Angel Island

The room looked as if it had housed a cyclone. The furniture lay in

splinters; the feminine loot lay on the floor, trampled and torn.

"I'd like to sit down," Ralph admitted. It was the first remark that any

one of the men had made. "Lucky they can't understand me. I'd hate them

to know it, but I'm as weak as a cat."

"No sitting down, yet," Frank commanded, still in his inflexible tones

of a disciplinarian. "Open the door, Pete - get some air in here!" He

knelt before a sea-chest which filled one corner of the room, unlocked

it, lifted the cover. The sunlight glittered on the contents.

"My God, I can't," said Billy.

"I feel like a murderer," said Pete.

"You've got to," Frank said in a tone, growing more peremptory with each

word. "Now."

"That's right," said Ralph. "If we don't do it now, we'll never do it.' Frank handed each man a pair of shears.

"I sharpened them myself," he said briefly.

Heads over their shoulders, the girls watched.

Did intuition shout a warning to them? As with one accord, a long wail

arose from them, swelled to despairing volume, ascended to desperate

heights.

"Now!" Frank ordered.

They had thought the girls securely tied.

Clara fought like a leopardess, scratching and biting.

Lulu struggled like a caged eagle, hysteria mounting in her all the time

until the room was filled with her moans.

Peachy beat herself against the wall like a maniac. She shrieked without

cessation. One scream stopped suddenly in the middle - Ralph had struck

her on the forehead. For the rest of the shearing session she lay over a

chair, limp and silent.

Chiquita, curiously enough, resisted not at all. She only swayed and

shrugged, a look of a strange cunning in her long, deep, thick-lashed

eyes. But of them all, she was the only one who attempted to comfort;

she talked incessantly.

Julia did not move or speak. But at the first touch of the cold steel on

her bare shoulders, she fainted in Billy's arms.

An hour later the men emerged from the Clubhouse.

"I'm all in," Honey muttered. "And I don't care who knows it. I'm going

for a swim." Head down, he staggered away from the group and zigzagged

over the beach.

"I guess I'll go back to the camp for a smoke," Frank said. "I never

realized before that I had nerves." Frank was white, and he shook at

intervals. But some strange spirit, compounded equally of a sense of

victory and of defeat, flashed in his eyes.