Angel Island

Silence, profound, portentous, protracted, followed.

Finally, Honey Smith absently stooped and picked up a pebble. He threw

it over the silver ring of the flat, foam-edged, low-tide waves. It

curved downwards, hissed across a surface of water smooth as jade,

skipped four times, and dropped.

The men strained their eyes to follow the progress of this tangible

thing.

"Where do you suppose they've gone?" Honey said as unexcitedly as one

might inquire directions from a stranger.

"When do you suppose they'll come back?" Billy Fairfax added as casually

as one might ask the time.

"Did you notice the red-headed one?" asked Pete Murphy. "My first girl

had red hair. I always jump when I see a carrot-top." He made this

intimate revelation simply, as if the time for a conventional reticence

had passed.

"They were lookers all right," Ralph Addington went on. "I'd pick the

golden blonde, the second from the right." He, too, spoke in a

matter-of-fact tone, as though he were selecting a favorite from the

front row in the chorus.

"It must have happened if we saw it," Frank Merrill said. There was in

his voice a note of petulance, almost childish. "But we ought not to

have seen it. It has no right to be. It upsets things so."

"What are we all standing up like gawks for?" Pete Murphy demanded with

a sudden irritability.

"Sit down!"

Everybody dropped. They all sat as they fell. They sat motionless. They

sat silent.

"The name of this place is 'Angel Island,'" announced Billy Fairfax

after a long time. His tone was that of a man whose thoughts, swirling

in phantasmagoria, seek anchorage in fact.

They did not sleep that night.

When Frank Merrill arose the next morning, Ralph Addington was just

returning from a stroll down the beach. Ralph looked at the same time

exhausted and recuperated. He was white, tense, wild-eyed, but recently

aroused interior fires glowed through his skin, made up for his lost

color and energy. Frank also had a different look. His eyes had kindled,

his face had become noticeably more alive. But it was the fire of the

intellect that had produced this frigid glow.

"Seen anything?" Frank Merrill inquired.

"Not a thing."

"You don't think they're frightened enough not to come back?"

The gleam in Ralph Addington's eye changed to flame. "I don't think

they're frightened at all. They'll come back all right. There's only one

thing that you can depend on in women; and that is that you can't lose

them."