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The main difference, we are told, between the amateur and the professional golfer is the fact that the latter is always aiming at the pin, while the former has in his mind a vague picture of getting somewhere reasonably near it. Vincent Jopp invariably went for the pin. He tried to hole out from anywhere inside two hundred and twenty yards. The only occasion on which I ever heard him express any chagrin or disappointment was during the afternoon round on his first day out, when from the tee on the two hundred and eighty yard seventh he laid his ball within six inches of the hole.

“A marvellous shot!” I cried, genuinely stirred.

“Too much to the right,” said Vincent Jopp, frowning.

He went on from triumph to triumph. He won the monthly medal in May, June, July, August, and September. Towards the end of May he was heard to complain that Wissahicky Glen was not a sporting course. The Greens Committee sat up night after night trying to adjust his handicap so as to give other members an outside chance against him. The golf experts of the daily papers wrote columns about his play. And it was pretty generally considered throughout the country that it would be a pure formality for anyone else to enter against him in the Amateur Championship–an opinion which was borne out when he got through into the final without losing a hole. A safe man to have betted on, you would have said. But mark the sequel.

* * * * *

The American Amateur Championship was held that year in Detroit. I had accompanied my employer there; for, though engaged on this nerve-wearing contest, he refused to allow his business to be interfered with. As he had indicated in his schedule, he was busy at the time cornering wheat; and it was my task to combine the duties of caddy and secretary. Each day I accompanied him round the links with my note-book and his bag of clubs, and the progress of his various matches was somewhat complicated by the arrival of a stream of telegraph-boys bearing important messages. He would read these between the strokes and dictate replies to me, never, however, taking more than the five minutes allowed by the rules for an interval between strokes. I am inclined to think that it was this that put the finishing touch on his opponents’ discomfiture. It is not soothing for a nervous man to have the game hung up on the green while his adversary dictates to his caddy a letter beginning “Yours of the 11th inst. received and contents noted. In reply would state—-” This sort of thing puts a man off his game.

I was resting in the lobby of our hotel after a strenuous day’s work, when I found that I was being paged. I answered the summons, and was informed that a lady wished to see me. Her card bore the name “Miss Amelia Merridew.” Amelia! The name seemed familiar. Then I remembered. Amelia was the name of the girl Vincent Jopp intended to marry, the fourth of the long line of Mrs. Jopps. I hurried to present myself, and found a tall, slim girl, who was plainly labouring under a considerable agitation.

“Miss Merridew?” I said.

“Yes,” she murmured. “My name will be strange to you.”

“Am I right,” I queried, “in supposing that you are the lady to whom Mr. Jopp—-“

“I am! I am!” she replied. “And, oh, what shall I do?”

“Kindly give me particulars,” I said, taking out my pad from force of habit.

She hesitated a moment, as if afraid to speak.

“You are caddying for Mr. Jopp in the Final tomorrow?” she said at last.

“I am.”

“Then could you–would you mind–would it be giving you too much trouble if I asked you to shout ‘Boo!’ at him when he is making his stroke, if he looks like winning?”