After twenty-four hours on the road, Garraty tightens his food belt and tries to delay eating even as the other boys celebrate with their concentrates. McVries quietly tells Garraty that, if he had to bet on anyone, he might bet on Garraty to win, but also says he would never choose to do the Walk again because it is almost suicide. Olson agrees in a hollow, unnerving way. Soon the walkers pass a banner marking one hundred miles, and they enter the first truly enormous crowd of the Walk.

The spectacle overwhelms Garraty. The cheering, signs, faces, and absurd details in the crowd strike him as unbearably funny, and he falls into a fit of hysterical laughter that costs him warnings and nearly his life. McVries drags him upright twice, slaps him back into control, and keeps him moving until Garraty recovers enough wind to stay alive. During the aftermath, Frank Morgan is shot, Olson bitterly accuses McVries of wrongdoing for saving Garraty, and McVries dismisses him, telling Garraty that he only paid back a debt and that they are now even.

As the day grows hotter, the crowd remains almost continuous, turning into one anonymous, hungry public face that Garraty quickly comes to hate. Wanting to understand what is happening around him, Garraty drops back to walk with Stebbins. Stebbins explains that the heaviest spectator pressure and television coverage are held back until later because too much crowding too early would break the walkers faster. He also says that eventually the crowd stops mattering because each walker must mentally burrow inward until he reaches his own deepest limit. Another walker dies off to the side of this conversation, and Garraty watches the soldiers casually raise a sun umbrella over their halftrack, a small comfort that enrages the boys.

Garraty moves back up to McVries, near Barkovitch, who keeps taunting everyone. McVries makes clear that he saved Garraty once but will not do it again. Then a redheaded boy breaks down completely, stops in the road, begs for mercy, and rushes toward the halftrack; a soldier smashes his hands with a carbine butt, the vehicle runs over his legs, and he is finally shot while still being warned. Horrified, Garraty babbles about Jan and home, and McVries steadies him by drawing him into conversation about love and the scar on his face.

McVries finally tells the story. The scar came from his relationship with Priscilla, a girl he loved intensely and followed to a summer job in a New Jersey pajama factory. He worked badly at a brutal piecework job, earned less than she did, grew ashamed and resentful, and watched romance curdle into money worries, sexual frustration, and mutual bitterness. After a fight at work and a failed attempt to get Priscilla to leave with him, McVries lashed out at her, tried to force intimacy, and Priscilla slashed his face with a letter-opener, leaving him with twelve stitches. McVries says that distance has reduced Priscilla to almost nothing in his mind and admits the affair was probably only an excuse, not the real reason he entered the Walk. When he asks Garraty why he is here, Garraty cannot answer, and McVries closes by telling him that, before he dies, he ought to understand that he has been had.