It was the first time Billy had known Julia to fly low. But he discovered gradually that only in the sunlight did she haunt the zenith.

At twilight she always kept close to the earth. Billy took to haunting the reefs at dusk.

Again and again, the same thing happened.

Suddenly--and it was as if successive waves of electricity charged through his body--the quiet air began to purr and vibrate and drum. Out of the star-shot dusk emerged the speeding whiteness of Julia. Always, as she approached, she slowed her flight. Always as she pa.s.sed, her sorrowing gray eyes would seek his burning blue ones. Billy could bring himself to speak of this strange experience to n.o.body, not even to Honey. For there was in it something untellable, unsharable, the wonder of the vision and the dream, the unreality of the apparition.

The excitement of these happenings kept the men entertained, but it also kept them keyed up to high tension. For a while they did not notice this themselves. But when they attempted to go back to their interrupted work, they found it hard to concentrate upon it. Frank Merrill had given up trying to make them patrol the beach. Unaided, day and night he attended to their signals.

"Well," said Honey Smith one day and, for the first time, there was a peevish note in his voice, "that 'natural selection' theory of yours, Ralph, seems to have worked out to some extent--but not enough. We seem to be comfortably divided, all ten of us, into happy couples, but hanged if I'm strong for this long-distance acquaintance."

"You're right there," Ralph Addington admitted; "we don't seem to be getting any forwarder."

"It's all very pretty and romantic to have these girls flying about,"

Honey continued in a grumbling tone, "but it's too much like flirting with a canary-bird. d.a.m.n it all, I want to talk with them."

Ralph made a hopeless gesture. "It is a deadlock, I admit. I'm at my wits' end."

Perhaps Honey expressed what the others felt. At any rate, a sudden irascibility broke out among them. They were good-natured enough while the girls were about, but over their work and during their leisure, they developed what Honey described as every kind of blue-bean, sourball, katzenjammer and grouch. They fought heroically against it--and their method of fighting took various forms, according to the nature of the four men. Frank Merrill lost himself in his books. Pete Murphy began the score of an opera vaguely heroic in theme; he wrote every spare moment.

Billy Fairfax worked so hard that he grew thin. Honey Smith went off on long, solitary walks. Ralph Addington, as usual, showed an exasperating tendency towards contradiction, an unvarying contentiousness.

And then, without warning, all the girls ceased to come to the island.

Three days went by, five, a week, ten days. One morning they all pa.s.sed over the island, one by one, an hour or two between flights; but they flew high and fast, and they did not stop.

Ralph Addington had become more and more irascible. That day the others maintained peace only by ignoring him.

"By the G.o.ds!" he snarled at night as they all sat dull and dumb about the fire. "Something's got to happen to change our way of living or murder'll break out in this community. And we'd better begin pretty quick to do something about it. What I'd like to know is," and he slapped his hand smartly against a flat rock, "coming down to cases--as we must sooner or later--what is our right in regard to these women."

III

"I don't exactly like your use of the word right, Ralph," said Billy.

"You mean duty, don't you?"

"And he'd better change that to privilege," put in Pete Murphy, scowling.

"Shut up, you mick," Honey interposed, flicking Pete on the ear with a pebble. "What do you know about machinery?"

Pete grinned and subsided for a moment. Honey could always placate him by calling him a mick.

"No," Ralph went on obstinately, addressing himself this time to Billy, "I mean right. Of course, I mean right," he went on with one of his, gusty bursts of, irritation. "For G.o.d's sake, don't be so high-brow and altruistic."

"How about it, Frank?" Billy said, turning to Merrill.

"Well," said Frank slowly, "I don't exactly know how to answer that question. I don't know what you mean by the word--right. I take it that you mean what our right would be if these flying-maidens permitted themselves to become our friends. I would say, that, in such a case, you would have the only right that any man ever has, as far as women are concerned--the right to woo. If he wins, all well and good. If he loses, he must abide by the consequences."

"You're on, Frank," said Billy Fairfax.

"You've said the last word."

"In normal condition, I'd agree with you," Ralph said. "But in these conditions I disagree utterly."

"How?" Frank asked. "Why?" He turned to Ralph with the instinctive equability that he always presented to an opponent in argument.

"Well, in the first place, we find ourselves in a situation unparalleled in the world's history." Ralph had the air of one who is saying aloud for the first time what he has said to himself many times. At any rate, he proceeded with an unusual fluency and glibness.

"Circ.u.mstances alter cases. We can't handle this situation by any of the standards we have formerly known. In fact, we've got to throw all our former standards overboard. There are five of these girls. There are five of us. Voila! Following the laws of nature we have selected each of us the mates we prefer. Or, following the law that Bernard Shaw discovered, the ladies have selected, each of them, the mates that they prefer. They are now turning themselves inside out to prove to us that we selected them. Voila! The rest is obvious. If they come to terms, all right! If they don't--" He paused. "I repeat that we are placed in, a situation new in the history of the world. I repeat the bromidion--circ.u.mstances alter cases. We may have to stay on this island as long as we live. I am perfectly willing to confess that just now I'd rather not be rescued. But it's over our months that we've been here. We must think of the future. The future justifies anything. If these girls don't come to terms, they must be made to come to terms. You'll find I'm right."

"Right!" exclaimed Billy hotly. "What are you talking about? Those are the principles of an Apache or a Hottentot."

"Or a cave-man," Pete added.

"Well, what are we under our skins but Hottentots and Apaches and cave-men?" said Ralph. "Now, I leave it to you. Look facts in the face.

Use your common sense. Count out civilization and all its artificial rules. Think of our situation on this island, if we don't capture these women soon. We can't tell when they'll stop coming. We don't know what the conditions of their life may be. The caprice may strike them to-morrow to cut us out for good. Maybe their men will discover it--and prevent them from coming. A lot of things may happen to keep them away.

What's to become of us in that case? We'll go mad, five men alone here.

It isn't as though we could tame them by any gentle methods. You can't catch eagles by putting salt on their tails. In the first place, we can't get close enough to them, because of their accursed wings, to prove that we wouldn't harm them. They've sent us a challenge--it's a magnificent one. They've thrown down the gage. And how have we responded? I bet they think we're a precious lot of molly-coddles! I bet they're laughing in their sleeves all the time. I'd hate to hear what they say about us. But the point I'm trying to make is not that. It's this: we can't afford to lose them. This place is a prison now. It will be worse than that if this keeps up--it'll be a madhouse."

"Do you mean to tell me that you're advocating marriage by capture?"

Billy asked in an incredulous voice.

"I mean to tell you I'm arguing capture," Ralph said with emphasis.

"After that, you, can trust the marriage question to take care of itself."

Argument broke out hydra-headed. They wrangled the whole evening. Theory at first guided them. In the beginning, names like Plato, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer preceded quotation; then, came Shaw, Havelock-Ellis, Kraft-Ebing, Weininger. Sleep deadened their discussion temporarily but it burst out at intervals all the next day. In fact, it seemed to possess eternal vitality, eternal fascination. Leaving theory, they went for parallels of their strange situation, to history, to the Scriptures, to fiction, to drama, to poetry.

Honey ended every discussion with a philosophic, "Aside from the question of brutality, this marriage by capture isn't a sporting proposition. It's like jacking deer. I'm not for it. And, O Lord, what's the use of chewing the rag so much about it? Wait a while. We'll get them yet, I betchu!"

All of Honey's s.e.x-pride flared in this buoyant a.s.surance. It had apparently not yet occurred to him that he would not conquer Lulu in the end and conquer her by merely submitting to her wooing of him.

And in the meantime, the voiceless tete-a-teteing of the five couples continued.

"Say, Ralph," Honey said one day in a calm interval, "it's just occurred to me that we haven't seen those girls, flying in a bunch for quite some time. Don't suppose they've quarrelled, do you?"

Everybody stopped work to stare at him. "I bet that's the answer,"

Ralph exclaimed. His voice held the note of one for whom a private mystification has at last broken.

"But what do you suppose they've quarrelled about?" Pete Murphy asked.

"Me," Honey said promptly.

Ralph laughed absent-mindedly. "It's a hundred to one shot that they're quarrelling about us, though," he said. For some mysterious reason this theory raised his spirits perceptibly.

"But--to get down to bra.s.s tacks," Pete asked in a puzzled tone, "what have we done to make them quarrel?"

"Oh, we've done nothing," Ralph answered with one of his lordly a.s.sumptions of a special knowledge. "It's just the disorganization that always falls on women when men appear on their horizon. They're absolutely without s.e.x-loyalty, you know. They seem to have principle enough in regard to some things, a few things. But the moment a man appears, it's all off. West of Suez, they'll lie and steal; east of Suez, they'll betray and murder as easy as breathe."

"Cut that out, Addington," Pete Murphy commanded in a dangerous voice.

"I won't stand for that kind of talk."