Angel Island

The four men virtually took no time off from work; or at least the

change of work that stood for leisure was all in the line of

home-making. Eternally, they joked each other about these womanish

occupations; but they all kept steadily to it. Ralph Addington and Honey

Smith put the furniture into shape, repairing and polishing it. Billy

Fairfax sorted out the glass, china, tools, household utensils of every

kind.

Pete Murphy went through the trunks with his art side uppermost. He

collected all kinds of Oriental bric-a-brac, pictures and draperies. He

actually mended and pressed things; he had all the artist's capability

in these various feminine lines. When the others joked him about his

exotic and impracticable tastes, he said that, before he left, he

intended to establish a museum of fine arts, on Angel Island.

Hard as the men worked, they had always the appearance of those who

await the expected. But the expected did not occur; and gradually the

sharp edge of anticipation wore dull. Emotionally they calmed. Their

nerves settled to a normal condition. The sudden whirr of a bird's

flight attracted only a casual glance. In Ralph Addington alone,

expectation maintained itself at the boiling point. He trained himself

to work with one eye searching the horizon. One afternoon, when they had

scattered for a siesta, his hoarse cry brought them running to the beach

from all directions.

So suddenly had the girls appeared that they might have materialized

from the air. This time they had not come from the sea. When Ralph

discovered them, they were hovering back of them above the trees that

banded the beach. The sun was setting, blood-red; the whole western sky

had broken away. The girls seemed to be floating in a sea of

crimson-amber ether. Its light brought lustre to every feather; it

turned the edges of their wings to flame; it changed their smoothly

piled hair to helmets of burnished metal.

The men tore from the beach to the trees at full speed. For a moment the

violence of this action threw the girls into a panic. They fluttered,

broke lines, flew high, circled. And all the time, they uttered shrill

cries of distress.

"They're frightened," Billy Fairfax said. "Keep quiet, boys."

The men stopped running, stood stock-still.

Gradually the girls calmed, sank, took up the interweaving figures of

their air-dance. If at their first appearance they seemed creatures of

the sea, this time they were as distinctively of the forest. They looked

like spirits of the trees over which they hovered. Indeed, but for their

wings they might have been dryads. Wreaths of green encircled their

heads and waists. Long leafy streamers trailed from their shoulders.

Often in the course of their aerial play, they plunged down into the

feathery tree-tops.