Angel Island. Inez Haynes Gillmore

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СКАЧАТЬ hungry enough to drop. Let’s knock off for a while and feed our faces. How about mock turtle, chicken livers, and red-headed duck?”

      They built a fire, opened cans of soup and vegetables.

      “The Waldorf has nothing on that,” Pete Murphy said when they stopped, gorged.

      “Say, remember to look for smokes, all of you,” Ralph Addington admonished them suddenly.

      “You betchu!” groaned Honey Smith, and his look became lugubrious. But his instinct to turn to the humorous side of things immediately crumpled his brown face into its attractive smile. “Say, aren’t we going to be the immaculate little lads? I can’t think of a single bad habit we can acquire in this place. No smokes, no drinks, few if any eats—and not a chorister in sight. Let’s organize the Robinson Crusoe Purity League, Parlor Number One.”

      “Oh, gee!” Pete Murphy burst out. “It’s just struck me. The Wilmington ‘Blue,’ is lost forever—it must have gone down with everything else.”

      Nobody spoke. It was an interesting indication of how their sense of values had already shifted that the loss to the world of one of its biggest diamonds seemed the least of their minor disasters.

      “Perhaps that’s what hoodooed us,” Pete went on. “You know they say the Wilmington ‘Blue’ brought bad luck to everybody who owned it. Anyway, battle, murder, adultery, rape, rapine, and sudden death have followed it right along the line down through history. Oh, it’s been a busy cake of ice—take it from muh! Hope the mermaids fight shy of it.”

      “The Wilmington ‘Blue’ isn’t alone in that,” Ralph Addington said. “All big diamonds have raised hell. You ought to hear some of the stories they tell in India about the rajahs’ treasures. Some of those briolettes—you listen long enough and you come to the conclusion that the sooner all the big stones are cut up, the better.”

      “I bet this one isn’t gone,” said Pete. “Anybody take me? That’s the contrariety of the beasts—they won’t stay lost. We’ll find that stone yet—where among our loot. The first thing we know, we’ll be all knifing each other to get it.”

      “Time’s up,” called Frank Merrill. “Sorry to drive you, but we’ve got to keep at it as long as the light lasts. After to-day, though, we need work only at high water. Between times, we can explore the island—” He spoke as if he were wheedling a group of boys with the promise of play.

      “Select a site for our capital city”—Honey Smith helped him out facetiously—“lay out streets—begin to excavate for the church, town-hall, schoolhouse, and library.”

      “The first thing to do now,” Frank Merrill went on, as usual, ignoring all facetiousness, “is to put up a signal.”

      Under his direction, they nailed a pair of sheets, one at the southern, the other at the northern reef, to saplings which they stripped of branches. Then they went back to the struggle for salvage.

      The fascination of work—and of such novel work—still held them. They labored the rest of the morning, lay off for a brief lunch, went at it again in the afternoon, paused for dinner, and worked far into the evening. Once they stopped long enough to build a huge signal fire on the each. When they turned in, not one of them but nursed torn and blistered hands. Not one of them but fell asleep the instant he lay down.

      They slept until long after sunrise.

      It was Pete Murphy who waked them. “Say, who was it, yesterday, talked about seeing black spots? I’m hanged if I’m not hipped, too. When I woke just before sunrise, there were black things off there in the west. Of course I was almost dead to the world but—”

      “Like great birds?” Billy Fairfax asked with interest.

      “Exactly.”

      “Bats from your belfry,” commented Ralph Addington. Because of his constant globe-trotting, Addington’s slang was often a half-decade behind the times.

      “Too much sunlight,” Frank Merrill explained. “Lucky thing, we don’t any of us have to wear glasses. We’d certainly be up against it in this double glare. Sand and sun both, you see! And you can thank whatever instinct that’s kept you all in training. This shipwreck is the most perfect case I’ve ever seen of the survival of the fittest.”

      And in fact, they were all, except for Pete Murphy, big men, and all, even he, active, strong-muscled, and in the pink of condition.

      The huge tide had not entirely subsided, but there was a perceptible diminution in the height of the waves. Up beyond the water-line lay a fresh installment of jetsam. But, as before, they labored only to save the flotsam. They worked all the morning.

      In the afternoon, they dug a huge trench. Frank Merrill presiding, they buried the dead with appropriate ceremony.

      “Thank God, that’s done,” Ralph Addington said with a shudder. “I hate death and everything to do with it.”

      “Yes, we’ll all be more normal now they’re gone,” Frank Merrill added. “And the sooner everything that reminds us of them is gone the better.”

      “Say,” Honey Smith burst out the next morning. “Funny thing happened to me in the middle the night. I woke out of a sound sleep—don’t know why—woke with a start as if somebody’d shaken me—felt something brush me so close—well, it touched me. I was so dead that I had to work like the merry Hades to open my eyes—seemed as if it was a full minute before I could lift my eyelids. When I could make things out—damned if there wasn’t a bird—a big bird—the biggest bird I ever saw in my life—three times as big as any eagle—flying over the water.”

      Nothing could better have indicated Honey’s mental turmoil than the fact that he talked in broken phrases rather than in his usual clear, swift-footed curt sentences.

      Nobody noticed this. Nobody offered comment. Nobody seemed surprised. In fact, all the psychological areas which explode in surprise and wonder were temporarily deadened.

      “As sure as I live,” Honey continued indignantly, “that bird’s wings must have extended twenty feet above its head.”

      “Oh, get out!” said Ralph Addington perfunctorily.

      “As sure as I’m sitting here,” Honey went on earnestly. “I heard a woman’s laugh. Any of you others get it?”

      The sense of humor, it seemed, was not extinct. Honey’s companions burst into roars of laughter. For the rest of the morning, they joked Honey about his hallucination. And Honey, who always responded in kind to any badinage, received this in silence. In fact, wherever he could, a little pointedly, he changed the subject.

      Honey Smith was the type of man whom everybody jokes, partly because he received it with such good humor, partly because he turned it back with so ready and so charming a wit. Also it gave his fellow creatures a gratifying sense of equality to pick humorous flaws in one so manifestly a darling of the gods.

      Honey Smith possessed not a trace of genius, not a suggestion of what is popularly termed “temperament.” He had no mind to speak of, and not more than the usual amount of character. In fact, but for one thing, he was an average person. That one thing was personality—and personality he possessed to an extraordinary degree. Indeed, there seemed to be something mysteriously compelling about this personality СКАЧАТЬ