“You ain’t the only wise guy in the world,” he said to me. “I can handle them just as good as you, only I don’t get the ones that can be handled. Mac don’t never send me out with anybody but hard-boiled eggs.”
So I told him:
“I never saw the man yet that I couldn’t make him loosen up.”
So he said: “Well, there’s a pair of them right here in this club that if you can squeeze a dime out of either of them on the side, I’ll give you all I make in a week.”
So I ast him who they were. He said it was Mr. Perkins and Mr. Conklin. Mr. Perkins joined the club last fall and Mr. Conklin just came in this last spring already. He’s the kind that wants all the barbers to starve to death. Jake says he wears all that stuff on his chin to keep his Adam’s apple from insect pests and frostbites. He’s director of two or three banks downtown, and every time the schoolteachers can’t think of nothing else to talk about, they tell you to always be straight and honest and work hard, and you’ll turn out a second Mr. Conklin. Because he did it all himself. He didn’t even have his whiskers to start with. Mr. Perkins is a warder in one of the churches and gives talks to the young men’s meetings every other Friday night. He don’t play golf on Sunday, and he don’t play golf on Monday or Saturday on account of those two days being so close to Sunday. Jake says he don’t play golf on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, either. But, anyway, he’s got as much dough as all of Mr. Conklin’s banks, pretty near, and he don’t have to do nothing.
Well, up to the time Davy was telling his troubles I or Jake had never caddied for either one of these birds. We probably never would of, only we wanted to show Davy how good we were.
“They’re airtight,” he said to us. “You’d stand just as much of a chance of getting three hundred yards out of a spoon.”
“What do they go round in?” I ast him.
“Neither one of them ever plays more’n the nine holes,” Davy told us; “and if you add nine or ten strokes to the score they got, you’ll be closer to the right score than they are. Mr. Conklin’s speed’s about sixty-three, and Mr. Perkins made a fifty-nine once. It was even fifty the way he counted.”
“So they underestimate, do they?” I ast him.
“Do they!” Dave said. “Why, if Chick Evans had their system he could play this course four times in thirty-six! He’d hole out from every tee. All he’d need’d be one club and a good, sharp pencil.”
“Do they ever play together?” I ast him.
“No,” said Davy. “Mr. Perkins went round with Mr. Adams a couple of times, but Mr. Conklin likes his solitary.”
Well, I winked at Jake and we moseyed out together; and I was going to tell him my idear, but he beat me to it.
“We’ll get a bet with Davy,” he said. “We’ll bet him that I and you can squeeze real money out of the both of them. And we can do it easy if we can get them to play against each other.”
“That’s the whole thing,” I said. “You can work it better’n me. You lay for them and get them matched. The rest of it’s a setup.”
So the next day we brought it up again in the shop, and Davy made us the bet. It was his week’s earnings against ours. And it was understood that we weren’t to come right out and ask for something extra. We weren’t to do anything that was not legitimate—begging, or anything like that. If they tipped us, it had to be of their own free will, without compunction.
It was about a week afterwards that Jake braced Mr. Conklin. He was practicing putts on the “clock.” Jake waited till he happened to sink a ten-footer.
“That was great, Mr. Conklin!” Jake said to him. “If you putt like that right along, I’m thinking Mr. Perkins would have to go some.”
“What do you mean?” Mr. Conklin ast him.
“Maybe I oughtn’t to of said nothing,” Jake said to him. “But I overheard Mr. Perkins the other day telling Mac that he’d been watching you a couple of times, and he’d noticed you had some mighty bad habits, and he thought Mac ought to tell you about them. And then he said he wasn’t much of a golfer himself, but he hadn’t been at it nowhere near as long as you; but he could trim you three up on nine holes.”
“What does he go round in?” Mr. Conklin ast Jake.
“He’ll average about sixty,” Jake told him.
Then Mr. Conklin said:
“If that’s all the better he is, he’d have his troubles beating me even.”
“Why don’t you tackle him?” said Jake.
“I’d just as lief,” Mr. Conklin said. “But I ain’t going to suggest it.”
“You don’t have to,” Jake said to him. “The way to do is for you to be up here when he is—he’s here any weekday afternoon except Mondays and Saturdays—and you could just happen to be starting out when he is and when he saw you were alone he’d probably ask you if you didn’t want to go round with him.”
Mr. Conklin didn’t say no more; and the next day Jake went to work on Mr. Perkins.
“Mr. Perkins,” he said, “I seen that approach you made on the ninth. That was a pippin! You could give Mr. Conklin a pretty good battle now, if that’s the way you shoot all the time.”
“Conklin!” said Mr. Perkins. “I didn’t know he was very good.”
“I don’t know if he is or
