Wessels stationed himself in a hopefully deprecatory attitude and watched Pollock build a monument of sand, balance his ball, and whistling nervously through his teeth, lunge successfully down.  Whereupon, in defiance of etiquette, he swore with equal fervor, and they started off.

Pickings glanced at Booverman in a superior and critical way, but at this moment a thin, dyspeptic man with undisciplined whiskers broke in serenely without waiting for the answers to the questions he propounded: 

“Ideal weather, eh?  Came over from Norfolk this morning; ran over at fifty miles an hour.  Some going, eh?  They tell me you’ve quite a course here; record around seventy-one, isn’t it?  Good deal of water to keep out of?  You gentlemen some of the cracks?  Course pretty fast with all this dry weather?  What do you think of the one-piece driver?  My friend, Judge Weatherup.  My name’s Yancy—­Cyrus P.”

A ponderous person who looked as though he had been pumped up for the journey gravely saluted, while his feverish companion rolled on: 

“Your course’s rather short, isn’t it?  Imagine it’s rather easy for a straight driver.  What’s your record?  Seventy-one amateur?  Rather high, isn’t it?  Do you get many cracks around here?  Caddies seem scarce.  Did either of you gentlemen ever reflect how surprising it is that better scores aren’t made at this game?  Now, take seventy-one; that’s only one under fours, and I venture to say at least six of your holes are possible twos, and all the rest, sometime or other, have been made in three.  Yet you never hear of phenomenal scores, do you, like a run of luck at roulette or poker?  You get my idea?”

“I believe it is your turn, sir,” said Pickings, both crushing and parliamentary.  “There are several waiting.”

Judge Weatherup drove a perfect ball into the long grass, where successful searches averaged ten minutes, while his voluble companion, with an immense expenditure of force, foozled into the swale to the left, which was both damp and retentive.

“Shall we play through?” said Pickings, with formal preciseness.  He teed his ball, took exactly eight full practice swings, and drove one hundred and fifty yards as usual directly in the middle of the course.

“Well, it’s straight; that’s all can be said for it,” he said, as he would say at the next seventeen tees.

Booverman rarely employed that slogan.  That straight and narrow path was not in his religious practice.  He drove a long ball, and he drove a great many that did not return in his bag.  He glanced resentfully to the right, where Judge Weatherup was straddling the fence, and to the left, where Yancy was annoying the bullfrogs.

“Darn them!” he said to himself.  “Of course now I’ll follow suit.”

But whether or not the malignant force of suggestion was neutralized by the attraction in opposite directions, his drive went straight and far, a beautiful two hundred and forty yards.