This time we were cautious—there could be no question about that. We were still confident, but were running no risks. Half a dozen times did we change our grip. For a full minute we wobbled the club about the ball, picking out the exact spot where we were going to hit it. Then slowly we brought the club back, higher and higher. Keeping our eye glued with maniacal intensity on the globule, we finally made a tremendous swipe at it and—carefully cut the sand from under it, so that it came down kerplunk! We had driven it just two inches—straight down. Bjones said nothing. There are times when silence is more precious than radium. And the caddy—the caddy was beyond speech.
We don't know how we finally managed to persuade the ball to vacate the tee and seek the green expanse of the valley below. But we did at last, and stumbled down the hill after it with vengeance in our eye. Selecting the ugliest-looking iron club in the bag Bjones had given us, we remorselessly drove that ball and a number of sods right up to the edge of the green—in eight, we believe. Or was it eighteen?
"Now, a nice little tap, a wrist-shot," said Bjones, who had holed out and had smoked half a cigar in the meantime.
It was a nice little tap. Tearing a hole in the flag and just missing the caddy's head by a fraction of an inch, that perverted pellet plunged screaming into an oak-forest, where it buried itself and will probably in the course of time grow into a cork-and-rubber plant.
"Hard luck, old man," Bjones murmured. But there was something very wistful in his smile. You see, that ball was brand new, and had cost Bjones just one dollar. The next ball he gave us was not quite so new—not by several gashes.
We have no intention of going into all the painful details of that game. Suffice it to state that after three hours of play and seven balls we had made eight holes. We didn't count our strokes. It would require one of those patent calculating machines that can add up three columns of figures at a time. When we hit the ball a good wallop, it invariably sought refuge in the woods or in a creek. The rest of the time it just dribbled along.
"Your game isn't so bad," said Bjones in answer to our apologies, "if you could only get it distributed properly. The trouble seems to be that you do all your putting from the tee and on the fairway, and all your driving on the green. If you could only reverse that, you would be a real winner." But, of course, that was precisely what we couldn't do.
One hole was an especially depressing experience. The tee is on the edge of a cliff, at the foot of which a little bubbling brook burbles beauteously. Now, any human being with the full use of one leg could kick a golf-ball over that stream without the slightest difficulty. So could we. But we made the mistake of going at it with a driver. We swung with savage determination, nicked the ball neatly on top, and had the pleasure of seeing it describe a pretty parabola and plunge with a gurgle to a watery grave. That, if we remember well, was the fourth ball. Of course, about thirty or forty pairs went "through" us. That is, some sixty or eighty gentlemen in more or less mussy garments came up behind us, watched us cynically, and then with grins more or less politely disguised went on ahead. Again and again, when we had just made a wicked drive of several yards, a fat duffer old enough to be one of our remote ancestors, with a red face and a girth that indicated years of reckless indulgence in pork and port, would come along, watch us for a moment, and then, growling apologetically, would drive like a rifle-bullet straight for the green we wouldn't reach for half an hour. And we have always rather fancied our lithe and athletic build!—or so we like to describe it.
Bjones was awfully decent about the whole thing. Bjones is a thorough-bred. He kept framing excuses for us, blaming the clubs he loaned us and the clothes he had induced us to wear. He even spoke harshly of the state of the turf in several places. We must admit that it did look pretty rough—after we got through with it.
In the end even he fell silent—that was when we had broken the second club. Unbroken gloom settled like a pall on our soul. We were too depressed even to swear. Besides, we had used up all the expressions we had been treasuring up for a time of mental stress, and we ceased to find consolation in the repetition.