Ralph glared. "Won't stand for it?" he repeated. "I'd like to know how the h.e.l.l you're going to help yourself?"

"I'll find a way, and pretty d.a.m.ned quick," Pete retorted.

It was the closest approach to a quarrel that had yet occurred. The other three men hastily threw themselves into the breach. "Shut up, you mick," Honey called to Pete. "Remember you came over in the steerage."

Pete grinned and subsided.

"As sure as shooting," Honey said, "those girls have quarrelled. I bet we never see them again."

It was a long time before they saw any of them; but, curiously enough, the next time the flying-girls visited the island they came in a group.

It had been sultry, the first of a long series of sticky, muggy days.

What threatened to be a thunderstorm and then, as Honey said, failed to "make good," came up in the afternoon. Just as the sky was at its blackest, Honey called, "Hurroo! Here they come!"

The effect of the approach of the flying-maidens was so strange as to make them unfamiliar. There was no sun to pour a liquid iridescence through their wings. All the high lights of their plumage had dulled.

Painted in flat primary colors, they looked like paper dolls pasted on the inky thundercloud. As usual, when they came in a group, they wove in and out in a limited spherical area, achieving extraordinary effects in close wheeling.

As the girls made for the island, a new impulse seized Honey. He ran down the beach, dashed into the water, swam out to meet them.

"Come back, you fool!" Frank yelled.

There may be sharks in that water.

But Honey only laughed. He was a magnificent swimmer. He seemed determined to give, in an alien element, an exhibition which would equal that of the flying-girls. The effect on them was immediate; they broke ranks and floated, watching every move.

To hold their interest, Honey nearly turned himself inside out.

At first he tore the water white with the vigor of his trudgeon-stroke.

Then turning from left to right, he employed the side-stroke. From that, he went to the breast-stroke. Last of all, he floated, dove, swam under water so long that the girls began uneasily to fly back and forth, to twitter with alarm.

Finally he emerged and floated again.

"He swims like a motor-boat!" said Ralph admiringly.

Suddenly Lulu fluttered away from her companions, dropped so low that she could have touched Honey with her hand, and flew protectingly above him.

The men on the beach watched these proceedings with a gradual diminution of their alarm, with the admiration that Honey in the water always excited, with the amus.e.m.e.nt that Lulu's fearless display of infatuation always developed.

"Oh, my G.o.d!" Frank called suddenly. "There's a shark!"

Simultaneously, the others saw what he saw--a sinister black triangle swiftly shearing the water. They ran, yelling, down to the water's edge and stood there trying to shout a warning over the noise of the surf.

Honey did not get it at once. He was still floating, his smiling, up-turned face looking into Lulu's smiling, down-turned one. Then, rolling over, he apparently caught a glimpse of the black fin bearing so steadily on him. He made immediately for the sh.o.r.e but he had swum far and fast.

Lulu was slower even than he in realizing the situation. For a moment, obviously piqued at his action, she dropped and hung in the rear.

Perhaps her mates signaled to her, perhaps her intuition flashed the warning. Suddenly she looked back. The scream which she emitted was as shrill with terror as any wingless woman's. Swooping down like an eagle, she seized Honey under the shoulders, lifted him out of the water. His weight crippled her. For though the first impulse of her terror carried her high, she sank at once until Honey hung just above the water.

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."

n.o.body 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.

For several days, the girls did not appear on Angel Island. All that time, the capture argument lay in abeyance. Even Ralph, who had introduced the project, seemed touched by the gallantry of Honey's rescue. Honey, himself, was strangely subdued; his eternal monologue had dried up; he seemed preoccupied. Nevertheless, it was he, who, one night, reopened the discussion with a defiant flat: "Well, boys, I might as well tell you, I've swung over to Ralph's side. I'm for the capture of those girls, and capture as soon as we can make it."

"Well, I'll be--" said Billy. "After they saved your life! Honey, I guess I don't know you any more."

"What's changed you?" Pete asked in amazement.

"Can't tell you why--don't know myself why when you get the answer tell me. Only in the ten minutes that those girls packed me through the air, I did some quick thinking, I can't explain to you why we've got the right to capture them. But we have. That's all there is to it."

War broke out with a new animosity; for they had, of course, now definitely divided into sides. Their conversation always turned into argument now, no matter how peaceably and innocently it began.

The girls had begun to visit the island again, singly now, singly always. Discussion died down temporarily and the wordless tete-a-teteing began again. Lulu hovered ever at Honey's shoulder. Clara postured always within Pete's vision. Chiquita took up her eternal vigil on Frank's reef. Peachy discovered new wonders of what Honey called "trick flying." Julia became a fixed white star in their blue noon sky.

A day or two or three of this long-distance wooing, and argument exploded more vehemently than ever. Honey and Ralph still maintained that, as the ruling s.e.x of a man-managed world, they had the right of discovery to these women. Frank still maintained that, as a supra-human race, the flying-girls were subject to supra-human laws. Billy and Pete still maintained that, as the development not only of the race but of the individual depended on the treatment of the female by the male, the capture of these independent beings at this stage of civilization would be a return to barbarism.

After one night of wrangling, they came to the agreement that no one of them would take steps towards capture until all five had consented to it. They drew up a paper to this effect and signed it.

Their cabins were nearly completed now. Boundless leisure threatened to open before them. More and more in the time which they were alone they fell into the habits which their individual tastes developed. Frank still worked on his library. He had transferred the desk and the bookcases to the interior of his hut. He spent all his spare time there arranging, cla.s.sifying, and cataloguing his books. Billy fell into an orgy of furniture-making and repairing. Addington began, unaided, to build a huge cabin, bigger than the others, and separated a little distance from them. n.o.body asked him what it was for. Honey took long solitary walks into the interior of the island. He returned with great bunches of uprooted flowers which he planted against the cabin-walls.

Pete dragged out from an unexplored trunk a box of water-colors, a block of paper. Now, when he was not working on a symphonic poem, he was coping with the wonders of the semi-tropical coloring. His companions rallied and harried him, especially about the poem; but he could always silence them with a threat to read it aloud. All the Celt in him had come to the surface. They heard him chanting his numbers in the depths of the forest; sometimes he intoned them, swinging on the branch of a high tree. He even wandered over the reefs, reciting them to the waves.

One day, late in the afternoon, Billy lay on his favorite spot on the southern reef, dreaming. High up in the air, Julia flashed and gyrated, revolved and spun. It seemed to Billy that he had never seen her go so high. She looked like a silver feather. But as he looked, she went higher and higher, so high that she disappeared vertically.