Mercator stayed around for a few days but then he left and took his praxinoscope with him. He had a little wagon and a single, patient horse with eyes kinder than its owner’s. The kid ran into him only once after the shadow show. Mercator was drunk and pissing against the side of the town hall when the kid passed by, after dusk. Mercator’s shadow, like a grotesque extension of its owner, danced beside the man. For some reason the kid did not wish to step on or near it. He skipped around the dancing shadow and hurried away from there. For a moment the shadow felt almost alive.

The kid read whatever penny books or periodicals came through. His mother was not a voracious reader but she tolerated this habit. He rode horses and he played Hangman’s Bluff and Juggler’s Ball and Ghost in the Graveyard and, of course, they all played at clowns.

He was quite a happy little kid, for a while.

This all changed after the Rasmussen Gang rode into town.

But the Kid did not want to think about that now. In fact, he realised, he did not want to think about much of anything. A pleasant lassitude of thought prevailed on him. The featureless grey plains seemed never to change and the track just led on and on and on into the distance.

At last he saw something just ahead. He made for it, with that same sort of languor, and soon he saw that it was a small town, really just a collection of several buildings where the track terminated. A train stood at the end of the track with many of its windows broken and heavily sustained damage to its sides, but how it came to that state, or what it was doing there, he had no idea. It was then that a man wearing a conductor’s uniform came in his way, and the Kid looked at him with some surprise. The man held an official-looking clipboard in his hands and he looked at the Kid and he looked at the clipboard and he ticked something off on the page.

He said, “You’re late.”

“I am?” the Kid said.

“Come with me,” the conductor said. The Kid followed him meekly. I must be very late, he thought. There was a clock, somewhere nearby, and it kept ticking and ticking.

The conductor led him past the clock tower and into the plain beyond the town. As they walked, the Kid saw a group of passengers standing around in a patch of dug earth. He didn’t know why he thought they were passengers. Perhaps it was that they seemed ill-suited for the purpose to which they’d been put. The men wore hats and suits and of the women, some wore dresses and some riding pants, but all of them held spades.

They were digging in the hard ground.