“Well,” Honey prodded him with a kind of non-committal calm, “what happened?”

“Nothing.  If you can believe me — nothing.  I stared — oh, I guess I stared for a quarter of a minute straight up into the most beautiful pair of eyes that I ever saw in my life.  I stared straight up into them and I stared straight down into them.  They were as deep as a well and as gray as a cloud and as cold as ice.  And they had lashes — " For a moment the quiet directness of Billy’s narrative was disturbed by a whiff of inner tumult.  “Whew! what eyelashes!  Honey, did you ever come across a lonely mountain lake with high reeds growing around the edge?  You know how pure and unspoiled and virginal it seems.  That was her eyes.  They sort of hypnotized me.  My eyes closed and — when I awoke it was broad daylight.  What do you think?”

“Well,” said Honey judicially, “I know just how you feel.  I could have killed the boys for joshing me the way they did.  I was sure.  I was certain I heard a woman laugh that night.  And, by God, I did hear it.  Whenever I contradict myself, something rises up and tells me I lie.  But - .”  His radiant brown smile crumpled his brown face.  “Of course, I didn’t hear it.  I couldn’t have heard it.  And so I guess you didn’t see the peroxide you speak of.  And yet if you Punch me in the jaw, I’ll know exactly how you feel.”  His face uncrumpled, smoothed itself out to his rare look of seriousness.”  The point of it is that we’re all a little touched in the bean.  I figure that you and I are alike in some things.  That’s why we’ve always hung together.  And all this queer stuff takes us two the same way.  Remember that psychology dope old Rand used to pump into us at college?  Well, our psychologies have got all twisted up by a recent event in nautical circles and we’re seeing things that aren’t there and not seeing things that are there.”

“Honey,” said Billy, “that’s all right.  But I want you to understand me and I don’t want you, to make any mistake.  I saw a girl.”

“And don’t forget this,” answered Honey.  “I heard one.”

Billy made no allusion to any of this with the other three men.  But for the rest of the day, he had a return of his gentle good humor.  Honey’s spirits fairly sizzled.

That night Frank Merrill suddenly started out of sleep with a yelled, “What was that?”

“What was what?” everybody demanded, waking immediately to the panic in his voice.

“That cry,” he explained breathlessly, “didn’t you hear it?” Frank’s eyes were brilliant with excitement; he was pale.

Nobody had heard it.  And Ralph Addington and Pete Murphy, cursing lustily, turned over and promptly fell asleep again.  But Billy Fairfax grew rapidly more and more awake.  “What sort of a cry?” he asked.  Honey Smith said nothing, but he stirred the fire into a blaze in preparation for a talk.

“The strangest cry I ever heard, long-drawn-out, wild — eerie’s the word for it, I guess,” Frank Merrill said.  As he spoke, he peered off into the darkness.  “If it were possible, I should say it was a woman’s voice.”