“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?”

The gleam in Ralph Addington’s eye changed to flame.  “I don’t think they’re frightened at all.  They’ll come back all right.  There’s only one thing that you can depend on in women; and that is that you can’t lose them.”

“I can scarcely wait to see them again,” Frank exclaimed eagerly.  “Addington, I can write a monograph on those flying-maidens that will make the whole world gasp.  This is the greatest discovery of modern times.  Man alive, don’t you itch to get to paper and pencil?”

“Not so I’ve noticed it,” Ralph replied with contemptuous emphasis.  “I shall lie awake nights, just the same though.”

“Say, fellers, we didn’t dream that, did we?” Billy Fairfax called suddenly, rolling out of the sleep that had followed their all-night talk.

“Well, I reckon if it wasn’t for the other four, no one of us would trust his own senses,” Frank Merrill said dryly.

“If you’d listened to me in the beginning,” Honey Smith remarked in a drowsy voice, not bothering to open his, eyes, “I wouldn’t be the I-told-you-so kid now.”

“Well, if you’d listened to me and Pete!” said Billy Fairfax; “didn’t we think, way back there that first day, that our lamps were on the blink because we saw black spots?  Great Scott, what dreams I’ve had,” he went on, “a mixture of ‘Arabian Nights,’ ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ ’Peter Wilkins,’ ‘Peter Pan,’ ‘Goosie,’ Jules, Verne, H. G. Wells, and every dime novel I’ve ever read.  Do you suppose they’ll come back?”