With the careless slouch and bored manner of someone long used to freedom's luxuries, the young man picked up his drink and approached Hendley's table. "Join you?" he murmured. "You look as if you've been enjoying your first day in camp."
"It's been quite a day," Hendley admitted. "There's so much to see and do."
"That's the usual reaction," the other said, faintly patronizing.
Hendley flushed. With a self-conscious laugh he said, half-defensively, "I didn't say it was all good."
The stranger was surprised. "Now that's unusual."
"Well, I've seen some peculiar things," said Hendley. "Even that water polo match where you fished me out—by the way, I didn't have a chance to thank you properly." The young man brushed aside his gratitude. Hendley went on talking. "They play kind of rough. One of those men came out with a broken arm. It's hardly what you'd call playing for fun."
The young man raised a quizzical eyebrow—one only in an exaggerated arch. The controlled boredom of his expression was deceptive. His face was in fact remarkably expressive, but each reaction seemed deliberately languid. He was, Hendley guessed, several years younger than Hendley's own thirty-three years, but he gave the impression of a sophisticated worldliness which Hendley could not approach.
"You call hurting people fun?" Hendley demanded.
The young man smiled lazily. "Some people do."
A sudden, vivid image of a golf club, glinting in the sun as it slashed down in a vicious arc toward a limp figure on the green, jolted Hendley. The defenses which he had built up with drink and reason to contain that demoralizing reality abruptly shattered. "There was something else," he said soberly. "Maybe you can help me—it's something that happened today in a game. It—it's hard to believe, but it did happen!"