The paired crossing stood tied at marker fourteen at twenty minutes past five, with six miles of the posted trail still under the trees and about seventy minutes of usable light left on the slope. Dark reaches that chute around six-thirty this week. Saltglass Column spent the last of that light on a spit allegation. Vesper Quill, boss of the Reed Company, stood at the trailhead and said she was delighted.
The bounty board in town had sold the day as a paired exhibition. Two companies, one ribbon, times kept to the half-minute, and a bonus if the finish could be filed as level. The posting called the timber an opportunity. Nopony from the board walked the line. The sheet shows a picnic symbol at the ninth switchback and the words firm ground.
The ground there is a clay chute about twice a pony's height, slick since the melt. Nell Harrow of the Reed Company came down it wrong. Her left fetlock turned. She sat and pulled the dish towel she carries for wraps. Torven Ash, a Saltglass outrider, came off the same slope on his feet, stopped over her, and spat. Harrow says the spit struck the towel. The Saltglass steward, writing on the back of the score card, entered the line as "moisture, disputed, non-scoring."
"It was warm when it hit," Harrow said. She was still on the clay, boot off, towel knotted over the joint. "I hired on for thirty-six bits and a walk home. The towel was for a sprain. It can do one job."
A heron worked the ditch about forty yards below the chute and stayed there. It stabbed one pocket of brown water, brought up a frog, swallowed, and stabbed the same pocket again. Saltglass mentioned the bird in its first statement. Reed Company mentioned the bird in its second. The heron kept at the frogs.
Quill gave her account at the trailhead. Her boots were clean. The ribbon copy was already in her satchel. A runner had brought the score up from marker fourteen: two watches, three minutes apart, averaged on the card and entered as shared time. That average triggers the level-file bonus. Marker eighteen, the posted end, stayed six miles ahead. Both companies stayed put once the average was on the card.
"Delighted," Quill said. "A level sheet against Saltglass is a result we'll take. Get it to the office before the light goes."
Bramble Stitch met the companies at first light and walked with them as far as her gate, two miles short of the chute. She has kept the cabin at the edge for nineteen years. She stopped at the gate because the posted line leaves the path she uses and drops into the clay.
"Ponies who live here take the roots above that chute," Stitch said. She kept splitting the pile. "The sheet draws through a hill that bends. I told their runner while he still had dry hooves. He checked a whistle against his clock and went on."
Ash's denial came through his captain, Maren Calder, from the same trailhead bench as Quill. Calder said Ash cleared his throat into a crosswind and the crosswind finished the work. She said Saltglass would answer questions in town. The board opened a conduct file before supper. Penny Ledger, who keeps both books, said the file would be heard on Thursday in the board room, eleven miles from the chute and up one flight of stairs.
"The timber is still an opportunity," Ledger said. "Conduct sits in the other book. The tie is clean enough to pay tonight."
The level bonus is eighty bits, split by the posting across both companies, on top of the day rate. The day rate was thirty-six bits a head for a finished crossing. The crossing finished on paper at marker fourteen. By the time the relay carried Quill's statement to town, the usable light was off the ninth switchback. Harrow was still sitting on it. The heron had moved one ditch downstream, and the picnic symbol on the sheet still read firm ground.
Ash stayed on the bench until Calder had the card copied twice. He did not walk back to the chute. A Saltglass runner came down with a folding stretcher and a chit for four bits, due if the canvas left the pack. Harrow told him to take it uphill.
The board's night clerk entered the tie under exhibition results and the spit under conduct, two lines, two books. The whistle the runner had checked against his clock was still in his vest. It had not been blown at the chute.
