A cask of haul oil at the south wagon yard cost four bits and six coppers before the Choosing Day rope line reached the first post. The yard slate has carried a Choosing Day price since the town began setting the bench vote on the same morning as the winter haul. Every one of those prices had started with a three. The four was chalked over a three that still showed through, and the yard left both figures up.
On a haul morning the cask is the day's work. It fires the short-line engine as far as the ditch farms and keeps a cider press turning after the apples are in. It also runs the bellows at Hearthstone Smithy, where the wage board by the door still listed three bits and two coppers for a full turn. A pony who bought one cask before breakfast had already spent more than the smithy would pay for the day. The yard sells the cask whole. The difference comes back as a second line on the receipt.
Reed Colter hauls for three orchards past the south ditch and buys his cask before he votes, on the theory that a cart with no fire is a cart he will still be pushing at dusk. He paid four bits and six coppers and then another eleven, which the receipt listed under "civic adjacency." The pump sits forty paces from the ballot rope. The Town Haul Board had added the eleven coppers for Choosing Day only, on the ground that ponies in line make the yard busier. Colter read it twice.
"I was going to buy the cask if the rope was there or not," he said. "They charged me for standing near my own errand."
Tarrel Wick took the coins without looking at the rope. He has kept the south yard window for nine seasons under the town franchise, which is the only place inside the ditch that can sell a sealed haul cask. The mark on the seal is the town's. The price on the slate is the Board's. Wick's job is to match them and to lock the box when the column is full.
"I don't set the chalk," Wick said. "I count what the slate says and I put it in the lockbox. If the lockbox is heavy, somepony above me wanted it heavy."
The Board's morning notice ran to half a page and used the word synergy once, in a sentence that tied "ballot congestion" to "cask realization." Below the sentence was the allotment table. The festival line showed what it has shown since the spring vote to dress the square: eighty bits for bunting, forty for the platform rental, and twenty-six for an eleven-player band hired to play when the ballot line slowed. The haul-offset line under it, the one marked for wage carts and ditch haulers when the slate runs hot, had no figure. It had no figure in the summer book either. A clerk who was willing to turn the page said the spring allotment had moved that sum onto the platform so the Choosing Day speeches would have somewhere to stand.
Mayor Pippin Pines cut the ribbon on that platform at second bell, which was when the slate took the four. She stood above the band, thanked the Board for "a square that understands movement," and named the price a sign that Ponyville was busy enough to be proud of. The adjacency charge stayed on the receipt. A note from her office, passed down to the yard after the ribbon, asked Wick to hold the ceremonial column at the dawn price of three bits and eight coppers. Three and eight was the old record. Four and six, the note said, belonged to ordinary commerce, because the ceremonial window closes when the ribbon falls. Ordinary commerce would be written into the next morning's book.
Wick chalked nothing back. The window price stayed at four bits and six coppers, plus the eleven. Colter's receipt kept the four, the sum that left his hoof at the window. He folded it once, put it in the same pocket as his ballot stub, and bought the second cask the press still needed. The band had started the march it was hired to play whenever the line slowed. Across the rope, the dawn figure of three bits and eight coppers was already being copied into the book the mayor's note had asked for, which would let the town say that Choosing Day had set a record and that the record was the smaller number.
