“It won’t do any good,” he said, sagely. “That bull won’t go back until he follows the cows at milking time. He might quit before that—I dunno. I’ll do what I can though.” And with a laconic chirrup to his nag, he departed in the direction of the Van Westervelts’ farmyard.
The party of three followed him with their eyes until he had disappeared in a cloud of dust and then examined the apple-tree from which the Sphynx’s legs dangled hopelessly. The rest of him was hidden among the leaves.
“Until the cows come home,” said Patricia, solemnly, and looking into one another’s eyes all three of them burst into shameless laughter. And with that laugh free-masonry was established. It was plainly to be read in Aurora’s eyes. The toppling of Jimmy’s dignity had been too much for her own sense of gravity.
Patricia meanwhile had taken out her watch. “This, my dear children,” she said, indicating with a fine gesture, the Sphynx’s apple-tree, “is one of the hazards of the New Game of Golf. There is only an hour and a half to finish in. Play the game, you two, I must wait.”
“It wouldn’t be the sporting thing,” said Steve, struggling with a desire to obey.
“I’d like to know who is as good a judge of the rules of a game as its inventor,” said Patricia. “Am I right, Aurora?”
Aurora by this time was fingering at the strap of Ventnor’s golf bag. “Yes,” she decided, “as Patricia says, it’s in the game.”
Steve glanced at her quickly, joyfully, but her head was lowered and she was already down the steps of the stile and walking along the road toward the adjoining meadow. Ventnor’s eyes met Patricia’s for the fraction of a second of wireless telegraphy, after which Steve plunged down the steps and followed his caddy.
The gabled roof of Augustus North’s house was visible above the trees scarcely half a mile away, but the paper chase led to it by devious, sequestered ways, which Steve Ventnor and his caddy scrupulously followed. Many times on the way they stopped in the shadow of the trees, and but a few minutes of time remained when Steve ran down his putt. It had taken him just one hundred and three shots to do that last nine hundred yards in an hour and forty minutes. His caddy counted them; which only went to prove her a conscientious person, for under the circumstances book-keeping was a difficult matter.