Tance Trodder's boots had to work to stir a cloud of excitement from the well-packed street. Despite the packed earth of the thoroughfare running the length of the town between the wooden boardwalks—like everything else in this booming "modern west"—Trodder was coated in a thin coat of dust from boots to hat.

Not that it would matter, even if Tance had ever been the kind of man to mind such a detail. Nothing but the moon shuffling gradually west (as if it too were searching for a fool's lot of gold) and one of those new sputtering gas streetlights did anything to offer relief to the black purity of the night. Besides, as far as Tance could tell, there was no one to witness him in the execution of his particular line of work apart from the stranger entering east at the edge of town. And it was that stranger, guiding a ware-worn chestnut mare by a hard-used leather lead, who was most likely to be the focus of his specific occupation this night.

Tance Trodder preferred to do his work by the apathetic light of the stars.

Gripping the smooth handle of his tool of trade, flexing the muscles of his callused hands until he felt at one with the simple machine, Tance reflected—and not for the first time—how his was a work that needed no audience. Standing in the middle of the near-deserted road, watching the oncoming stranger ambling into his town, that familiar feeling of anticipation stole over him.

Sometimes at moments like these, when Tance was feeling particularly introspective (although this was a word Tance Trodder would never recognize if heard over the course of any conversation), he worried that despite the sheath of night that usually hid him at his work, he might still have an audience made up of the one person he least wanted to think might be privy to his actions. Never a very proud man, with nary much reason for pride in his life and comfortable with that fact, Tance nevertheless always felt a sense of reddening shame at the thought his Mama—God rest her in His peace—might be looking down and seeing him going about the way he made his living.

His was a work his Mama would never have approved. She had aspired for good things, if not great, on his behalf. His Mama who knew him and loved him was aware he didn't have as much trappings upstairs as many other boys his age. Instead, the life he had chosen was one that by its very necessity immersed itself in the very excrement of this world.

But now wasn't much the time for such considerations. As the stranger moved closer, crossing into town, Tance took his own step forward, closing the distance a heartbeat at a time. As the man came even with the first of the town's Inns, Tance stepped forward, placing the General Goods to his left. As the stranger advanced to the darkened Sheriff's Office, Tance put the batwing doors of the saloon to his back. The man had spurs to his boots, and with each step the ching, ching danced across the breeze to Tance's ears, sounding with each chime like the music of two coins ringing together. The horse keeping pace nickered at the sound, antsy in the knowledge of their purpose. The exhalations of her flaring nostrils were visible in the rapidly cooling desert air, and discomfiture was plain in her large eyes.

The moment of Tance's purpose was nearing. He had a sense for these things; it was his knack in life. Not the most worthy of knacks, but it was what he had. What he was.

He stopped in the street, shifting his weight and readying his hand on his tool of trade. The other man advanced another two paces, but then his horse shied up, planting her rear legs and centering her weight under her croup, and the man settled his own advance just eight or nine strides short of Tance. The two men looked at each other under the maternal moonlight for a pregnant pause.

And then the mare raised her tail by the dock and let go with her breed's particular brand of fertilizer. The manure hit the packed dirt with a flat plop, and four or five pounds lighter she shifted her weight back to her shoulders and, thus relieved, started forward again. Once more heading west to the far end of town, where the second and better of the two Inns kept itself, the stranger greeted Tance as he passed him in the dark.

"H'lo."

"'Lo," Tance offered back, drawling out the word as automatically as he now gripped the haft of his shovel, just as he had a thousand times before and would a thousand times hence, bending at last to his work.