"That's a promise!" cried Ambrose. "One down, eh? Where do we go from here?"
IV
Our team veterans did not lack sympathetic encouragement on the last nine holes, and all four matches tightened up to such an extent that we wavered between hope and fear until Crane's final putt on the seventeenth green dropped us into the depths of despair.
Gilmore, setting the pace with Jordan, gave us early encouragement by maintaining a safe lead throughout and winning his match, 3 to 2. First blood was ours, but the period of rejoicing was a short one; for the deliberate Lounsberry, approaching and putting with heartbreaking accuracy, disposed of Bishop on the seventeenth green.
"One apiece," said Doc Pinkinson. "Now what's Elder doing?"
The Elder-Smathers match came to Number Seventeen all square; but our man ended the suspense by dropping a beautiful mashie pitch dead to the pin from a distance of one hundred yards. Smathers' third shot also reached the green; but his long putt went wide and Elder tapped the ball into the cup, adding a second victory to our credit.
"It's looking better every minute!" chirped the irrepressible Doc Pinkinson. "Now if Moreman can lick his man we're all hunky-dory. If he loses—good-a-by, cup! No use figuring on that red-headed snipe of a kid. MacNeath has sent him to the cleaner's by now, sure!"
The gallery waited at the seventeenth green, watching in anxious silence as Crane and Moreman played their pitch shots over the guarding bunker. Both were well on in threes; but the Bellevue caddie impudently held his forefinger in the air as a sign that his man was one up. Moreman made a good try, but his fourth shot stopped a few inches from the cup; and Crane, after studying the roll of the green for a full minute, dropped a forty-foot putt for a four—and dropped our spirits with it.
"That settles it!" wheezed Daddy Bradshaw. "No need to bother about that other match.... Oh, if Anderson was so set on breaking his leg, why didn't he wait till to-morrow?"
"Then he could have busted 'em both," remarked the unfeeling Pinkinson, "and nobody would have said a word. Might's well pay those bets, I reckon. We got as much chance as that snowball they're always talking about. If it didn't melt, somebody would eat it."