Once more was the much-enduring telegraph boy among those present.
'T'ree dis time!' he observed.
Gossett sprang, but again the watchful Sigsbee was too swift.
'Be brave, Gossett—be brave,' he said. 'This is a crisis in the game. Keep your nerve. Play just as if nothing existed outside the links. To look at these telegrams now would be fatal.'
Eye-witnesses of that great encounter will tell the story of the last hole to their dying day. It was one of those Titanic struggles which Time cannot efface from the memory. Archibald was fortunate in getting a good start. He only missed twice before he struck his ball on the tee. Gossett had four strokes ere he achieved the feat. Nor did Archibald's luck desert him in the journey to the green. He was out of the bunker in eleven.
Gossett emerged only after sixteen. Finally, when Archibald's twenty-first stroke sent the ball trickling into the hole, Gossett had played his thirtieth.
The ball had hardly rested on the bottom of the hole before Gossett had begun to tear the telegrams from their envelopes. As he read, his eyes bulged in their sockets.
'Not bad news, I hope,' said a sympathetic bystander.
Sigsbee took the sheaf of telegrams.
The first ran: 'Good luck. Hope you win. McCay.' The second also ran: 'Good luck. Hope you win. McCay.' So, singularly enough, did the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh.