Angel Island

Angel Island

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Title: Angel Island

Author: Inez Haynes Gillmore
Release Date: November, 2003 [Etext #4637] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on February 20,
2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
The Project Gutenberg Etext of Angel Island by Inez Haynes Gillmore
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Angel Island

By Inez Haynes Gillmore

Author of "Phoebe and Ernest," "Phoebe, Ernest, and Cupid," etc.

To
M. W. P.

Angel Island

I

It was the morning after the shipwreck. The five men still lay where
they had slept. A long time had passed since anybody had spoken. A
long time had passed since anybody had moved. Indeed, it, looked
almost as if they would never speak or move again. So bruised and
bloodless of skin were they, so bleak and sharp of feature, so stark and
hollow of eye, so rigid and moveless of limb that they might have been
corpses. Mentally, too, they were almost moribund. They stared
vacantly, straight out to sea. They stared with the unwinking fixedness
of those whose gaze is caught in hypnotic trance.
It was Frank Merrill who broke the silence finally. Merrill still looked
like a man of marble and his voice still kept its unnatural tone, level,
monotonous, metallic. "If I could only forget the scream that Norton
kid gave when he saw the big wave coming. It rings in my head. And
the way his mother pressed his head down on her breast - oh, my God!"
His listeners knew that he was going to say this. They knew the very
words in which he would put it. All through the night-watches he had
said the same thing at intervals. The effect always was of a red-hot wire
drawn down the frayed ends of their nerves. But again one by one they
themselves fell into line.
"It was that old woman I remember," said Honey Smith. There were
bruises, mottled blue and black, all over Honey's body. There was a

falsetto whistling to Honey's voice. "That Irish granny! She didn't say a
word. Her mouth just opened until her jaw fell. Then the wave struck!"
He paused. He tried to control the falsetto whistling. But it got away
from him. "God, I bet she was dead before it touched her!"
"That was the awful thing about it," Pete Murphy groaned. It was as
inevitable now as an antiphonal chorus. Pete's little scarred, scratched,
bleeding body rocked back and forth." The women and children! But it
all came so quick. I was close beside 'the Newlyweds.' She put her arms
around his neck and said, 'Your face'll be the last I'll look on in this life,
dearest! 'And she stayed there looking into his eyes. It was the last face
she saw all right." Pete stopped and his brow blackened. " While she
was sick in her stateroom, he'd been looking into