The call-out on Saturday's pitch ledger stood at thirty-six bits before anypony filled in the reason. That is two town guards at eighteen bits an hour, one-hour minimum, already attached when Constable Bracken Hill stepped onto the clover. The description line stayed blank until evening. A clerk then wrote: foal, age three, one goal.
Moth Cotter is three. Sable Cotter, the dam, pays eighteen bits a season so the foal can stand on the town pitch with the other three-year band. She sells tack from a stall on Market Row. On Saturday Moth scored once. The chest-glass, released by the watch desk after the Pulse asked for the hour, shows the score. The foal walked the ball in backward, sat down in the goal, and ate a clover. Both sidelines cheered. Lark Spinner reported that play to the guard as an unregistered professional.
Spinner keeps a foal on the north side. She told the dispatch pony the south side had "brought a finisher" and asked for a birth scroll and a constable. On the glass, Hill asks for the scroll. Sable Cotter takes it from a saddlebag that also holds a needle tin and two unpaid invoices. Moth Cotter offers the constable the clover. Hill's report records the foal's fastest movement as a walk.
"I paid the eighteen in bits I had set aside for thread," Sable Cotter said. "They can watch the glass. He sits on the ball. If sitting is a skill, they can bill the grass."
Ponyville Property Pros holds the pitch lease. The permit the Foal Pitch Board signs each spring sends any "extraordinary attendance" back to the permit holder as a bill. A guard on the clover counts. Marigold Fineprint, who posts the facility invoices, sent the thirty-six-bit surcharge to the board before supper, with a two-bit parchment fee on the same slip.
"The lease is the lease," Fineprint said. "We grade whether the watch came onto the parcel. The watch came."
Pellamy Voss chairs the Foal Pitch Board. His note to families called Moth's goal a disruption to the purchased balance of the hour and said the board would reassess eligibility against developmental norms. The same note splits the surcharge across participating households in the spirit of the season's synergy. Twelve households stand on the two sides. The split, before anypony argues over the parchment fee, comes to three bits a family. Sable Cotter's household is on the list. Spinner's household is on the list. The season book the Pulse read lists ribbons at sixty bits, juice at twenty-two, and a May guest speaker at forty. The guard is absent from the book.
"Families purchase a balanced hour," Voss said. "One finisher, however small, moves the hour off what we sold. The share is how we hold the standard we advertised."
Voss has yet to name who on the board suggested the guard. The birth scroll gives the date. Sable Cotter's receipt shows the same eighteen bits as every south-side receipt the Pulse was shown.
Constable Hill works that sheet. Spinner asked him to stay and watch Moth at match speed, and the glass runs twelve minutes past the hour. In those minutes Moth lies sideways, the ball sits where it stopped, and a north-side foal trots past and misses. Hill's partner kept the same extra minutes from the east touchline. The watch book rounds a resident-requested extension up to the next full hour. Applied here, that is another thirty-six bits. Fineprint has the first slip out. The second slip is the line the board hopes to leave blank until Thursday.
"I get the same bits for a lock or a foal," Hill said. "Put the time on the watch book. She already paid to stand here."
Mayor Pippin Pines said the guard answers when a resident asks for the guard. She confirmed both slips, if the second posts, land in the general watch account. That account also pays the evening round on Market Row. The round passes Sable Cotter's stall after dark.
The board meets Thursday to vote on Moth Cotter's place in the band and on whether families will share one surcharge or two. The ribbon line still reads sixty bits, unspent. At Monday's open, Sable Cotter's copy of the first surcharge was on the stall counter, clipped to the thread order she had yet to pay.
