"No!"
"He has, I tell you."
"I don't believe it," said Waddles. "He may be all kinds of a chump, but he wouldn't do that."
The Old Guard didn't believe it either. It must have been all of three weeks before Totten and Woodson and Miller realised that Peacock was a deserter, that he was deliberately avoiding them. At first they accepted his lame excuses at face value, and when doubt began to creep in they said the thing couldn't be possible. One day they waited for him and brought matters to a showdown. Henry wriggled and twisted and squirmed, and finally blurted out that he had made other arrangements. That settled it, of course; and then instead of being angry or disgusted with Henry they seemed to pity him, and from the beginning to the end I am quite certain that not one of them ever took the renegade to task for his conduct. Worse than everything else they actually missed him. It was Frank Woodson, acting as spokesman for the others, who explained the situation to me.
"Oh, about Henry? Well, it's this way: We've all got our little peculiarities—Lord knows I've a few of my own. I never would have thought this could happen, but it just goes to show how a man gets a notion crossways in his head and jams up the machinery. Henry is all right at heart. His head is a little out of line at present, but his heart is O. K. You see, he won that cup and it gave him a wrong idea. He really thinks that under certain conditions he can play back to that eighty-two. I know he can't. We all know he can't; but let him go ahead and try it. He'll get over this little spell and be a good dog again."
The Bish, who was present, suggested that the Old Guard should elect a new member and forget the deserter.
"No-o," said Frank thoughtfully; "that wouldn't be right. We've talked it over, the three of us, and we'll keep his place open for him. Confound it, man! You don't realise that we've been playing together for more than fifteen years! We understand each other, and we used to have more fun than anybody, just dubbing round the course. The game doesn't seem quite the same, with Henry out of it; and I don't think he's having a very good time, hanging on the fringe of Class A and trying to butt in where he isn't wanted. No; he'll come back pretty soon, and everything will be just the same again. We've all got our little peculiarities, Bish. You've got some. I've got some. The best thing is to be charitable and overlook as much as you can, hoping that folks will treat you the same way."
"And that," said Bish after Jumbo had gone away, "proves the statement that a friend is 'a fellow who knows all about you and still stands for you.' How long do you suppose they'll have to wait before that old imbecile regains his senses?"
They waited for at least five months, during which time H. Peacock, Esquire, enrolled himself as the prize pest of the golfing world. The Class-B men, resenting his treatment of the Old Guard, were determined not to let him break into one of their foursomes, and the Class-A men wouldn't have him at any price. The game of pussy-wants-a-corner is all right for children, but Henry, playing it alone, did not seem to find it entertaining. He picked up a stranger now and then, but it wasn't the season for visitors, and even Uncle George Sawyer shied when he saw Henry coming. The stubbornness which led him to insist that his handicap be cut would not permit him to hoist the white flag and return to the fold, and altogether he had a wretched time of it—almost as bad a time as he deserved. Left to himself he became every known variety of a golfing nut. He saved his score cards, entering them on some sort of a comparative chart which he kept in his locker—one of those see-it-at-a-glance things. He took lessons of the poor professional; he bought new clubs and discovered that they were not as good as his old ones; he experimented with every ball on the market; and his game was neither better nor worse than it was before the Hemmingway Cup poured its poison into the shrivelled receptacle which passed for Henry Peacock's soul.