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 himself a ninety-six. But even such a score, he could not bring himself to mention in this company. He subtracted ten.

"I can crack eighty-six," he asserted boldly, yet with a slight catch of breath. "Oh yes," he confirmed, more easily, once he had said it, "on a par seventy-two course."

Ramsey again looked him over. "Suppose we allow your friend eighty-eight," he suggested to Jay, sportingly and politely. "That just evens the sides. You play your total scores on each hole against our total," Ramsey explained to Metten carefully. "We aren't playing your best ball, you know. Harry and I don't mind riding to Pittsburgh in a box car, but our wives may mildly object. Ten dollars a hole all right for you, with fifty on the round?"

Phil Metten was caught. He tried to encourage himself with thought of Jay Rountree's, his partner's, miraculous shots; he tried to persuade himself to the imagined possibility of himself shooting the eighteen best holes of his career, one after the other, seriatim; but his thumping heart told him that at golf he could not make good. He must back down before these society people or his boast of the minute ago would cost him much money. Phil Metten would not back down; and he had the money. What was a hundred, even two hundred dollars, to him now? More than that he made every morning. Whatever he betrayed at golf, he would show them that with money he was no piker.

"Twenty a hole will be all right for me," he raised the stake recklessly.

"Then you want a hundred on the round?"

Phil, somewhat choked, nodded.