“Curious about Merrill,” Honey Smith answered, indulging in one of his sudden, off-hand characterizations, bull’s-eye shots every one of them.  “He’s a good man, ruined by culturine.  He’s the bucko-mate type translated into the language of the academic world.  Three centuries ago he’d have been a Drake or a Frobisher.  And to-day, even, if he’d followed the lead of his real ability, he’d have made a great financier, a captain of industry or a party boss.  But, you see, he was brought up to think that book-education was the whole cheese.  The only ambition he knows is to make good in the university world.  How I hated that college atmosphere and its insistence on culture!  That was what riled me most about it.  As a general thing, I detest a professor.  Can’t help liking old Frank, though.”

The four men virtually took no time off from work; or at least the change of work that stood for leisure was all in the line of home-making.  Eternally, they joked each other about these womanish occupations; but they all kept steadily to it.  Ralph Addington and Honey Smith put the furniture into shape, repairing and polishing it.  Billy Fairfax sorted out the glass, china, tools, household utensils of every kind.

Pete Murphy went through the trunks with his art side uppermost.  He collected all kinds of Oriental bric-a-brac, pictures and draperies.  He actually mended and pressed things; he had all the artist’s capability in these various feminine lines.  When the others joked him about his exotic and impracticable tastes, he said that, before he left, he intended to establish a museum of fine arts, on Angel Island.

Hard as the men worked, they had always the appearance of those who await the expected.  But the expected did not occur; and gradually the sharp edge of anticipation wore dull.  Emotionally they calmed.  Their nerves settled to a normal condition.  The sudden whirr of a bird’s flight attracted only a casual glance.  In Ralph Addington alone, expectation maintained itself at the boiling point.  He trained himself to work with one eye searching the horizon.  One afternoon, when they had scattered for a siesta, his hoarse cry brought them running to the beach from all directions.

So suddenly had the girls appeared that they might have materialized from the air.  This time they had not come from the sea.  When Ralph discovered them, they were hovering back of them above the trees that banded the beach.  The sun was setting, blood-red; the whole western sky had broken away.  The girls seemed to be floating in a sea of crimson-amber ether.  Its light brought lustre to every feather; it turned the edges of their wings to flame; it changed their smoothly piled hair to helmets of burnished metal.

The men tore from the beach to the trees at full speed.  For a moment the violence of this action threw the girls into a panic.  They fluttered, broke lines, flew high, circled.  And all the time, they uttered shrill cries of distress.