them. They reached the third tee in a daze, and it was here that
mortification began to set in.

The third hole is another bogey four, up the hill and past the tree
that serves as a direction-post, the hole itself being out of sight. On
his day, James had often done it in ten and Peter in nine; but now they
were unnerved. James, who had the honour, shook visibly as he addressed
his ball. Three times he swung and only connected with the ozone; the
fourth time he topped badly. The discs had been set back a little way,
and James had the mournful distinction of breaking a record for the
course by playing his fifth shot from the tee. It was a low, raking
brassey-shot, which carried a heap of stones twenty feet to the right
and finished in a furrow. Peter, meanwhile, had popped up a lofty ball
which came to rest behind a stone.

It was now that the rigid rules governing this contest began to take
their toll. Had they been playing an ordinary friendly round, each
would have teed up on some convenient hillock and probably been past
the tree with their second, for James would, in ordinary circumstances,
have taken his drive back and regarded the strokes he had made as a
little preliminary practice to get him into midseason form. But today
it was war to the niblick, and neither man asked nor expected quarter.
Peter's seventh shot dislodged the stone, leaving him a clear field,
and James, with his eleventh, extricated himself from the furrow. Fifty
feet from the tree James was eighteen, Peter twelve; but then the
latter, as every golfer does at times, suddenly went right off his
game. He hit the tree four times, then hooked into the sand-bunkers to
the left of the hole. James, who had been playing a game that was
steady without being brilliant, was on the green in twenty-six, Peter
taking twenty-seven. Poor putting lost James the hole. Peter was down