could hardly remain friends with that between them,’ I said.
    Amos had been watching me sidelong, waiting for me to plead for the rest of the story.
    â€˜You might be right. Any road, looks as if we’ll never know.’
    I gave in. ‘So what happened?’
    â€˜It’s just after sun-up, still mist down in the valley and dew on the grass. So the course is hard-going but a touch slippery – not ideal but good enough. This time of the morning there’s nobody there but the gentlemen themselves, their friends and the grooms – not above three dozen people and their horses all told. The two gentlemen strip down to their shirts and breeches and shake hands as if they were going to fight a duel, and I daresay it didn’t seem much different. The two of them look a bit green about the gills and they’d probably have backed out of it if they could have done, but with the bet taken before witnesses, there was no way out.’
    â€˜Of course there was, if they’d had a tenth of the brain of their horses.’
    â€˜That’d be asking a lot. Funny thing, if a man drinks too much. Come morning, you wake up with a sick and guilty feeling, as if you’ve done something wrong and the consequences of it are going to catch up with you any moment. I reckon that’s how those two gentlemen must have felt. Any road, they get up on their horses and come under starter’s orders. I should have mentioned before that it was a fair race as it went, horses pretty well matched and both of them useful enough riders. So the friend who’s acting as starter gives the