Angel Island Part 16

The men closed in upon them.

Twenty minutes later, silence had fallen on the Clubhouse, a silence that was broken only by panted breathing. The five men stood resting.

The five girls stood, tied to the walls, their hands pinioned in front of them. At intervals, one or the other of them would call in an agonized tone to Julia. And always she answered with words that rea.s.sured and calmed.

The room looked as if it had housed a cyclone. The furniture lay in splinters; the feminine loot lay on the floor, trampled and torn.

"I'd like to sit down," Ralph admitted. It was the first remark that any one of the men had made. "Lucky they can't understand me. I'd hate them to know it, but I'm as weak as a cat."

"No sitting down, yet," Frank commanded, still in his inflexible tones of a disciplinarian. "Open the door, Pete--get some air in here!" He knelt before a sea-chest which filled one corner of the room, unlocked it, lifted the cover. The sunlight glittered on the contents.

"My G.o.d, I can't," said Billy.

"I feel like a murderer," said Pete.

"You've got to," Frank said in a tone, growing more peremptory with each word. "Now."

"That's right," said Ralph. "If we don't do it now, we'll never do it."

Frank handed each man a pair of shears.

"I sharpened them myself," he said briefly.

Heads over their shoulders, the girls watched.

Did intuition shout a warning to them? As with one accord, a long wail arose from them, swelled to despairing volume, ascended to desperate heights.

"Now!" Frank ordered.

They had thought the girls securely tied.

Clara fought like a leopardess, scratching and biting.

Lulu struggled like a caged eagle, hysteria mounting in her all the time until the room was filled with her moans.

Peachy beat herself against the wall like a maniac. She shrieked without cessation. One scream stopped suddenly in the middle--Ralph had struck her on the forehead. For the rest of the shearing session she lay over a chair, limp and silent.

Chiquita, curiously enough, resisted not at all. She only swayed and shrugged, a look of a strange cunning in her long, deep, thick-lashed eyes. But of them all, she was the only one who attempted to comfort; she talked incessantly.

Julia did not move or speak. But at the first touch of the cold steel on her bare shoulders, she fainted in Billy's arms.

An hour later the men emerged from the Clubhouse.

"I'm all in," Honey muttered. "And I don't care who knows it. I'm going for a swim." Head down, he staggered away from the group and zigzagged over the beach.

"I guess I'll go back to the camp for a smoke," Frank said. "I never realized before that I had nerves." Frank was white, and he shook at intervals. But some strange spirit, compounded equally of a sense of victory and of defeat, flashed in his eyes.

"I'm going off for a tramp." Pete was sunken as well as ashen; he looked dead. "Do you suppose they'll hurt themselves pulling against those ropes?" he asked tonelessly.

"Let them struggle for a while," Ralph advised. Like the rest of them, Ralph was exhausted-looking and pale. But at intervals he swaggered and glowed. With his strange, new air of triumph and his white teeth glittering through his dark mustache, he was more than ever like some huge predatory cat. "Serves them right! They've taken it out of us for three months."

Billy did not speak, but he swayed as he followed Frank. He fell on his bed when they reached the camp. He lay there all night motionless, staring at the ceiling.

There was a tiny spot of blood on one hand.

V

A.

Dawn on Angel Island.

A gigantic rose bloomed at the horizon-line; half its satin petals lay on the iron sea, half on the granite sky. The gold-green morning star was fading slowly. From the island came a confusion of bird-calls.

Addington emerged from the Clubhouse. Without looking about him, he staggered down the path to the Camp. The fire was still burning. The other men lay beside it, moveless, asleep with their clothes on. They waked as his footsteps drew near. Livid with fatigue, their eyelids dropping in spite of their efforts, they jerked upright.

"How are they?" Billy asked.

"The turn has come," Ralph answered briefly. As he spoke he crumpled slowly into a heap beside the fire. "They're going to live."

The others did not speak; they waited.

"Julia did it. She had dozed off. Suddenly in the middle of the night, she sat upright. She was as white as marble but there was a light back of her face. And with all that wonderful hair falling down--she looked like an angel. She called to them one by one. And they answered her, one by one. You never heard--it was like little birds answering the mother-bird's call. At first their voices were faint and weak. But she kept encouraging them until they sat up--G.o.d, it was--."

Ralph could not go on for a while.

"She gave them a long talk--she was so weak she had to keep stopping--but she went right on--and they listened. Of course I couldn't understand a word. But I knew what she said. In effect, it was: 'We cannot die. We must all live. We cannot leave any one of us here alone.

Promise me that you will get well!' She pledged them to it. She made them take an oath, one after the other. Oh, they were obedient enough.

They took it."

He stopped again.

"That talk made the greatest difference. After it was all over, I gave them some water. They were different even then. They looked at me--and they didn't shrink or shudder. When I handed Julia the cup, she made herself smile. G.o.d, you never saw such a smile. I nearly--" he paused, "I all but went back to the cabin and cut my throat. But the fight's over. They'll get well. They're sleeping like children now."

"Thank G.o.d!" Merrill groaned. "Oh, thank G.o.d!"

"I've felt like a murderer ever since----" Billy said. He stopped and his voice leaped with a sudden querulousness. "You didn't wake me up; you've done double guard duty during the night, Ralph."

"Oh, that's all right. You were all in--I felt that--" Ralph stammered in a shamefaced fas.h.i.+on. "And I knew I could stand it."

"There's a long sleep coming to you, Ralph," Pete said. "You've hardly closed your eyes this week. No question but you've saved their lives."

B.