nded in a long, eerie cry. Then
straight out to the eastern horizon they went and away and off.

They were dwindling rapidly.

They were spots.

They were specks.

They were nothing.

II

Silence, profound, portentous, protracted, followed.

Finally, Honey Smith absently stooped and picked up a pebble. He threw
it over the silver ring of the flat, foam-edged, low-tide waves. It
curved downwards, hissed across a surface of water smooth as jade,
skipped four times, and dropped.

The men strained their eyes to follow the progress of this tangible
thing.

"Where do you suppose they've gone?" Honey said as unexcitedly as one
might inquire directions from a stranger.

"When do you suppose they'll come back?" Billy Fairfax added as casually
as one might ask the time.

"Did you notice the red-headed one?" asked Pete Murphy. "My first girl
had red hair. I always jump when I see a carrot-top." He made this
intimate revelation simply, as if the time for a conventional reticence
had passed.

"They were lookers all right," Ralph Addington went on. "I'd pick
the golden blonde, the second from the right." He, too, spoke in a
matter-of-fact tone, as though he were selecting a favorite from the
front row in the chorus.

"It must have happened if we saw it," Frank Merrill said. There was in
his voice a note of petulance, almost childish. "But we ought not to
have seen it. It has no right to be. It upsets things so."

"What are we all standing up like gawks for?" Pete Murphy demanded with
a sudden irritability.

"Sit down!"

Everybody dropped. They all sat as they fell. They sat motionless. They
sat silent.

"The name of this place is 'Angel Island,'" announced Billy Fairfax
after a long time. His tone was that of a man whose thoughts, swirling
in phantasmagoria, seek anchorage in fact.

They did not sleep that night.

When Frank Merrill arose the next morning, Ralph Addington was just
returning from a stroll down the beach. Ralph looked at the same time
exhausted and recuperated. He was white, tense, wild-eyed, but recently
aroused interior fires glowed through his skin, made up for his lost
color and energy. Frank also had a different look. His eyes had kindled,
his face had become noticeably more alive. But it was the fire of the
intellect that had produced this frigid glow.

"Seen anything?" Frank Merrill inquired.

"Not a thing."

"You don't think they're frightened enough not to come back?"