Angel Island

They watched the strange birds disappear over the water. For more than

an hour, the men sat still, waiting for them to return. They did not

come back, however. The men hung about camp all day long, talking of

nothing else. Night came at last, but sleep was not in them. The dark

seemed to give a fresh impulse to conversation. Conjecture battled with

theory and fact jousted with fancy. But one conclusion was as futile as

another.

Frank Merrill tried to make them devise some system of defense or

concealment, but the others laughed at him. Talk as he would, he could

not seem to convince them of their danger. Indeed, their state of mind

was entirely different from his. Mentally he seemed to boil with

interest and curiosity, but it was the sane, calm, open-minded

excitement of the scientist. The others were alert and preoccupied in

turn, but there was an element of reserve in their attitude. Their eyes

kept going off into space, fixing there until their look became one

brooding question. They avoided conversation. They avoided each other's

gaze.

Gradually they drew off from the fire, settled themselves to rest, fell

into the splendid sleep that followed their long out-of-doors days.

In the middle of the night, Billy Fairfax came out of a dream to the

knowledge that somebody was shaking him gently, firmly, furtively.

"Don't move!" Honey Smith's voice whispered; "keep quiet till I wake the

others."

It was a still and moon-lighted world. Billy Fairfax lay quiet, his

wide-open eyes fixed on the luminous sky. The sense of drowse was being

brushed out of his brain as though by a mighty whirlwind, and in its

place came a vague sensation of confusion, of excitement, of a

miraculous abnormality. He heard Honey Smith crawl slowly from man to

man, heard him whisper his adjuration once, twice, three times. "Now,"

Honey called finally.

The men looked seawards. Then, simultaneously they leaped to their feet.

The semi-tropical moon was at its full. Huge, white, embossed, cut out,

it did not shine - it glared from the sky. It made a melted moonstone of

the atmosphere. It faded the few clouds to a sapphire-gray, just touched

here and there with the chalky dot of a star. It slashed a silver trail

across a sea jet-black except where the waves rimmed it with snow. Up in

the white enchantment, but not far above them, the strange air-creatures

were flying. They were not birds; they were winged women!

Darting, diving, glancing, curving, wheeling, they interwove in what

seemed the premeditated figures of an aerial dance. If they were

conscious of the group of men on the beach, they did not show it; they

seemed entirely absorbed in their flying. Their wings, like enormous

scimitars, caught the moonlight, flashed it back. For an interval, they

played close in a group inextricably intertwined, a revolving ball of

vivid color. Then, as if seized by a common impulse, they stretched,

hand in hand, in a line across the sky-drifted. The moonlight flooded

them full, caught glitter and gleam from wing-sockets, shot shimmer and

sheen from wing-tips, sent cataracts of iridescent color pulsing

between. Snow-silver one, brilliant green and gold another, dazzling

blue the next, luminous orange a fourth, flaming flamingo scarlet the

last, their colors seemed half liquid, half light. One moment the whole

figure would flare into a splendid blaze, as if an inner mechanism had

suddenly turned on all the electricity; the next, the blaze died down to

the fairy glisten given by the moonlight.