He teed up, and drove his best drive, and followed it with a brassy that laid him twenty yards off the green, where a good approach brought the desired four.

“Even threes,” said Pickings to himself, as though he had seen a ghost.  Now he was only a golfer of one generation; there was nothing in his inheritance to steady him in such a crisis.  He began slowly to disintegrate morally, to revert to type.  He contained himself until Booverman had driven free of the river, which flanks the entire green passage to the ninth hole, and then barely controlling the impulse to catch Booverman by the knees and implore him to discretion, he burst out: 

“I say, dear boy, do you know what your score is?”

“Something well under four,” said Booverman, scratching his head.

“Under four, nothing; even threes!”

“What?”

“Even threes.”

They stopped, and tabulated the holes.

“So it is,” said Booverman, amazed.  “What an infernal pity!”

“Pity?”

“Yes, pity.  If only some one else could play it out!”

He studied the hundred and fifty yards that were needed to reach the green that was set in the crescent of surrounding trees, changed his brassy for his cleek, and his cleek for his midiron.

“I wish you hadn’t told me,” he said nervously.

Pickings on the instant comprehended his blunder.  For the first time Booverman’s shot went wide of the mark, straight into the trees that bordered the river to the left.

“I’m sorry,” said Pickings with a feeble groan.

“My dear Picky, it had to come,” said Booverman, with a shrug of his shoulders.  “The ball is now lost, and all the score goes into the air, the most miraculous score any one ever heard of is nothing but a crushed egg!”

“It may have bounded back on the course,” said Pickings, desperately.

“No, no, Picky; not that.  In all the sixty thousand times I have hit trees, barns, car-tracks, caddies, fences,—­”

“There it is!” cried Pickings, with a shout of joy.

Fair on the course, at the edge of the green itself, lay the ball, which soon was sunk for a four.  Pickings felt a strange, unaccountable desire to leap upon Booverman like a fluffy, enthusiastic dog; but he fought it back with the new sense of responsibility that came to him.  So he said artfully:  “By George! old man, if you hadn’t missed on the fourth or the sixth, you’d have done even threes!”

“You know what I ought to do now—­I ought to stop,” said Booverman, in profound despair—­“quit golf and never lift another club.  It’s a crime to go on; it’s a crime to spoil such a record.  Twenty-eight for nine holes, only forty-two needed for the next nine to break the record, and I have done it in thirty-three—­and in fifty-three!  I ought not to try; it’s wrong.”

He teed his ball for the two-hundred-yard flight to the easy tenth, and took his cleek.