Angel Island | Page 7

you, but we've got to
keep at it as long as the light lasts. After to-day, though, we need work
only at high water. Between times, we can explore the island - " He
spoke as if he were wheedling a group of boys with the promise of
play.
"Select a site for our capital city" - Honey Smith helped him out
facetiously - "lay out streets - begin to excavate for the church,
town-hall, schoolhouse, and library."
"The first thing to do now," Frank Merrill went on, as usual, ignoring
all facetiousness, "is to put up a signal."
Under his direction, they nailed a pair of sheets, one at the southern, the
other at the northern reef, to saplings which they stripped of branches.
Then they went back to the struggle for salvage.
The fascination of work - and of such novel work - still held them.
They labored the rest of the morning, lay off for a brief lunch, went at it
again in the afternoon, paused for dinner, and worked far into the
evening. Once they stopped long enough to build a huge signal fire on

the each. When they turned in, not one of them but nursed torn and
blistered hands. Not one of them but fell asleep the instant he lay down.
They slept until long after sunrise.

It was Pete Murphy who waked them. "Say, who was it, yesterday,
talked about seeing black spots? I'm hanged if I'm not hipped, too.
When I woke just before sunrise, there were black things off there in
the west. Of course I was almost dead to the world but - "
"Like great birds?" Billy Fairfax asked with interest.
"Exactly."
"Bats from your belfry," commented Ralph Addington. Because of his
constant globe-trotting, Addington's slang was often a half-decade
behind the times.
"Too much sunlight," Frank Merrill explained. "Lucky thing, we don't
any of us have to wear glasses. We'd certainly be up against it in this
double glare. Sand and sun both, you see! And you can thank whatever
instinct that's kept you all in training. This shipwreck is the most
perfect case I've ever seen of the survival of the fittest."
And in fact, they were all, except for Pete Murphy, big men, and all,
even he, active, strong-muscled, and in the pink of condition.
The huge tide had not entirely subsided, but there was a perceptible
diminution in the height of the waves. Up beyond the water-line lay a
fresh installment of jetsam. But, as before, they labored only to save the
flotsam. They worked all the morning.
In the afternoon, they dug a huge trench. Frank Merrill presiding, they
buried the dead with appropriate ceremony.
"Thank God, that's done," Ralph Addington said with a shudder. "I hate
death and everything to do with it."

"Yes, we'll all be more normal now they're gone," Frank Merrill added.
"And the sooner everything that reminds us of them is gone the better."
"Say," Honey Smith burst out the next morning. "Funny thing
happened to me in the middle the night. I woke out of a sound sleep -
don't know why - woke with a start as if somebody'd shaken me - felt
something brush me so close - well, it touched me. I was so dead that I
had to work like the merry Hades to open my eyes - seemed as if it was
a full minute before I could lift my eyelids. When I could make things
out - damned if there wasn't a bird - a big bird - the biggest bird I ever
saw in my life - three times as big as any eagle - flying over the water."
Nothing could better have indicated Honey's mental turmoil than the
fact that he talked in broken phrases rather than in his usual clear,
swift-footed curt sentences.
Nobody noticed this. Nobody offered comment. Nobody seemed
surprised. In fact, all the psychological areas which explode in surprise
and wonder were temporarily deadened.
"As sure as I live," Honey continued indignantly, "that bird's wings
must have extended twenty feet above its head."
"Oh, get out!" said Ralph Addington perfunctorily.
"As sure as I'm sitting here," Honey went on earnestly. "I heard a
woman's laugh. Any of you others get it?"
The sense of humor, it seemed, was not extinct. Honey's companions
burst into roars of laughter. For the rest of the morning, they joked
Honey about his hallucination. And Honey, who always responded in
kind to any badinage, received this in silence. In fact, wherever he
could, a little pointedly, he changed the subject.
Honey Smith was the type of man whom everybody jokes, partly
because he received it with such good humor, partly because he turned
it back with so ready and so charming a