Sharon Whipple mocked them injuriously. His ironic shouts attracted the notice of arriving players. Gideon Whipple stayed placid, smiling grimly, but Rapp, Senior, was nettled to retort.
"Mebbe you could do a whole lot better!" he called to Sharon in tones unnecessarily loud.
Sharon's reply, in a voice eminently soothing and by that calculated further to irritate the novice, was in effect that Rapp, Senior, might safely wager his available assets that Sharon Whipple could do better.
"Well, come on and do it then if you're so smart!" urged Rapp, Senior. "Come on, once--I dare you!"
Sharon scorned--but rather weakly--the invitation. Secretly, through his hostile study of the game, he had convinced himself that he by divine right could do perfectly what these people did so clumsily. Again and again his hands had itched for the club as he watched futile drives. He knew he could hit the ball. He couldn't help hitting it, stuck up the way it was on a pinch of sand--stuck up like a sore thumb. How did they miss it time after time? He had meant to test his conviction in solitude, but why not put it to trial now, and shame this doubting and inept Rapp, Senior?
"Oh, well, I don't mind," he said, and waddled negligently to the tee.
Rapp, Senior, voiced loud delight. Gideon Whipple merely stood safely back without comment, though there was a malicious waiting gleam in his eyes.
"You folks make something out of nothing," scolded Sharon, fussily.
Grasping the proffered club he severely threatened with it the new ball which Rapp, Senior, had obligingly teed up for him. In that moment he felt a quick strange fear, little twinges of doubt, a suspicion that all was not well. Perhaps the sudden hush of those about him conduced to this. Even newly arrived players in the background waited in silence. Then he recovered his confidence. There was the ball and there was the club--it was easy, wasn't it? Make a mountain out of a mole hill, would they? He'd show them!
Amid the hanging silence--like a portent it overhung him--he raised the strange weapon and brought it gruntingly down with all the strength of his stout muscles.
In the fading light of seven o'clock on that fair summer's evening John McTavish for the hundredth time seized the heavy arms of Sharon Whipple and bent them back and up in the right line. Then Sharon did the thing faithfully in his own way, which was still, after an hour's trial, not the way of John McTavish.