“I know just what’ll happen now; I know it well.”

But this time there was no varying in the flight; the drive went true to the green, straight on the flag, where a good but not difficult put brought a two.

“Even threes again,” said Pickings, but to himself.  “It can’t go on.  It must turn.”

“Now, Pickings, this is going to stop,” said Booverman angrily.  “I’m not going to make a fool of myself.  I’m going right up to the tee, and I’m going to drive my ball right smack into the woods and end it.  And I don’t care.”

“What!”

“No, I don’t care.  Here goes.”

Again his drive continued true, the mashy pitch for the second was accurate, and his put, after circling the rim of the cup, went down for a three.

The twelfth hole is another dip into the long grass that might serve as an elephant’s bed, and then across the Housatonic River, a carry of one hundred and twenty yards to the green at the foot of an intruding tree.

“Oh, I suppose I’ll make another three here, too,” said Booverman, moodily.  “That’ll only make it worse.”

He drove with his midiron high in the air and full on the flag.

“I’ll play my put carefully for three,” he said, nodding his head.  Instead, it ran straight and down for two.

He walked silently to the dreaded thirteenth tee, which, with the returning fourteenth, forms the malignant Scylla and Charybdis of the course.  There is nothing to describe the thirteenth hole.  It is not really a golf-hole; it is a long, narrow breathing spot, squeezed by the railroad tracks on one side and by the river on the other.  Resolute and fearless golfers often cut them out entirely, nor are ashamed to acknowledge their terror.  As you stand at the thirteenth tee, everything is blurred to the eye.  Near by are rushes and water, woods to the left and right; the river and the railroad; and the dry land a hundred yards away looks tiny and distant, like a rock amid floods.

A long drive that varies a degree is doomed to go out of bounds or to take the penalty of the river.

“Don’t risk it.  Take an iron—­play it carefully,” said Pickings in a voice that sounded to his own ears unrecognizable.

Booverman followed his advice and landed by the fence to the left, almost off the fair.  A midiron for his second put him in position for another four, and again brought his score to even threes.

When the daring golfer has passed quaking up the narrow way and still survives, he immediately falls a victim to the fourteenth, which is a bend hole, with all the agonies of the preceding thirteenth, augmented by a second shot over a long, mushy pond.  If you play a careful iron to keep from the railroad, now on the right, or to dodge the river on your left, you are forced to approach the edge of the swamp with a cautious fifty-yard-running-up stroke before facing the terrors of the carry.  A drive with a wooden club is almost sure to carry into the swamp, and only a careful cleek shot is safe.