The stage road runs west out of Chalk Wells and there is nothing on it for four days but grass, wind and the shale where the horses go lame.

The county posts no bounty for marksmanship. It pays for the man still standing when the dust settles. That is the entire law out here, and every man in FantasyWorld has had it read to him.

Bryan shot better this week than he has ever shot in his life.

He came up the street with the sun behind him and he did not waste a round. Everything he carried, he fired. Everything he fired, hit. When it was over there was not one cartridge left in his belt — not one, none, an empty loop where a spare should have been, because he had used the whole of what he owned.

164.56. The best day's shooting of his career, across seventy-six times he has stood in a street like this one.

It was also the second week running that he finished with nothing left over. A clean belt happens sixty-five times in a thousand and ten mornings out here. Bryan has now done it twice on the trot and been carried off both times.

Because Mario came up the other end of the street.

There was not a man in the territory Mario would have lost to that morning — nine of them out there, and he would have put every one of them in the dirt. He drew on the only one who had ever shot like this.

1.46.

That is the whole margin. That is what a life's best is worth in Chalk Wells.

They took Bryan's boots off in the street. Four in a row now, and 2-5, and there is still not a single mark against his shooting.

Mario walked into the land office with 990.40 taken out of this season, more than any man in the county, and signed his name to a 4-3.

Gabes rode out at first light with the wrong man in the saddle beside him.

A week ago he had left Kendrick Bourne asleep in the bunkhouse and paid for it. So this time he went in, woke Bourne, put him on a horse and took him along.

Bourne produced 1.9.

Behind the bunkhouse door, still asleep, Travis Hunter had 20.1 in him.

All told, Gabes left 33.6 in Chalk Wells. He has now made the same mistake in consecutive weeks with the same man at the centre of it, from opposite directions, which is no longer a bad morning. It is a habit.

He won by 23.74.

He won by 23.74 and climbed to second in the county, because the man he rode against was Nate, and Nate was the slowest thing on the plain. Every one of the nine other men would have beaten Nate this week. Every single one. He posted 106.26 and it goes down in the Ledger in red, and a man can go 0-9 against the field and still only lose the one fight that counts, which is the only mercy this country offers anybody.

Jack does not miss the slow ones.

He rode down Justin in open ground, 159.42 to 120.38, and Justin — who had not been beaten in five straight, who was sitting at the head of the table with the weather at his back — went down to third with dust in his teeth. Jack has taken five in a row now and sits 6-1.

Which brings us to the post.

At the county line there is a marker driven into the caliche, and burned into the wood is the figure 100. Two riders are standing at it.

Daniel has been at that post since last week. He needed one more crossing and he had Bill in front of him, and Bill has lost to Daniel most of the years they have both been alive, 3-6 across the whole of it.

Bill was waiting at the creek anyway, and he had Bo Nix with him.

Nix is a 17-a-day man. He put 40.96 on the ground.

Daniel went back down the road with 99 still on him. Bill took his third straight and is 4-3, and for once his powder went off in a fight that paid.

So Jack arrived at the marker in the same week, from the other direction, and stopped there too.

Two men. Same number. Neither past it.

And out beyond the last claim, in the part of the territory nobody rides to on purpose, Eric/Blakey buried the season's sixth body and then, at last, found somebody slower than they were.

Bolek came up the trail with 20.7 still packed in his saddlebags — food, water, ammunition, all of it strapped down and untouched while he starved in the open. He lost by 31.44. He is 1-6 and he wears the belt for it, and in fifty-four rides against the field he has come home ahead of thirteen.

Eric/Blakey are 1-6 as well. It took seven attempts and the weakest man in the county to get there, and they will take it, because out here a win is a win and nobody asks how you got it.

That is the point, and Bryan is the proof of it.

He fired everything he had. He hit everything he aimed at.

The county paid Mario.