to sit down and take his temples
in his hands, but for the sake of history he struggled on.

"Damn it!" said Booverman all at once.

"What's the matter?" said Pickings, observing his face black with fury.

"Do you realize, Pickings, what it means to me to have lost those two
strokes on the fourth and sixth greens, and through no fault of mine,
neither? Even threes for the whole course--that's what I could do if I
had those two strokes--the greatest thing that's ever been seen on a
golf-course. It may be a hundred years before any human being on the
face of this earth will get such a chance. And to think I might have
done it with a little luck!"

Pickings felt his heart begin to pump, but he was able to say with some
degree of calm:

"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.

"Never mind me," he said, slashing away in reckless fashion.

Booverman with a little care studied the ten-foot route to the hole and
putted down.

"Even threes!" said Pickings, leaning against a tree.

"Blast that sixth hole!" said Booverman, exploding. "Think of what it
might be, Picky--what it ought to be!"

Pickings retired hurriedly before the shaking approach of Booverman's
frantic club. Incapable of spe