Slowly the procession passed around the course. Before the judges’ stand, and four times as they circled the square each group paused that the drummers might perform their little rhythm, that the banner bearers might dance their skillful little steps.
Cynthia sat enthralled. Almost she had to pinch herself to believe it was real. Glorious in color as an old window of stained glass; silks and velvets, knights in full armor, pages, banners and trumpeters, and at the very end the Palio itself, a great banner drawn in a cart, with the staked flags of the contrada around it.
The procession was over. Cynthia sat back and cracked a few nuts and ate them. Just to return to reality for a while, after so much beauty, was a rest and a relief. She had thought so intensely, packed it down so tightly into her memory that no least gesture of it might be forgotten. Even so, she felt as though she would have liked a week of that procession in order to be able to remember it all.
Again the mortar.
The race was about to start. Ten restive little horses ranged behind a rope, ten jockeys struggling to keep them in line. The sound of the gun. They’re off!
Panting, scrambling, hurled against the Dog’s Box, cutting corners, they tore around the course, and the piazza was one vast shout as though from a single throat. Cynthia, on her feet like the rest, stamped and clapped and shouted with the others. The Snail, the little brown Snail was among the leaders. Once around the course. Three times was the extent of the race. And the starting post was in sight again. But one rider was off—which was it?
The Snail’s! Cynthia could have sobbed aloud with despair, with disappointment. Her favorite, out of the race because without a rider. Someone had raised a whip and the Snail’s jockey had been the victim.
Oh well, so much for that! Cynthia, disgusted, almost sank back to her seat, but the mass of excitement around her was too strong to resist. The Snail, for some reason, seemed still to be a favorite, his name rose again and again from surrounding throats. Stubbornly he kept to the track, came to the first of the tiny streets that turned off, away from the race track. Gallantly he resisted temptation, clung to the course. Past the next alley, past the next street, and well among the leaders still. Pulling ahead now, faster and faster, because riderless, guideless. The Snail caught up with the horse of the Eagle, passed him, caught up with the horse of the Owl, hitherto the leader. The Owl’s rider plied whip with vigor, but he was a husky youth, quite a burden for the Owl’s little horse to carry. And the Snail was half a head in the lead as the goal post was passed for the second time.
“Oh come on ... come on!” Regardless now of the fact that the horse was riderless, Cynthia wanted only that he should make the circle the third time. Successfully.
Now he was well in the lead, past the wicked flail of the Owl’s malicious rider. Nothing now could stop him, though as he approached for the third time the steep street leading up into the town Cynthia held her breath lest this time he should leave the course and gallop up it. Held her breath so that she was completely unconscious of the broad shoulders in front of her which her eager hands were grasping.