This time he had pulled his ball into some long
grass. Gossett's drive was, however, worse; and the subsequent movement
of the pair to the hole resembled more than anything else the
manoeuvres of two men rolling peanuts with toothpicks as the result of
an election bet. Archibald finally took the hole in twelve after
Gossett had played his fourteenth.
When Archibald won the next in eleven and the tenth in nine, hope began
to flicker feebly in his bosom. But when he won two more holes,
bringing the score to like-as-we-lie, it flamed up within him like a
beacon.
The ordinary golfer, whose scores per hole seldom exceed those of
Colonel Bogey, does not understand the whirl of mixed sensations which
the really incompetent performer experiences on the rare occasions when
he does strike a winning vein. As stroke follows stroke, and he
continues to hold his opponent, a wild exhilaration surges through him,
followed by a sort of awe, as if he were doing something wrong, even
irreligious. Then all these yeasty emotions subside and are blended
into one glorious sensation of grandeur and majesty, as of a giant
among pygmies.
By the time that Archibald, putting with the care of one brushing flies
off a sleeping Venus, had holed out and won the thirteenth, he was in
the full grip of this feeling.
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