Angel Island

And continuously she screamed.

The other girls realized her plight in an instant. They dropped like

stones to her side, eased her partially of Honey's weight. Julia alone

did not touch him. She floated above, calling directions. The group of

girls arose gradually, flew swiftly over the water toward the beach. The

men ran to meet them.

"Don't go any further," Billy commanded in a peremptory voice unusual

with him. "They'll not put him down if we come too near."

The men hesitated, stopped.

Immediately the girls deposited Honey on the sand.

"Did you notice the cleverness of that breakaway?" said Pete. "He

couldn't have got a clinch in anywhere."

But to do Honey justice, he attempted nothing of the sort. He lay flat

and still until his rescuers were at a safe height. Then he sat up and

smiled radiantly at them. "Ladies, I thank you," he said.

"And I'll see that you get a Carnegie medal if it takes the rest of my

life. I guess," he remarked unabashed, as his companions joined him, "it

will be fresh-water swimming for your little friend hereafter."

Nobody spoke for a while. His companions were still white and Billy

Fairfax even shook.

"You looked like an engraving that used to hang over my bed when I was a

child," said Ralph, with an attempt at humor that had, coming from him,

a touching quality, "a bunch of, angels lugging a dead man to heaven.

You'd have been a ringer for it if you'd had a shave."

"Well, the next time the girls come, I'm going to swim out among the

pretty sharks," said Pete, obviously trying to echo Ralph's light note.

"By Jove, hear them chatter up there. They're talking all at once and at

the top of their lungs just like your sisters and your cousins and your

aunts."

"They're as pale as death, too," observed Billy. "Look at that!"

The flying-maidens had come together in a compact circular group, hands

over each other's shoulders, wings faintly fluttering. Perceptibly they

clung to each other for support. Their faces had turned chalky; their

heads drooped. Intertwined thus, they drifted out of sight.

"Lord, they are beautiful, close-to!" Honey said. "You never saw such

complexions! Or such eyes and teeth! And - and - by George, such an

effect of purity and stainlessness. I feel like a - and yet, by - ." He

fell into an abstraction so deep that it was as though he had forgotten

his companions.