An hour later the men emerged from the Clubhouse.

“I’m all in,” Honey muttered.  “And I don’t care who knows it.  I’m going for a swim.”  Head down, he staggered away from the group and zigzagged over the beach.

“I guess I’ll go back to the camp for a smoke,” Frank said.  “I never realized before that I had nerves.”  Frank was white, and he shook at intervals.  But some strange spirit, compounded equally of a sense of victory and of defeat, flashed in his eyes.

“I’m going off for a tramp.”  Pete was sunken as well as ashen; he looked dead.  “Do you suppose they’ll hurt themselves pulling against those ropes?” he asked tonelessly.

“Let them struggle for a while,” Ralph advised.  Like the rest of them, Ralph was exhausted-looking and pale.  But at intervals he swaggered and glowed.  With his strange, new air of triumph and his white teeth glittering through his dark mustache, he was more than ever like some huge predatory cat.  “Serves them right!  They’ve taken it out of us for three months.”

Billy did not speak, but he swayed as he followed Frank.  He fell on his bed when they reached the camp.  He lay there all night motionless, staring at the ceiling.

There was a tiny spot of blood on one hand.

V

A.

Dawn on Angel Island.

A gigantic rose bloomed at the horizon-line; half its satin petals lay on the iron sea, half on the granite sky.  The gold-green morning star was fading slowly.  From the island came a confusion of bird-calls.

Addington emerged from the Clubhouse.  Without looking about him, he staggered down the path to the Camp.  The fire was still burning.  The other men lay beside it, moveless, asleep with their clothes on.  They waked as his footsteps drew near.  Livid with fatigue, their eyelids dropping in spite of their efforts, they jerked upright.

“How are they?” Billy asked.

“The turn has come,” Ralph answered briefly.  As he spoke he crumpled slowly into a heap beside the fire.  “They’re going to live.”

The others did not speak; they waited.

“Julia did it.  She had dozed off.  Suddenly in the middle of the night, she sat upright.  She was as white as marble but there was a light back of her face.  And with all that wonderful hair falling down — she looked like an angel.  She called to them one by one.  And they answered her, one by one.  You never heard — it was like little birds answering the mother-bird’s call.  At first their voices were faint and weak.  But she kept encouraging them until they sat up — God, it was — .”

Ralph could not go on for a while.

“She gave them a long talk — she was so weak she had to keep stopping — but she went right on — and they listened.  Of course I couldn’t understand a word.  But I knew what she said.  In effect, it was:  ’We cannot die.  We must all live.  We cannot leave any one of us here alone.  Promise me that you will get well!’ She pledged them to it.  She made them take an oath, one after the other.  Oh, they were obedient enough.  They took it.”