He was interrupted by the Potent Noble, who had calmed down. "Git the hell out in the rough there and find that ball I sliced."
"Yes, suh." The Wildcat started out through the fog to find the freckled white sphere. He threshed around in the trees and underbrush for a while, and then to his mind came a memory of the horrible words which the Potent Noble had spoken. "This place was a graveyard!" The Wildcat shuddered extensively and abandoned the search for the golf ball.
He looked up, and there before him was a tombstone!
"Lawd Gawd, Lady Luck, whah is you?" Automatically his feet began to work, and they were aided an instant later by his racing legs. He went away from there through the fog. The next thing he knew, he had made a forty-foot dive over a sand bank. He rolled for a moment in the shifting sand before he brought up against a stunted cedar.
"Whah at is I?"
The fog cleared, and the Wildcat saw the sand dunes stretching below him. At the edge of the slope were the waves of the Golden Gate. Then the fog closed in again, and everything about him faded out of the picture. Above his head, out of the drifting fog, a flight of sea gulls started a little gossip. To the Wildcat's ears came their shrieking remarks. He stopped his wild shuddering and began to moan.
"'At's dem ghost boys! I know 'em! Lady Luck, take dem boys away. I ain't talkin' wid no ghosts." He turned and started up the bank. He began throwing sand out from under his feet like a record-busting rotary snow plough. His legs ran for ten minutes, but his wind was crippled, and in the shifting sand he covered a space of less than twenty feet. Exhausted with his effort, he flopped down on the sloping bank. "Dey's got me," he moaned, "dey's got me! I knowed it. I knowed dem graveyard ghosts would git me, once I gits divo'ced f'um dat mascot goat. Lady Luck, here I is!" The Wildcat curled up and covered his head with his arms.
He lay in repose for less than ten seconds; for suddenly, out of the fog in mid channel, came the booming siren whistle of a liner, heading out of the Golden Gate. "Whoom! Wha-om!"
The Wildcat moaned. "I heahs you, Gabriel, I heahs you! Heah I is, Lawd—heah I is."
"Whooom! We-ow-oom!"