Jim Nashe, a retired fireman who has just inherited a fortune and weathered a divorce, enjoys a rare freedom to buy a new car and wander the country at his own pace. His easygoing drift is interrupted when he picks up a hitchhiker, Jack Pozzi, a sharp-tisted professional gambler who has just suffered a devastating reverse: his latest poker game was robbed, he was blamed for the loss, and he was beaten. With his bankroll wiped, Pozzi cannot even meet the minimum buy-in to face a pair of eccentric old millionaires he once outplayed. Seeing an opportunity, Nashe offers to back Pozzi with $10,000 for a rematch, sparking a reckless alliance built on risk and curiosity.
The targets of this high-stakes gamble are the two wealthy men who share a sprawling estate, Bill Flower and Willy Stone. They are men of wit and wealth, not easily fooled, and what begins as a game of wits quickly reveals itself as a deeper test of nerve and loyalty. The rematch starts badly for Pozzi, but Flower and Stone swing back with precision, draining the initial stake and forcing Nashe to ante more with his beloved car. Pozzi loses again, leaving Nashe to put up the car itself as collateral for more chips, a gamble that reveals just how far Nashe is willing to go to keep the game alive.
The agreement grows stranger still: if Pozzi and Nashe win a single round of cards, Nashe would recover the car; if they lose, they owe $10,000. Nashe loses that final bet in a moment of tense calm, sealing their debt in straight terms. With the money owed, Flower and Stone propose a new, methodical form of repayment: fifty days of labor to build a wall from ten thousand large stones—stones said to come from a 15th‑century castle. The men are supervised by a pragmatic foreman, Calvin Murks, who keeps a watchful eye on their progress and on Pozzi’s temper.
As days pass, Nashe works with steady focus, while Pozzi sinks into despondency, feeling reduced to a servant rather than a partner. The tension between the two grows when Pozzi takes offense at a cutting remark from Murks and lashes out, an act that prompts Murks to begin showing up to the site armed. The power dynamic shifts as Pozzi tries to escape, believing Nashe will join him, while Nashe insists on finishing the project. One night, Pozzi attempts to slip through a fence and vanish, offering to call Nashe’s family if he is successful. The next dawn, Nashe finds Pozzi badly beaten and unconscious outside his shack; Murks claims Pozzi has been taken to a hospital, but Nashe remains skeptical of the story.
Murks then takes Nashe out for drinks with his son-in-law, Floyd, and a casual pool game turns into a small financial handshake. Nashe wins a mere $50, and in a rare moment of generosity asks Floyd to spend it on Murks’s family, a gesture that Murks later uses to test Nashe’s loyalties. Before the ride back, Nashe asks to reclaim Murks’s car, and Floyd agrees to get Murks’s approval. The drive ends in tragedy: Nashe accelerates, Murks cries out in alarm as a motorbike closes in, and the car crashes, killing Floyd and Murks. Wounded, Nashe staggers away along the road, where a passing driver—played by cameo appearance by Paul Auster—offers a lift. In the final, quiet moment, Nashe tells the stranger that he plans to head to Minnesota and asks to be taken to the nearest payphone, leaving the fate of the debt and the men who chased it uncertain but clearly altered forever.
