Part 16

"But you and your pussy-footed old side-partner got into me for eighty dollars just the same!" scoffed Cottle. "You and your principles be damned!"

Uncle Billy swallowed this without blinking, but he did not look at Cottle. He was looking at the roll of bills on the table.

"If you are really in earnest----" began Poindexter, and glanced at Old Man Sprott.

"Go ahead, Billy," croaked that aged reprobate. "Teach him a lesson. He needs it."

"Never mind the lesson," snapped Cottle. "I got out of school a long time ago. The bet is that I can leave my left arm in the clubhouse safe--stick it in my pocket--and trim you birds with one hand."

"We wouldn't insist on that," said Old Man Sprott. "Play with both hands if you want to."

"Think I'm a welsher?" demanded Cottle. "The original proposition goes. 'Course I wouldn't really cut the arm off and leave it in the safe, but what I mean is, if I use two arms in making a shot, right there is where I lose. Satisfactory?"

"Perkins," said Uncle Billy, solemnly wagging his head, "you are a witness that this thing has been forced on me. I have been bullied and browbeaten and insulted into making this bet----"

"And so have I," chimed in Old Man Sprott. "I'm almost ashamed----"

The Ooley-cow shrugged his shoulders.

"I am a witness," said he quietly. "Calvin, these gentlemen have stated the case correctly. You have forced them to accept your proposition----"

"And he can't blame anybody if he loses," finished Uncle Billy as he reached for the roll of bills.

"You bet!" ejaculated Old Man Sprott. "He was looking for trouble, and now he's found it. Count it, Billy, and we'll each take half."

"That goes, does it?" asked Cottle.

"Sir?" cried Uncle Billy.

"Oh, I just wanted to put you on record," said Cottle, with a grin. "Wesley, you're my witness too. I mislaid a five-hundred-dollar note the other day, and it may have got into my change pocket. Might as well see if a big bet will put these safety-first players off their game! Anyhow, I'm betting whatever's there. I ain't sure how much it is."

"I am," said Uncle Billy in a changed voice. He had come to the five-hundred-dollar bill, sandwiched in between two twenties. He looked at Old Man Sprott, and for the first time I saw doubt in his eyes.

"Oh, it's there, is it!" asked Cottle carelessly. "Well, let it all ride. I never backed up on a gambling proposition in my life--never pinched a bet after the ball started to roll. Shoot the entire works--'s all right with me!"

Uncle Billy and Old Man Sprott exchanged significant glances, but after a short argument and some more abuse from Cottle they toddled over to the desk and filled out two blank checks--for five hundred and eighty dollars apiece.

"Make 'em payable to cash," suggested Cottle. "You'll probably tear 'em up after the game. Now the next thing is a stakeholder----"

"Is that--necessary?" asked Old Man Sprott.

"Sure!" said Cottle. "I might run out on you. Let's have everything according to Hoyle--stakeholder and all the other trimmings. Anybody'll be satisfactory to me; that young fellow getting an earful at the door; he'll do."

So I became the stakeholder--the custodian of eleven hundred and sixty dollars in coin and two checks representing a like amount. I thought I detected a slight nervousness in the signatures, and no wonder. It was the biggest bet those old petty larcenists had ever made in their lives. They went in to luncheon--at the invitation of the Ooley-cow, of course--but I noticed that they did not eat much. Cottle wandered out to the practise green, putter in hand, forgetting all about the mint toddy which, by the way, had never been ordered.

V

"You drive first, sir," said Uncle Billy to Cottle, pursuing his usual system. "We'll follow you."

"Think you'll feel easier if I should hit one over into the eucalyptus trees yonder?" asked the man from Dubuque. "Little nervous, eh? Does a big bet scare you? I was counting on that.... Oh, very well, I'll take the honour."

"Just a second," said Old Man Sprott, who had been prowling about in the background and fidgeting with his driver. "Does the stakeholder understand the terms of the bet? Mr. Cottle is playing a match with each of us individually----"

"Separately and side by each," added Cottle.

"Using only one arm," said Old Man Sprott.

"If he uses both arms in making a shot," put in Uncle Billy, "he forfeits both matches. Is that correct, Mr. Cottle?"

"Correct as hell! Watch me closely, young man. I have no moustache to deceive you--nothing up my sleeve but my good right arm. Watch me closely!"

He teed his ball, dropped his left arm at his side, grasped the driver firmly in his right hand and swung the club a couple of times in tentative fashion. The head of the driver described a perfect arc, barely grazing the top of the tee. His two-armed swing had been a thing of violence--a baseball wallop, constricted, bound up, without follow-through or timing, a combination of brute strength and awkwardness. Uncle Billy's chin sagged as he watched the easy, natural sweep of that wooden club--the wrist-snap applied at the proper time, and the long graceful follow-through which gives distance as well as direction. Old Man Sprott also seemed to be struggling with an entirely new and not altogether pleasant idea.

"Watch me closely, stakeholder," repeated Cottle, addressing the ball. "Nothing up my sleeve but my good right arm. Would you gentlemen like to have me roll up my sleeve before I start?"

"Drive!" grunted Uncle Billy.

"I'll do that little thing," said Cottle, and this time he put the power into the swing. The ball, caught squarely in the middle of the club-face, went whistling toward the distant green, a perfect screamer of a drive without a suspicion of hook or slice. It cleared the cross-bunker by ten feet, carried at least a hundred and eighty yards before it touched grass, and then bounded ahead like a scared rabbit, coming to rest at least two hundred and twenty-five yards away. "You like that?" asked Cottle, moving off the tee. "I didn't step into it very hard or I might have had more distance. Satisfactory, stakeholder?" And he winked at me openly and deliberately.

"Wha--what sort of a game is this?" gulped Old Man Sprott, finding his voice with an effort.

"Why," said Cottle, smiling cheerfully, "I wouldn't like to say off-hand and so early in the game, but you might call it golf. Yes, call it golf, and let it go at that."

At this point I wish to go on record as denying the rumour that our two old reprobates showed the white feather. That first tee shot, and the manner in which it was made, was enough to inform them that they were up against a sickening surprise party; but, though startled and shaken, they did not weaken. They pulled themselves together and drove the best they knew how, and I realised that for once I was to see their true golfing form uncovered.

Cottle tucked his wooden club under his arm and started down the course, and from that time on he had very little to say. Uncle Billy and Old Man Sprott followed him, their heads together at a confidential angle, and I brought up the rear with the Ooley-cow, who had elected himself a gallery of one.

The first hole is a long par four. Poindexter and Sprott usually make it in five, seldom getting home with their seconds unless they have a wind behind them. Both used brassies and both were short of the green. Then they watched Cottle as he went forward to his ball.

"That drive might have been a freak shot," quavered Uncle Billy.

"Lucky fluke, that's all," said Old Man Sprott, but I knew and they knew that they only hoped they were telling the truth.

Cottle paused over his ball for an instant, examined the lie and drew a wooden spoon from his bag. Then he set himself, and the next instant the ball was on its way, a long, high shot, dead on the pin.

"And maybe that was a fluke!" muttered the Ooley-cow under his breath. "Look! He's got the green with it!"

From the same distance I would have played a full mid-iron and trusted in Providence, but Cottle had used his wood, and I may say that never have I seen a ball better placed. It carried to the little rise of turf in front of the putting green, hopped once, and trickled onto the sand. I was not the only one who appreciated that spoon shot.

"Say," yapped Old Man Sprott, turning to Perkins, "what are we up against here? Miracles?"

"Yes, what have you framed up on us?" demanded Uncle Billy vindictively.

"Something easy, gentlemen," chuckled the Ooley-cow. "A soft thing from my home town. Probably he's only lucky."

The two members of the Sure-Thing Society went after their customary fives and got them, but Cottle laid his approach putt stone dead at the cup and holed out in four. He missed a three by the matter of half an inch. I could stand the suspense no longer. I took Perkins aside while the contestants were walking to the second tee.

"You might tell a friend," I suggested. "In strict confidence, what are they up against?"

"Something easy," repeated the Ooley-cow, regarding me with his soft, innocent eyes. "They wanted it and now they've got it."

"But yesterday, when he played with both arms----" I began.

"That was yesterday," said Perkins. "You'll notice that they didn't have the decency to offer him a handicap, even when they felt morally certain that he had made a fool bet. Not that he would have accepted it--but they didn't offer it. They're wolves, clear to the bone, but once in a while a wolf bites off more than he can chew." And he walked away from me. Right there I began reconstructing my opinion of the Ooley-cow.

In my official capacity as stakeholder I saw every shot that was played that afternoon. I still preserve the original score card of that amazing round of golf. There are times when I think I will have it framed and present it to the club, with red-ink crosses against the thirteenth and fourteenth holes. I might even set a red-ink star against the difficult sixth hole, where Cottle sent another tremendous spoon shot down the wind, and took a four where most of our Class-A men are content with a five. I might make a notation against the tricky ninth, where he played a marvellous shot out of a sand trap to halve a hole which I would have given up as lost. I might make a footnote calling attention to his deadly work with his short irons. I say I think of all these things, but perhaps I shall never frame that card. The two men most interested will never forget the figures. It is enough to say that Old Man Sprott, playing such golf as I had never seen him play before, succumbed at the thirteenth hole, six down and five to go. Uncle Billy gave up the ghost on the fourteenth green, five and four, and I handed the money and the checks to Mr. Calvin D. Cottle, of Dubuque. He pocketed the loot with a grin.

"Shall we play the bye-holes for something?" he asked. "A drink--or a ball, maybe?" And then the storm broke. I do not pretend to quote the exact language of the losers. I merely state that I was surprised, yes, shocked at Uncle Billy Poindexter. I had no idea that a member of the Episcopal church--but let that pass. He was not himself. He was the biter bitten, the milker milked. It makes a difference. Old Man Sprott also erupted in an astounding manner. It was the Ooley-cow who took the centre of the stage.

"Just a minute, gentlemen," said he. "Do not say anything which you might afterward regret. Remember the stakeholder is still with us. My friend here is not, as you intimate, a crook. Neither is he a sure-thing player. We have some sure-thing players with us, but he is not one of them. He is merely the one-armed golf champion of Dubuque--and the Middle West."

Imagine an interlude here for fireworks, followed by pertinent questions.

"Yes, yes, I know," said Perkins soothingly. "He can't play a lick with two arms. He never could. Matter of fact, he never learned. He fell off a haystack in Iowa--how many years ago was it, Cal?"

"Twelve," said Mr. Cottle. "Twelve next July."

"And he broke his left arm rather badly," explained the Ooley-cow. "Didn't have the use of it for--how many years, Cal?"

"Oh, about six, I should say."

"Six years. A determined man can accomplish much in that length of time. Cottle learned to play golf with his right arm--fairly well, as you must admit. Finally he got the left arm fixed up--they took a piece of bone out of his shin and grafted it in--newfangled idea. Decided there was no sense in spoiling a one-armed star to make a dub two-armed golfer. Country full of 'em already. That's the whole story. You picked him for an easy mark, a good thing. You thought he had a bad bet and you had a good one. Don't take the trouble to deny it. Gentlemen, allow me to present the champion one-armed golfer of Iowa and the Middle West!"

"Yes," said Cottle modestly, "when a man does anything, give him credit for it. Personally I'd rather have the cash!"

"How do you feel about it now?" asked the Ooley-cow.

Judging by their comments, they felt warm--very warm. Hot, in fact. The Ooley-cow made just one more statement, but to me that statement contained the gist of the whole matter.

"This," said he, "squares us on the wallet proposition. I didn't say anything about it at the time, but that struck me as a scaly trick. So I invited Cal to come out and pay me a visit.... Shall we go back to the clubhouse?"

* * * * *

I made Little Doc Ellis see the point; perhaps I can make you see it now.

Returning to the original simile, the Ooley-cow was willing to be milked for golf balls and luncheons and caddie hire. That was legitimate milking, and he did not resent it. He would have continued to give down in great abundance, but when they took fifty dollars from him, in the form of a bogus reward, he kicked over the bucket, injured the milkers and jumped the fence.

Why? I'm almost ashamed to tell you, but did you ever hear of a country cow--an Iowa cow--that would stand for being milked from the wrong side?

I think this will be all, except that I anticipate a hard winter for the golfing beginners at our club.

ADOLPHUS AND THE ROUGH DIAMOND

I

Now that Winthrop Watson Wilkins has taken his clubs away and cleaned out his locker some of the fellows are ready enough to admit that he wasn't half bad. On this point I agree with them. He was not. He was two-thirds bad, and the remainder was pure, abysmal, impenetrable ignorance.

Windy Wilkins may have meant well--perhaps he did--but when a fellow doesn't know, and doesn't know that he doesn't know and won't let anybody tell him that he doesn't know, he becomes impossible and out of place in any respectable and exclusive golf club. I suppose his apologists feel kindly toward him for eliminating Adolphus Kitts and squaring about a thousand old scores with that person, but I claim it was a case of dog eat dog and neither dog a thoroughbred. I for one am not mourning the departure of Windy Winkins, and if I never see him again, I will manage to bear it somehow.

They say that every golf club has one member who slips in while the membership committee is looking the other way. In Windy's case the committee had no possible excuse. There was an excuse for Adolphus Kitts. Adolphus got in when our club absorbed the Crystal Springs Country Club, and out of courtesy we did not scrutinise the Crystal Springs membership list, but Windy's name was proposed in the regular manner. All that was known of him was that he was a stranger in the community who had presumably never been in jail and who had money. The club didn't need his initiation fee and wasn't after new members, but for some reason or other the bars were down and Windy got in. The first thing we knew he landed in our midst with a terrific splash and began slapping total strangers on the back and trying to sign all the tags and otherwise making an ass of himself. He didn't wait for introductions--just butted in and took things for granted.

"You see, boys," he explained, "I've always been more or less of an ath-a-lete and I've tried every game but this one. Now that I'm gettin' to the time of life when I can't stand rough exercise any more, I thought I'd kind of like to take up golf. I would have done it when I lived in Chicago, but my friends laughed me out of it--said it was silly to get out and whale a little white pill around the country--but I guess anything that makes a man sweat is healthy, hey? And then my wife thought it would be a good thing socially, you know, and--no, waiter, this round is on me. Oh, but I insist! My card, gentlemen. That's right; keep 'em. I get 'em engraved by the thousand. Waiter! Bring some cigars here--perfectos, cigarettes--anything the gentlemen'll have, and let it be the best in the house! I don't smoke cigarettes myself, but my friends tell me that's the next step after takin' up golf! Ho, ho! No offence to any of you boys; order cigarettes if you want 'em. Everybody smokes on the new member!"

Well, that was Windy's tactful method of introducing himself. Is it any wonder that we asked questions of the membership committee? No out-and-out complaints, you understand. We just wanted to know where Windy came from and how he got in and who was to blame for it. Most of the information was furnished by Cupid Cutts.

Cupid is pretty nearly the whole thing at our club. In every golf club there is one man who does the lion's share of the work and gets nothing but abuse and criticism for it, and Cupid is our golfing wheel horse, as you might say. He is a member of the board of directors, a member of the house committee, chairman of the greens committee, and the Big Stick on the membership committee. He is also the official handicapper, which is a mighty good thing to bear in mind when you play against him. I have known Cupid to cut a man's handicap six strokes for beating him three ways on a ball-ball-ball Nassau.

Cutts is no Chick Evans, or anything like that, but, considering his physical limitations, he is a remarkable golfer and steady as an eight-day clock. He is so fat that he can't take a full-arm swing to save his life, but his little half-shot pops the ball straight down the middle of the course every time, and he plays to his handicap with a persistency that has broken many a youngster's heart. Straight on the pin all the time--that's his game, and whenever he's within a hundred yards of the cup he's liable to lay his ball dead.

There are lots of things I might tell you about Cupid Cutts--he's a sort of social Who's Who in white flannels and an obesity belt, and an authority on scandal and gossip, past and present--but the long and short of it is that it would be hard to get on without him, even harder than it is to get on with him. Well, we asked Cupid about Windy Wilkins, and Cupid went to the bat immediately.

"Absolutely all right, fellows, oh, absolutely! A little rough, perhaps, a diamond in the rough, but a good heart. And all kinds of money. He won't play often enough to bother anybody."

That was where Cupid was wrong two ways. Windy played every day, rain or shine, and he bothered everybody. He was just as noisy on the course as he was in the locker room, and when he missed his putt on the eighteenth green the fellows who were driving off at No. 1 had to wait until he cooled down. And when he managed to hit his drive clean he yelled like a Comanche and jumped up and down on the tee. He did all the things that can't be done, and when we spoke to him kindly about golfing etiquette he snorted and said he never had much use for red tape anyway and thought it was out of place in sport.

He tramped around on the greens and bothered people who wanted to putt. He talked and laughed when others were driving. He played out of his turn. He drove into foursomes whenever he was held up for a minute, just to let the players know that he was behind 'em.

He was absolutely impossible, socially and otherwise, but the most astonishing thing was the way he picked up the game after the first month or so. Windy was a tremendously big man and looked like the hind end of an elephant in his knickers; but for all his size he developed a powerful, easy swing and a reasonable amount of accuracy. As for form, he didn't know the meaning of the word. His stance was never twice the same, his grip was a relic of the dark ages, he handled his irons as a labouring man handles a pick, he did everything that the books say you mustn't do, and, in spite of it, his game improved amazingly. And he called us moving-picture golfers!

"Every move a picture!" he would say. "You have to plant your dear little feet just so. Your tee has got to be just so high. Your grip must be right to the fraction of an inch. You must waggle the club back and forth seven times before you dare to swing it, and then chances are you don't get anywhere! Step up and paste her on the nose the way I do! Forget this Miss Nancy stuff and hit the ball!"

When Windy got down around 90 he swelled all out of shape, and the next step, of course, was to have some special clubs built by MacLeish, the professional. They were such queer-looking implements that Cupid joked him about them one Saturday noon in the locker room. It was then that we got a real line on Windy, and Cupid found out that even a rough diamond may have a cutting edge.

"You're just like all beginners," said Cupid. "You make a few rotten shots and then think the clubs must be wrong. The regular models aren't good enough for you. You have to have some built to order, with bigger faces and stiffer shafts. Get it into your head that the trouble is with you, not with the club. The ball will go straight if you hit it right."

"Clubs make a lot of difference," said Windy. "Ten strokes anyway."

"Nonsense! A good, mechanical golfer can play with any clubs!"

"I suppose you think you can do it?"

"I know I can."

"And you'd bet on it?"

"Certainly."

Windy didn't say anything for as much as two minutes. The rascal was thinking.

"_All_ right," said he at last. "Tell you what I'll do. I'll make you a little proposition. You say you can play with any clubs. Give me the privilege of pickin' 'em out for you, and I'll bet you fifty dollars that I trim you on an even game--no handicap."

"Yes, but where are you going to get these clubs for me to play with? Off a scrap pile or something?"

"Right out of MacLeish's shop! Brand-new stuff, selected from the regular stock. And I'll go against you even, just to prove that you don't know it all, even if you have been playin' golf for twenty years!"

It was a flat, out-and-out challenge. Cupid looked Windy up and down with a pitying smile--the same smile he uses when an 18-handicap man asks to be raised to 24.

"I'd be ashamed to rob you, Wilkins," said he.

Windy didn't say anything, but he went into his locker and brought out a roll of bills about the size of a young grindstone. He counted fifty dollars off it, and you couldn't have told the difference. It looked just as big as before. He handed the fifty to me.

"It would be stealing it," said Cupid, but there was a hungry look in his eye.

"If you get away with it," said Windy, "I won't complain to the police. Put up or shut up."

Well, it looked like finding the money. We knew that Windy couldn't break a 90 to save his life, and Cupid had done the course in an 84, using nothing but a putting cleek.

"How many clubs can I have?" asked Cupid with his usual caution in the matter of bets.

"Oh, six or eight," answered Windy. "Makes no difference to me."

"I'll take eight," said Cupid briskly. "And if you don't mind, I'll post a check. I'm not in the habit of carrying the entire cash balance in my jeans."

"Fair enough!" said Windy. "You boys are all witnesses to the terms of this bet. I'm to pick out eight clubs--eight new ones--and Cutts here is to play with 'em. Is that understood?"