Pete again wrote the rest of the day and by firelight far into the night.  In the middle of the morning he stopped suddenly, weighted his paper down with a stone, rolled over on to the pine-needles, and fell immediately into a deep sleep.  He lay for hours, his face down, resting on his arm.

Whir-r-r-r-r!

Pete awoke with a start.  His manuscript was gone.  He leaped to his feet, stared wildly about.  Not far off Clara was flying, almost on the ground.  As he watched, she ascended swiftly.  She held his poem in her hands.  She studied it, her head bent.  She did not once look up or back; her eyes still jealously glued to the pencil-scratchings, she drifted out to sea, disappeared.

Pete did not move.  He watched Clara intently until she melted into the sky.  But as he watched, his creative mood broke and evaporated.  And suddenly another emotion, none the less fiercely ravaging, sluiced the blood into his face, filled his eyes with glitter, shook him as though a high wind were blowing, sent him finally speeding at a maniacal pace over the reefs.

“Say, do you think we’d better organize a search-party?” Honey asked finally.

“Not yet,” said Ralph, “here he comes.”

Pete was running down the trail like a deer.

“I’ve finished my poem,” he yelled jubilantly.

“Every last word of it.  And now, boys,” he added briskly before they could recover their breath, I’m with you on this capture question.”

For an instant, the others stared and blinked.  “What do you mean, Pete?” Honey asked stupidly, after an instant.

“Well, I’m prepared to go as far as you like.”

“But what changed you? " Honey persisted.

“Oh, hang it all,” Pete said and never had his little black, fiery Irish face so twisted with irritation, so flamed with spirit, “a poet’s so constituted that he’s got to have a woman round to read his verse to.  I want to teach Clara English so she can hear that poem.”

There was a half-minute of silence.  Then his listeners broke into roars.  “You damned little mick you!” Honey said.  He laughed at intervals for an hour.

They immediately broke the news of Pete’s desertion to Merrill.  Frank received it without any appearance of surprise.  But he announced, with a sudden boom of authority in his big voice, that he expected them all to stand by their agreement.  Billy answered for the rest that they had no intention of doing anything else.  But the four were now in high spirits.  Among themselves, they no longer said, “If we capture them,” but “When we capture them.”

The stress of the situation at once pulled Frank away from his books.  Again he took complete charge of the little group.  He was a natural disciplinarian, as they had learned at the time of the wreck.  Now his sense of responsibility developed a severity that was almost austerity.  He kept them constantly at work.  In private the others chafed at his tone of authority.  But in his presence they never failed of respect.  Besides, his remarkable unselfishness compelled their esteem, a shy vein of innocent, humorless sweetness their affection.  “Old Frank” they always called him.