"Well, don't worry," Ralph Addington said with the contemptuous accent
with which latterly he answered all Frank Merrill's remarks. "You will."
The others laughed, but Frank turned on them a look of severe reproof.
"Oh, hell!" Honey Smith exclaimed in a regretful tone; "they're beating
it again. I say, girls," he called at the top of his lungs, "don't go!
Stay a little longer and we'll buy you a dinner and a taxicab."
Apparently the flying-girls realized that he was addressing them. For a
hair's breadth of a second they paused. Then, with a speed that had a
suggestion of panic in it, they flew out to sea. And again a flood of
girl-laughter fell in bubbles upon them.
"They distrust muh!" Honey commented. But he smiled with the indolent
amusement of the man who has always held the master-hand with women.
"Must have come from the east, this time," he said as they filed soberly
back to camp. "But where in thunder do they start from?"
They had, of course, discussed this question as they had discussed a
hundred other obvious ones. "I'm wondering now," Frank Merrill answered,
"if there are islands both to the east and the west. But, after all, I'm
more interested to know if there are any more of these winged women, and
if there are any males."
Again they talked far into the night. And as before their comment was of
the wonder, the romance, the poetry of their strange situation. And
again they drew imaginary pictures of what Honey Smith called "the young
Golden Age" that they would soon institute on Angel Island.
"Say," Honey remarked facetiously when at length they started to run
down, "what happens to a man if he marries an angel? Does he become
angel-consort or one of those seraphim arrangements?"
Ralph Addington laughed. But Billy Fairfax and Pete Murphy frowned.
Frank Merrill did not seem to hear him. He was taking notes by the
firelight.
The men continued to work at the high rate of speed that, since the
appearance of the women, they had set for themselves. But whatever form
their labor took, their talk was ever of the flying-girls. They referred
to them individually now as the "dark one," the "plain one," the "thin
one," the "quiet one," and the "peachy one." They theorized eternally
about them. It was a long time, however, before they saw them again, so
long that they had begun to get impatient. In Ralph Addington this
uneasiness took the form of irritation. "If I'd had a gun," he snarled
more than once, "by the Lord Harry, I'd have winged one of them." He sat
far into the night and waited. He arose early in the morning and
watched. He went for long, slow, solitary, silent, prowling hikes into
the interior. His eyes began to look strained from so minute a study of
the horizon-line. He grew haggard. His attitude in the matter annoyed
Pete Murphy, who maintained that he had no right to spy on women.
Argument broke out between them, waxing hot, waned to silence, broke out
again and with increased fury. Frank Merrill and Billy Fairfax listened
to all this, occasionally smoothing things over between the disputants.
But Honey Smith, who seemed more amused than bothered, deftly fed the
flame of controversy by agreeing first with one and then with the other.