The Case Keeper

The deed is signed, witnessed, sealed and recorded. It is also impossible - and the only man who can prove it deals cards for four dollars a night.Argenta, Colorado. 1882. Four thousand men, one tired sheriff, and a burying ground growing faster than the assay office.Ezra Tallow has kept case at the Green Lumber Hall’s faro table for eleven years. He is the public memory of the deck - what fell, in what order, how many remain - and in eleven years he has never once been wrong. He carries no gun. Nobody in that camp could pick him out of a line of three, and he has spent a decade making sure of it.Then a clerk stands up in the street and reads out a recorded deed that hands a working silver claim to a Denver speculator over a faro debt, and Ezra stops walking in the middle of a sentence.The deed names the ace of spades falling to the bank on the sixth turn. It names the ace of spades again as the last card in the box. There is one ace of spades in a deck of cards.The man who lost the claim cannot read the paper that took it. The recorder says a gambler’s private notebook is not evidence - and he is right. The lawyer says a false story in a deed does not void a good signature - and he is right too. Every door Ezra tries is locked by men who are correct.And the speculator’s notary is already riding out to the camp with a pleasant manner, a state commission, and a cooper’s mallet.By the end of it a witness is face down in eleven inches of creek water. A drifter takes sixteen minutes to die on a four-foot drop for a murder Ezra can prove he did not commit. A miner’s hands are broken flat on a windlass frame. The county’s entire recorded title goes up at two in the morning, and the honest man who runs back in for it does not come out.What Ezra Tallow has left is thirty-one bound volumes, a burned hand that will not close, and one room in Colorado where his word still settles an argument.So that is where he takes it. One sealed deck. One table. Four hundred witnesses who bet for a living and can count.I keep the record. I do not argue the record. It says what fell.A hard-edged historical western thriller. 24 chapters, about 52,000 words - full length, standalone, no cliffhanger.A hero with no gun, no fists and no allies - and one skill nobody can argue withA villain who never raises his voice, never forges what he can buy, and never touches anybody himselfA counting proof any reader can follow cold, taught at the table in chapter onePeriod-exact faro, mining law, mechanic’s liens and water rights, worn lightlyNo romance subplotBook 4 of the Chuckwagon series. Every book stands alone and can be read in any order.Content note: this is the gritty end of the genre. Graphic violence, a lynching, torture, strong period language, and eight on-page deaths. All characters, mines, companies and events are invented.