"Doesn't a pair of stilts go with them?" I asked.
"Well, mine are worse. Just a bundle of toothpicks. Here, catch hold,
Lucy."
Mabel teed up for me. I selected a driver about the length of a
telegraph pole and swept my ball away. It stopped just short of the
first 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.
"_Sacré 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."