"I won't be when I win."
"Tell me what you want—if you win!"
"What? With this caddie hanging around and listening?" The Dryad, wide-eyed and flushed, regarded him in amazement.
Jones picked up a pinch of wet sand from the box, moulded it with great care into a tiny truncated cone, set it on the tee, set his ball on top of it, whipped the air persuasively with his driver once or twice, and, settling himself into the attitude popularly attributed to the Colossus of Rhodes, hit the ball for the longest, cleanest drive he had ever perpetrated.
"Dryad," he said, politely, "it is now up to you."
Of all the exquisite creatures that float through the winter sunshine of the semi-tropics this is the most exquisite and spirituelle. Long, slender, swallow-tailed wings, tinted with pearl and primrose, crossed with ashy stripes and double-barred with glowing crimson—this is the shy, forest-haunting creature that the Dryad sought to snare, and sought in vain.
Sometimes, standing on the long, white shell roads, where myriads of glittering dragon-flies sailed, far away a pale flash would catch the sun for an instant; and "Ready! Look out!" would cry the Dryad. Vanity! Swifter than a swallow the Ajax passed, a pearly blurr against the glare of the white road; swish! swish! the silken nets swung in vain.
"Oh, bother," sighed the Dryad.
Again, in the dim corridors of the forest, where tall palms clustered and green live oaks spread transparent shadows across palmetto thickets, far in some sunlit glade a tiny wing-flash would bring the Dryad's forest cry: "Quick! Oh, quick!" But the woodland ghost was gone.