“Well, I ain’t giving up,” he declared.  “I’ll show some people before I’m through.”

He paused, hearing again in his shamed ears the ironic laughter of Rapp, Senior, at the three wild swings he had made before—­in an excess of caution—­he had struck the ground back of the immune ball and raked it a pitiful five feet to one side.  He heard, too, the pleased laughter in the background, high, musical peals of tactless women and the full-throated roars of brutal men.  He felt again the hot flush on his cheeks as he had slunk from the dreadful scene with a shamed effort to brazen it out, followed by the amused stare of Gideon Whipple.  And he had slunk back when the course was cleared, to be told the simple secret of hitting a golf ball.  He would condescend to that for the sake, on a near day, of publicly humiliating a certain vainglorious jewellery dealer.  But apparently now, while the secret was simple enough to tell—­it took John McTavish hardly a score of burry words to tell it all—­it was less simple to demonstrate.  It might take him three or even four days.

“Ye’ve done gr-r-rand f’r-r a beginnerr-r,” said John McTavish, wearily, perfunctorily.

“I’ll tell you,” said Sharon.  “I ain’t wanting this to get out on me, that I come sneaking back here to have you teach me the silly game.”

“Mon, mon!” protested the hurt McTavish.

“So why can’t Buck here come up and teach me in private?  There’s open space back of the stables.”

“Ye cud do wor-r-rse,” said John.  “And yer-r-r full hour-r-’s lesson now will be two dollar-r-rs.”

“Certainly, McTavish,” said Sharon, concealing his amazement.  He could no longer address as Sandy one who earned two dollars as lightly as this.

There was a spacious opening back of the stable on the Whipple Old Place—­space and the seclusion which Sharon Whipple considered imperative.  Even Elihu Titus was sent about his business when he came to observe; threatened with an instant place in the ranks of the unemployed if he so much as breathed of the secret lessons to a town now said to be composed of snickering busybodies.  The open space immediately back of the stable gave on wider spaces of pasture and wood lot.

CHAPTER XI

Archaeologists of a future age will doubtless, in their minute explorations of this region, come upon the petrified remains of golf balls in such number as will occasion learned dispute.  Found so profusely and yet so far from any known course, they will perhaps give rise to wholly erroneous surmises.  Prefacing his paper with a reference to lost secrets once possessed by other ancients, citing without doubt that the old Egyptians knew how to temper the soft metal of copper, a certain scientist will profoundly deduce from this deposit of balls, far from the vestiges of the nearest course, that people of this remote day possessed the secret of driving a golf ball three and a half miles, and he will perhaps moralize upon the degeneracy of his own times, when the longest drive will doubtless not exceed a scant mile.