“That is too bad,” sighed Sly Fox. “I have an idea.”
So Sly Fox drove a tack into one of the balls, twisted a long piece of string around it and then drove the tack way down to the head.
“This string,” explained Hoot Owl, “is just as long as the field. You hit the ball with the club and the ball can’t get lost because it has a string tied to it.”
“That is very fine,” said the Bogey Man, wiping away his tears and taking a big drink of oatmeal water. “I wish you had thought about that before I bought those 999 balls.”
So they put the ball on the ground and gave the Bogey Man the ugliest and biggest club that they could find.
“Hit it hard, Bogey Man,” said Sly Fox, and then he stepped behind a tree.
“Yes, don’t be easy now,” screeched the Hoot Owl, and he flew up into the branches of the tree and put on his glasses.
The Bogey Man swung the club and struck the ball as hard as ever he could. The round thing went through the air so fast that you could hear it sing and when it got to the end of the field, it suddenly stopped. One end of the string was fastened to a sapling. The string kept stretching and stretching, until there was no more stretch in it and the ball fastened to the end of it came bounding back and struck the Bogey Man so hard in the nose that it knocked him right over. The poor Bogey Man dropped his club, and when he got on his feet again, he went away as fast as he could. Since that he has never been seen playing golf with anybody and the animals and snakes in Deacon Jones’ wood are happy. Some men from the city who saw Sly Fox and Hoot Owl playing thought it was really a good game and they went back and taught other people how to play it. Only instead of Sly Fox to find the balls they hired good little boys called caddies who always find the balls, no matter how far they go, and they never think of doing anything so dishonest as to charge twenty-five cents for the same ball over and over again.