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 God, 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 sunk