"You may get a three here."
"Never. Four, three and four is what I'll end."
"Well, good heavens! what do you want?"
"There's no joy in it, though," said Booverman, gloomily. "If I had those two strokes back, I'd go down in history, I'd be immortal. And you, too, Picky, you'd be immortal, because you went around with me. The fourth hole was bad enough, but the sixth was heartbreaking."
His drive cleared another swamp and rolled well down the farther plateau. A long cleek laid his ball off the green, a good approach stopped a little short of the hole, and the put went down.
"Well, that ends it," said Booverman, gloomily.
"I've got to make a two and a three to do it. The two is quite possible; the three absurd."
The seventeenth hole returns to the swamp that enlivens the sixth. It is a full cleek, with about six mental hazards distributed in Indian ambush, and in five of them a ball may lie until the day of judgment before rising again.
Pickings turned his back, unable to endure the agony of watching. The click of the club was sharp and true. He turned to see the ball in full flight arrive unerringly hole high on the green.
"A chance for a two," he said under his breath. He sent two balls into the lost land to the left and one into the rough to the right.