Angel Island. Inez Haynes Gillmore
adultery, rape, rapine, and sudden death have followed it right along the line down through history. Oh, it’s been a busy cake of ice—take it from muh! Hope the mermaids fight shy of it.”
“The Wilmington ‘Blue’ isn’t alone in that,” Ralph Addington said. “All big diamonds have raised hell. You ought to hear some of the stories they tell in India about the rajahs’ treasures. Some of those briolettes—you listen long enough and you come to the conclusion that the sooner all the big stones are cut up, the better.”
“I bet this one isn’t gone,” said Pete. “Anybody take me? That’s the contrariety of the beasts—they won’t stay lost. We’ll find that stone yet—where among our loot. The first thing we know, we’ll be all knifing each other to get it.”
“Time’s up,” called Frank Merrill. “Sorry to drive you, but we’ve got to keep at it as long as the light lasts. After to-day, though, we need work only at high water. Between times, we can explore the island—” He spoke as if he were wheedling a group of boys with the promise of play.
“Select a site for our capital city”—Honey Smith helped him out facetiously—“lay out streets—begin to excavate for the church, town-hall, schoolhouse, and library.”
“The first thing to do now,” Frank Merrill went on, as usual, ignoring all facetiousness, “is to put up a signal.”
Under his direction, they nailed a pair of sheets, one at the southern, the other at the northern reef, to saplings which they stripped of branches. Then they went back to the struggle for salvage.
The fascination of work—and of such novel work—still held them. They labored the rest of the morning, lay off for a brief lunch, went at it again in the afternoon, paused for dinner, and worked far into the evening. Once they stopped long enough to build a huge signal fire on the each. When they turned in, not one of them but nursed torn and blistered hands. Not one of them but fell asleep the instant he lay down.
They slept until long after sunrise.
It was Pete Murphy who waked them. “Say, who was it, yesterday, talked about seeing black spots? I’m hanged if I’m not hipped, too. When I woke just before sunrise, there were black things off there in the west. Of course I was almost dead to the world but—”
“Like great birds?” Billy Fairfax asked with interest.
“Exactly.”
“Bats from your belfry,” commented Ralph Addington. Because of his constant globe-trotting, Addington’s slang was often a half-decade behind the times.
“Too much sunlight,” Frank Merrill explained. “Lucky thing, we don’t any of us have to wear glasses. We’d certainly be up against it in this double glare. Sand and sun both, you see! And you can thank whatever instinct that’s kept you all in training. This shipwreck is the most perfect case I’ve ever seen of the survival of the fittest.”
And in fact, they were all, except for Pete Murphy, big men, and all, even he, active, strong-muscled, and in the pink of condition.
The huge tide had not entirely subsided, but there was a perceptible diminution in the height of the waves. Up beyond the water-line lay a fresh installment of jetsam. But, as before, they labored only to save the flotsam. They worked all the morning.
In the afternoon, they dug a huge trench. Frank Merrill presiding, they buried the dead with appropriate ceremony.
“Thank God, that’s done,” Ralph Addington said with a shudder. “I hate death and everything to do with it.”
“Yes, we’ll all be more normal now they’re gone,” Frank Merrill added. “And the sooner everything that reminds us of them is gone the better.”
“Say,” Honey Smith burst out the next morning. “Funny thing happened to me in the middle the night. I woke out of a sound sleep—don’t know why—woke with a start as if somebody’d shaken me—felt something brush me so close—well, it touched me. I was so dead that I had to work like the merry Hades to open my eyes—seemed as if it was a full minute before I could lift my eyelids. When I could make things out—damned if there wasn’t a bird—a big bird—the biggest bird I ever saw in my life—three times as big as any eagle—flying over the water.”
Nothing could better have indicated Honey’s mental turmoil than the fact that he talked in broken phrases rather than in his usual clear, swift-footed curt sentences.
Nobody noticed this. Nobody offered comment. Nobody seemed surprised. In fact, all the psychological areas which explode in surprise and wonder were temporarily deadened.
“As sure as I live,” Honey continued indignantly, “that bird’s wings must have extended twenty feet above its head.”
“Oh, get out!” said Ralph Addington perfunctorily.
“As sure as I’m sitting here,” Honey went on earnestly. “I heard a woman’s laugh. Any of you others get it?”
The sense of humor, it seemed, was not extinct. Honey’s companions burst into roars of laughter. For the rest of the morning, they joked Honey about his hallucination. And Honey, who always responded in kind to any badinage, received this in silence. In fact, wherever he could, a little pointedly, he changed the subject.
Honey Smith was the type of man whom everybody jokes, partly because he received it with such good humor, partly because he turned it back with so ready and so charming a wit. Also it gave his fellow creatures a gratifying sense of equality to pick humorous flaws in one so manifestly a darling of the gods.
Honey Smith possessed not a trace of genius, not a suggestion of what is popularly termed “temperament.” He had no mind to speak of, and not more than the usual amount of character. In fact, but for one thing, he was an average person. That one thing was personality—and personality he possessed to an extraordinary degree. Indeed, there seemed to be something mysteriously compelling about this personality of Honey’s. The whole world of creatures felt its charm. Dumb beasts fawned on him. Children clung to him. Old people lingered near as though they could light dead fires in the blaze of his radiant youth. Men hob-nobbed with him; his charm brushed off on to the dryest and dullest so that, temporarily, they too bloomed with personality. As for women—His appearance among them was the signal for a noiseless social cataclysm. They slipped and slid in his direction as helplessly as if an inclined plane had opened under their feet. They fluttered in circles about him like birds around a light. If he had been allowed to follow the pull of his inclination, they would have held a subsidiary place in his existence. For he was practical, balanced, sane. He had, moreover, the tendency towards temperance of the born athlete. Besides all this, his main interests were man-interests. But women would not let him alone. He had but to look and the thing was done. Wreaths hung on every balcony for Honey Smith and, always at his approach, the door of the harem swung wide. He was a little lazy, almost discourteously uninterested in his attitude towards, the individual female; for he had never had to exert himself.
It is likely that all this personal popularity would have been the result of that trick of personality. But many good fairies had been summoned to Honey’s christening; he had good looks besides. He was really tall, although his broad shoulders seemed to reduce him to medium height. Brown-skinned, brown-eyed, brown-haired, his skin was as smooth as satin, his eyes as clear as crystal, his hair as thick as fur. His expression had tremendous sparkle. But his main physical charm was a smile which crumpled his brown face into an engaging irregularity of contour and lighted it with an expression brilliant with mirth and friendliness.
He was a true soldier of fortune. In the ten years which his business career covered be had engaged in a score of business ventures. He had lost two fortunes. Born in the West, educated in the East, he had flashed from coast to coast so often that he himself would have found it hard to say where he belonged.
He was the admiration and the wonder and the paragon and the criterion of his friend Billy Fairfax, who had trailed his meteoric course through college and who, when the Brian Boru went down, was accompanying him on his most recent adventure—a