Eventually the eighteenth hole was reached, after a game that I should normally consider exciting, since my adversary and I were all square at the seventeenth. But this morning it struck me as colourless. Here, however, his second shot—full with the cleek—was short, and he went into the sandpan guarding the green, across which I had jumped in my outward journey, and walked through on my return. I stopped on the edge of the bunker, for I had warned him he could not be up, having myself played a full shot landing just over it. Upon which this accursed man took his niblick, and amid a shower of sand lay nearly dead.
‘Curious,’ says he.
Meantime I had been examining the sand, and saw there the trace of a bare foot.
‘There’s something much more curious than any shot of yours close by you,’ said I. ‘Look; do you see the trace of a naked foot close by you on the sand?’
He looked.
‘By God,’ he said, ‘let me putt first.’
He missed it. So I had two for the hole and won.