t bunker.

Haynes bent himself double to address his ball, but straightened up
while swinging and missed it by a foot. At the second attempt he
hooked it over square-leg's head on to the fairway of the eighteenth
hole.

"_Sacre bleu!_" he said with very fair freedom, "I'm not going all
that way after it. Lucy, run and fetch it, there's a dear."

Lucy, highly scandalized at the idea of losing a hole so tamely,
started off; Mabel and Haynes and I went after my ball.

I took the mashie, because I distrusted my ability to carry the bunker
with another telegraph pole. That mashie would have been about the
right length for me if I could have stood on a chair while making my
stroke. As it was it entered the ground two feet behind the ball and
emerged, with a superb divot, just in front.

"Aren't there _any_ short clubs in the bag, Mabel?" I asked. She
handed me a straight-faced putter ...

Five strokes later I picked my ball up out of the bunker.

"I'm over-exerting myself," I said. "We'll call that hole a half."

Neither of us was satisfied with his tee shot at the next hole. I
picked my ball out of a gorse-bush, and Haynes rescued his from a
drain. Then we strolled amicably towards the third tee. Our caddies,
unused to such methods, followed reluctantly.

"Was that 'ole 'alved, too, Sir?" piped Mabel with anxious interest.

"It's a nice point. I hardly know. Why?"

She hung her head and blushed. A sudden suspicion struck me.

"Mabel," I said sternly, "are you--_can_ you be--_betting_ on this
game?"

"Yes, Sir," she answered with a touch of defiance. "Boys always does."

I told Haynes, who appeared profoundly shocked.

"Good G----! I mean, _Mon dieu!_" he exclaimed. "What are we doing?"

"Surely you can't hold us responsible? The child's parents ..."

"I don't mean _that_, you ass. Here we have the innocent public
putting its money on our play, and we're treating the whole thing as a
joke. This has got to be a match, after all. A woman's fortune hangs
upon the issue--doesn't it, Lucy?"

"Yes, Sir," she answered without comprehension.

From this point the game became a grim struggle. I won the third hole
in seventeen, but Haynes took the fourth in nineteen to my twenty-two.

At the fifth I noticed a pond guarding the green. I carefully
circumvented this with my faithful putter and holed out in my smallest
score of the round so far.

"Hi!" shouted Haynes. "How many?" He had been having a little hockey