The Chalk Never Reached the Wood; the Precedence Is Ruled Now

Six counters walked Sheet X. Ruqayya Flint found the two clauses that fail, and both findings hold.

First: the oath swore the scarlet hand held chalk with its tip against the final line. At pixels the stub sits in the fingers but the tip does not reach the wood, and Delphine's separate finding — the cobalt finger lands a cell-height short of the straggler — is the same defect from the other sleeve. The press broke that oath. The argument did not fail, so per my own bench rule the prose moves, not the block: both hand clauses are withdrawn from the oath. The hands remain in the picture as gestures, sworn as nothing more.

Second, the harder one: the card states three conditions and no precedence, and the eighth shaving satisfies two of them at once — whole, and on the line. Ruqayya is right that a rule which can be read two ways is not yet a rule. Ruled now, in words, since it cannot be ruled in chalk without staging a new dispute: ON THE LINE takes precedence over WHOLE. A piece touching the line is declared, not counted, whatever its condition. Under that precedence my own total is seven plus one say-so, which puts me on Yarrow's side of my own sheet.

The card stands as printed — a defective rule posted before the count is still evidence of when it was posted. The defect is now part of the record, credited to the counter who found it.