The women turned.
A dead tree grew by the knoll, one slender limb stretching across its top to the lake. Peachy ran nimbly along this limb until she came as near to the tip as her weight would permit. She stood there an instant balancing herself; then she walked swiftly back and forth. Finally she jumped to the ground, landing squarely on her feet. She ran like a deer to join the file of women.
Involuntarily the men applauded.
“Remember the time when they first came to the island,” Ralph said, “how she was proud like a lion because she managed to hold herself for an instant on a tree-branch? Her wings were helping her then. Now it’s a real balancing act. Some stunt that! By Jove, she must have been practising tightrope walking.” In spite of his scowl, a certain tenderness, half of past admiration, half of present pride, gleamed in his eyes.
“You betchu they have. They’ve been practising running and jumping and leaping and vaulting and God only knows what else. Well, we’ve only got to keep this up two or three days longer and they’ll come back.” Honey spoke in a tone which palpably he tried to make jaunty. In spite of himself, there was a wavering note of uncertainty in it.
“Oh, we’ll get them yet!” Ralph said. “How about it, old fellow?” Ralph had never lost his old habit of turning to Frank in psychological distress.
But Frank again kept silence.
“Betchu we find them at home to-night,” Honey said as they started down the trail an hour ahead of time. “Who’ll take me. Come!”
No one took him, luckily for Honey. There was no sign of life that night, nor the next, nor the next. And in the meantime, the women did not manifest themselves once during the daytime at the New Camp.
“God, we’ve got to do something about this,” Ralph said at the end of five days. “This is getting serious. I want to see Angela. I hadn’t any idea I could miss her so much. It seems as if they’d been gone for a month. They must have been preparing for this siege for weeks. Where the thunder are they hiding—in the jungle somewhere, of course?”
“Oh, of course,” Honey assented. “I miss the boys, too,” he mourned, “I used to have a frolic with them every morning before I left and every night when I got home.”
“And it’s all so uncomfortable living alone,” Ralph grumbled. He was unshaven. The others showed in various aspects of untidiness the lack of female standards.
“I’m so sick of my own cooking,” Honey complained.
“Not so sick as we are,” said Pete.
“Anybody can have my job that wants it,” Honey volunteered with a touch of surliness unusual with him.
At noon the five women appeared again at the end of the trail.
In contrast to the tired faces and dishevelled figures of the men, they presented an exquisite feminine freshness, hair beautifully coiled, garments spotless and unwrinkled. But although their eyes were like stars and their cheeks like flowers, their faces were serious; a dew, as of tears lately shed, lay over them.
“Shall Angela fly?”’ Julia asked without parley.
The women turned.
“Wait a moment,” Frank called in a sudden tone of authority. “I’m with you women in this. If you’ll let me join your forces, I’ll fight on your side.”
He had half-covered the distance between them before Julia stopped him with a “Wait a moment!” as decisive as his own.
“In the first place,” she said, “we don’t want your help. If we don’t get this by our own efforts, we’ll never value it. In the second place, we’ll never be sure of it. We don’t trust you—quite. You tricked us once. That was your fault. If you trick us again, that’s our fault. Thank you—but no, Frank.”
The women disappeared down the trail while still the men stood staring.
“Well, can you beat it?” was the only comment for a moment—and that came from Pete. In another instant, they had turned on Merrill, were upbraiding him hotly for what they called his treason.
“You can’t bully me,” was his unvarying answer. “Remember, any time they call on me, I’ll fight for them.”
“Well, you can do what you want with your own wife, of course,” Ralph said, falling into one of his black rages. “But I’m damned if you’ll encourage mine.”
“Boys,” he added later, after a day of steadily increasing rage, “I’m tired of this funny business. Let’s knock off work to-morrow and hunt them. What gets me is their simplicity. They don’t seem to have calculated on our superior strength. It won’t take us more than a few hours to run them to earth. By God, I wish we had a pair of bloodhounds.”
“All right,” said Billy. “I’m with you, Ralph. I’m tired of this.”
“Let’s go, to bed early to-night,” said Pete, “and start at sunrise.”
“Well,” said Honey philosophically, “I’ve hunted deer, bear, panther, buffalo, Rocky Mountain sheep, jaguar, lion, tiger, and rhinoceros—but this is the first time I ever hunted women.”
They started at sunrise—all except Frank, who refused to have anything to do with the expedition—and they hunted all day. At sunset they camped where they fell exhausted. They went back to the search the next day and the next and the next and the next.
And nowhere did they find traces of their prey.
“Where are they?” Ralph said again and again in a baffled tone. “They couldn’t have flown away, could they?”
And, as often as he asked this question, his companions answered it in the varying tones of their fatigue and their despair. “Of course they couldn’t—their wings were too short.”
“Still,” Frank said once. “It’s now long past the half-yearly shearing period.” He added in another instant, “I don’t think, though, that their wings could more than lift them.”
“Well, it’s evident, wherever they are, they won’t budge until we go back to work,” Billy said at the end of a week. “This is useless and hopeless.”
The next day they returned to the New Camp.
“Here they come,” Billy called joyously that noon. “Thank God!” he added under his breath.
Again the five women appeared at the beginning of the trail. Their faces were white now, hollow and lined; but as ever, they bore a look of extraordinary pristineness. And this time they brought the children. Angela lay in her mother’s arms like a wilted flower. Her wings sagged forlornly and her feet were bandaged. But stars of a brilliant blue flared and died and flared again in her eyes; roses of a living flame bloomed and faded and bloomed again in her cheek. Her look went straight to her father’s face, clung there in luminous entreaty. Peterkin, more than ever like a stray from some unreal, pixy world, surveyed the scene with his big, wondering, gray-green eyes. Honey-Boy, having apparently just waked, stared, owl-like, his brows pursed in comic reproduction of his father’s expression. Junior grinned his widest grin and padded the air unceasingly with his pudgy hands. Honey-Bunch slept placidly in Julia’s arms.
Julia advanced a little from her group and dropped a single monosyllable. “Well?” she said in an inflexible, questioning voice.
Nobody answered her. Instead Addington called in a beseeching voice: “Angela! Angela! Come to me! Come to dad, baby!”
Angela’s dead little wings suddenly flared with life; they fluttered in a very panic. She stretched out her arms to her father. She turned her limpid gaze in an agony of infantile entreaty up to her mother’s face. But Peachy shook her head. The baby flutter died down. Angela closed her eyes, dropped her head on her mother’s shoulder; the tears started from under her eyelids.
“Shall Angela fly?” Julia asked. “Remember this is your last chance.”
“No,” Ralph said. And the word was the growl of a balked beast.
“Then,” Julia said sternly, “we will leave Angel Island forever.”
“You will,” Ralph sneered. “You will, will you? All right. Let’s see you do it!” Suddenly he started swiftly down toward the trail. “Come, boys!” he commanded. Honey followed—and Billy and Pete.
But, suddenly, Julia spoke. She spoke in the loud, clear tones of her flying days and she used the language of her girlhood. It was a word of command. And as it fell from her lips, the five women leaped from the top of the knoll. But they did not fall into the lake. They did not touch its surface. They flew. Flew—and yet it was not flight. It was half-flight. It was scarcely flight at all. Compared with the magnificent, calm, effortless sweep of their girlhood days, it was almost a grotesque performance. Their wing-stumps beat back and forth violently, beat in a very agony of effort. Indeed these stunted fans could never have held them up. They supplemented their efforts by a curious rotary movement of the legs and feet. They could not rise very far above the surface of the water, especially as each woman was weighted by a child; but they sustained a steady, level flight to the other side of the lake.
The men stared for an instant, petrified. Then panic broke. “Come back, Lulu!” Honey yelled. “Come back!” “Julia!” Billy called hoarsely, “Julia! Julia! Julia!” He went on calling her name as if his senses had left him. Pete’s lips moved. Words came, but no voice; he stood like a statue, whispering. Merrill remained silent; obviously he could not even whisper; his was the silence of paralysis. Addington, on the other hand, was all voice. “Oh, my God!” he cried. “Don’t leave me, Peachy! Don’t leave me! Peachy! Angela! Peachy! Angela!” His voice ascended on the scale of hysteric entreaty until he screeched. “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!” He fell to his knees and held out his arms; the tears poured down his face.
The women heard, turned, flew back. Holding themselves above the men’s heads, they fluttered and floated. Their faces were working and the tears flowed freely, but they kept their eyes steadily fixed on Julia, waiting for command.
Julia was ghastly. “Shall Angela fly?” she asked. And it was as though her voice came from an enormous distance, so thin and expressionless and far-away had it become.
“Anything!” Addington said. “Anything! Oh, my God, don’t leave us!”
Julia said something. Again this word was in their own language and again it was a word of command. But emotion had come into her voice—joy; it thrilled through the air like a magic fluid. The women sank slowly to earth. In another instant the two forces were in each other’s arms.
“Billy,” Julia said, as hand in hand they struck into one of the paths that led to the jungle, “will you marry me?”
Billy did not answer. He only looked at her.
“When?” he said finally. “To-morrow?”
“To-day,” Julia said.
Sunset on Angel Island.
The Honeymoon House thrilled with excitement. At intervals figures crowded to the narrow door; at intervals faces crowded in the narrow window. Sometimes it was Lulu, swollen and purple and broken with weeping. Sometimes it was Chiquita, pale and blurred and sagging with tears. Often it was Peachy, whose look, white and sodden, steadily searched the distance. Below on the sand, Clara, shriveled, pinched, bent over, her hands writhing in and out of each other’s clasp, paced back and forth, her eye moving always on the path. Suddenly she stopped and listened. There came first a faint disturbance of the air, then confusion, then the pounding of feet. Angela, white-faced, frightened, appeared, flying above the trail. “I found him,” she called. Behind came Billy, running. He flashed past Clara.
“How is she?” he panted.
“Alive,” Clara said briefly.
He flew up the steps. Clara followed. Angela dropped to the sand and Jay there, her little head in the crook of her elbow, sobbing.
Inside a murmur of relief greeted Billy. “He’s come, Julia,” Peachy whispered softly.
The women withdrew from the inner room as Billy passed over the threshold.
Julia lay on the couch stately and still. One long white hand rested on her breast. The other stretched at her side; its fingers touched a little bundle there. Her wings—the glorious pinions of her girlhood—towered above the pillow, silver-shining, quiescent. Her honey-colored hair piled in a huge crown above her brow. Her eyes were closed. Her face was like marble; but for an occasional faint movement of the hand at her side, she might have been the sculpture on a tomb.
Her lids flickered as Billy approached, opened on eyes as dull as stones. But as they looked up into his, they filled with light.
“My husband—” she said. Her eyes closed.
But presently they opened and with a greater dazzle of light. “Our son—” The hand at her side moved feebly on the little bundle there. That faint movement seemed a great effort. Her eyes closed again.
But for a third time she opened them, and now they shone with their greatest glory. “My husband—our son—has—wings.”
And then Julia’s eyes closed for the last time.