Gage

He says there is now no way they can gage the election's validity or contest the results.

Great debts / Wherein my time, sometimes too prodigal, / Hath left me gaged.

O doe not goe, this feaſt (I'le gage my life) / Is but a plot to trayne you to your ruine, / Be rul'd, you ſha'not goe.

A moiety competent / Was gaged by our king.

“But it is enough that I challenge the trial by combat — there lies my gage.” She took her embroidered glove from her hand, and flung it down before the Grand Master with an air of mingled simplicity and dignity…

"I'm nothing of the sort," exclaimed the MacQuibble, hurling down the gage of battle at once.

The gage was down for a duel that would split the Democratic party and ensure the election of a Republican president in 1860.

[I]t seemed to create a sort of material link between the Princess and himself, and at the end of three months it almost appeared to him, not that the exquisite book was an intended present from his own hand, but that it had been placed in that hand by the most remarkable woman in Europe.... [T]he superior piece of work he had done after seeing her last, in the immediate heat of his emotion, turned into a kind of proof and gage, as if a ghost, in vanishing from sight, had left a palpable relic.

Of course, I take a bang or some mud in coffee now and then, and I pick up on gage right smart.

Black faces, white tablecloth, gleaming very sharp knives lined up by the saucers... tobacco and "gage" smoke richly blended, eye-reddening and tart as wine, yowzah gwine smoke a little ob dis hyah sheeit gib de wrinkles in mah brain a proccess!