"I'm going after your ball. Don't you want it?"
The youngster's impertinence was so marked that a stranger who was standing beside me was moved to nearly uncontrollable merriment. When I turned and stared at him he offered what he possibly meant for an explanation.
"I fancy you'll find your caddie's right, sir; you sent your ball in that direction."
Refraining from a reply--the man was beneath my notice--I strode on after the boy. On and on we went, and the farther we went the farther we were from Hollis and the others.
"It must have been a tremendous hit," I observed, "if the ball came all this way."
"The hole's not over here," was all that boy condescended to say. Then he added, as if by way of an afterthought, "You might as well have hit it behind you. Now you'd better drive it back to the sandbox, if you can do it. It's the shortest road to the green--and the easiest."
When at last we reached the ball we found that it was in a wholly inaccessible position, amid uneven ground, at the bottom of a small hole, surrounded by grass and weeds, principally thistles, which were almost breast-high.
"It is unfortunate that it should have stopped just here," I remarked.
That boy said nothing. He looked at me. He handed me a club, which was rather shorter than the one I had used at first, and had a piece of metal at the lower end, with an air which was partly sulky and partly something worse. Then, with a sort of hop, skip and jump, which was grotesque in the extreme, he withdrew himself ten or twelve feet from where I was, and waited in the apparent expectation that, with that ridiculous implement, I was going to strike the ball just where it was. As this was evidently a boy who needed keeping in his place, I addressed him with a certain degree of sternness, holding out the club which he had given me.
"What do you call this thing?"