Angel Island

Late one afternoon, just as the evening star flashed the signal of

twilight, the girls came streaming over the sea toward the island.

At the first far-away glimpse, the men dropped their tools and ran to

the water's edge. Honey Smith waded out, waist-deep.

"Well, what do you know about that?" he called out. "Pipe the

formation!"

They came massed vertically. In the distance they might have been a

rainbow torn from its moorings, borne violently forward on a high wind.

The rainbow broke in spots, fluttered, and then came together again. It

vibrated with color. It pulsed with iridescence.

"How the thunder - " Addington began and stopped. "Well, can you beat

it?" he concluded.

The human column was so arranged that the wings of one of the air-girls

concealed the body of another just above her.

The "dark one" led, flying low, her scarlet pinions beating slowly back

and forth about her head.

Just above, near enough for her body to be concealed by the scarlet

wings of the "dark one," but high enough for her pointed brown face to

peer between their curves, came the "plain one."

Higher flew the "thin one." Her body was entirely covered by the orange

wings of the "plain one," but her copper-colored hair made a gleamy spot

in their vase-shaped opening.

Still higher appeared the "peachy one." She seemed to be holding her

lustrous blonde head carefully centered in the oval between the "thin

one's" green-and-yellow plumage. She looked like a portrait in a frame.

Highest of them all, floating upright, a Winged Victory of the air, her

silver wings towering straight above her head, the cameo face of the

"quiet one" looked level into the distance.

Their wings moved in rotation, and with machine-like regularity. First

one pair flashed up, swept back and down, then another, and another. As

they neared, the color seemed the least wonderful detail of the picture.

For it changed in effect from a column of glittering wings to a column

of girl-faces, a column that floated light as thistle-down, a column

that divided, parted, opened, closed again.

The background of all this was a veil of dark gauze at the horizon-line,

its foil a golden, virgin moon, dangling a single brilliant star.

"They're talking!" Honey Smith exclaimed. "And they're leaving!"

The girls did not pause once. They flew in a straight line over the

island to the west, always maintaining their columnar formation. At

first the men thought that they were making for the trees. They ran

after them. The speed of their running had no effect this time on their

visitors, who continued to sail eastward. The men called on them to

stay. They called repeatedly, singly and in chorus. They called in every

tone of humble masculine entreaty and of arrogant masculine command. But

their cries might have fallen on marble ears. The girls neither turned

nor paused. They disappeared.