“Well, come on and do it then if you’re so smart!” urged Rapp, Senior.  “Come on, once—­I dare you!”

Sharon scorned—­but rather weakly—­the invitation.  Secretly, through his hostile study of the game, he had convinced himself that he by divine right could do perfectly what these people did so clumsily.  Again and again his hands had itched for the club as he watched futile drives.  He knew he could hit the ball.  He couldn’t help hitting it, stuck up the way it was on a pinch of sand—­stuck up like a sore thumb.  How did they miss it time after time?  He had meant to test his conviction in solitude, but why not put it to trial now, and shame this doubting and inept Rapp, Senior?

“Oh, well, I don’t mind,” he said, and waddled negligently to the tee.

Rapp, Senior, voiced loud delight.  Gideon Whipple merely stood safely back without comment, though there was a malicious waiting gleam in his eyes.

“You folks make something out of nothing,” scolded Sharon, fussily.

Grasping the proffered club he severely threatened with it the new ball which Rapp, Senior, had obligingly teed up for him.  In that moment he felt a quick strange fear, little twinges of doubt, a suspicion that all was not well.  Perhaps the sudden hush of those about him conduced to this.  Even newly arrived players in the background waited in silence.  Then he recovered his confidence.  There was the ball and there was the club—­it was easy, wasn’t it?  Make a mountain out of a mole hill, would they?  He’d show them!

Amid the hanging silence—­like a portent it overhung him—­he raised the strange weapon and brought it gruntingly down with all the strength of his stout muscles.

* * * * *

In the fading light of seven o’clock on that fair summer’s evening John McTavish for the hundredth time seized the heavy arms of Sharon Whipple and bent them back and up in the right line.  Then Sharon did the thing faithfully in his own way, which was still, after an hour’s trial, not the way of John McTavish.

“Mon, what have I told ye?” expostulated John.  He had quit calling Sharon Sir-r-r.  Perhaps his r’s were tired, and anyway, Sharon called him Sandy, being unable to believe that any Scotchman would not have this for one or another of his names.  “Again I tell ye, th’ body must bend between th’ hips an’ th’ neck, but ye keep jer-r-rkin’ the head to look up.”

“But, Sandy, I’ve sprained my back trying to bend from the hips,” protested the plaintive Sharon.

“Yer-r-r old car-r-r-cass is musclebound, to be sur-r-e,” conceded John.  “You can’t hope to bend it the way yon laddie does.”  He pointed to Wilbur Cowan, who had been retrieving balls—­from no great distance—­hit out by the neophyte.

“Can he do it?” questioned Sharon.

“Show ’um!” ordered John.

And Wilbur Cowan, coming up for the driver, lithely bent to send three balls successively where good golf players should always send them.  Sharon blinked at this performance, admiring, envious, and again hopeful.  If a child could do this thing——­