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

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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.