Page:Golfers Magazine March 1916.pdf/19

 and determined manner in which he strove day after day to improve his game, and the sustained horror of his score.

Then came Nibbie’s tragic end. Late one Saturday afternoon in May, there was gathered at the nineteenth hole a representative group of the members of the Grassview Country Club. Marsfield, the Egyptologist, was there, with his soft beard and sleepy, studious eyes; Innes and Fraser, lawyers; Huntington, Princeton professor; and several New York bankers and business men. They had just come in from the links; the day was hot and dry and they were emptying many tall glasses in which the cracked ice clinked.

They were talking, of course, of Scores and Reasons Why, otherwise known as Alibis. Fraser was explaining that the bite of a mosquito while he was addressing the ball had cost him the fourteenth hole and probably the match (though he had finished four down); Marsfield, the Egyptologist, was telling of a 20 foot putt that went absolutely in the hole and then bounced out again; Innes was making sarcastic and pointed remarks concerning the incredible luck of Huntington, who had beaten him 2 and 1.

“Ah,” exclaimed Marsfield suddenly, interrupting himself, “here comes Rogers. Lucky dog! He got Jellie today. He was out Wednesday too and had him then.”

“A bit thick, I call it,” observed Penfield, who had once spent a month in England.

“He takes poor old Jellie for too much of a good thing,” put in Huntington, glancing at the two men as they approached down the corridor.

“But I say, look at Jellie’s face!” went on Penfield. “Must be one of his bad days. Just look at him!”

It was indeed evident from the expression on Mr. Jellie’s face that he was far from happy. His eyes were drawn half shut, as if in pain, his lips were quivering with emotion and his face was very white. Mr. Rogers, his companion, appeared on the contrary to be making an attempt to conceal some secret inner pleasure. A scarcely repressed smile twisted his lips and a twinkle of delight shone from his eyes. As he reached the corner where the others were seated he greeted them with familiar heartiness and beckoned to the waiter for a glass of something. Mr. Jellie sank into a chair with the briefest of nods in reply to the others’ greetings, thrust his hands deep in his pockets and gazed straight ahead at nothing with his eyes still half closed as though to shut out some painful sight.

It was Huntington who noticed at once an unusual vacancy in the atmosphere. He turned to Rogers to ask:

“Where’s Nibbie?”

Rogers grinned, glanced apprehensively at Mr. Jellie, and replied in one word:

“Dead.”

There was a chorus of astonished inquiry.

“Yes, dead,” Rogers reiterated.

“Dead as a dead dog. Jellie killed him.”

“What!” There was unbelief in ten voices.

Another broke in, Mr. Jellie himself. They all turned to him.

“T suppose you're glad of it,” he observed in a voice of mingled grief and indignation. “Well I’m not. I didn’t mean to do it. It was at the tenth hole. Rogers had me four down. Nibbie—” Mr. Jellie hesitated and gulped a little—“Nibbie had been very demonstrative all the way. I was 64 at the turn. I’d made a lot of rotten shots, and Nibbie was right after me all the time. You know how he feels—how he felt when. I made a bad shot. Well, on the tenth I got a beauty from the tee, right down the aisle about 220 yards. On the second I took a brassie and carried the brook. It sure was a fine shot, I’ll leave it to Rogers.”

Mr. Rogers nodded in confirmation. “I always have to play short there myself,” he confessed.

“But Nibbie must have thought I didn’t carry it,’ Mr. Jellie went on. “He must have thought I made the brook. Anyway, he evidenced disapproval. It made me mad, that’s all there is to it. He’d been howling at