And nowhere did they find traces of their prey.
“Where are they?” Ralph said again and again in a baffled tone. “They couldn’t have flown away, could they?”
And, as often as he asked this question, his companions answered it in the varying tones of their fatigue and their despair. “Of course they couldn’t—their wings were too short.”
“Still,” Frank said once. “It’s now long past the half-yearly shearing period.” He added in another instant, “I don’t think, though, that their wings could more than lift them.”
“Well, it’s evident, wherever they are, they won’t budge until we go back to work,” Billy said at the end of a week. “This is useless and hopeless.”
The next day they returned to the New Camp.
“Here they come,” Billy called joyously that noon. “Thank God!” he added under his breath.
Again the five women appeared at the beginning of the trail. Their faces were white now, hollow and lined; but as ever, they bore a look of extraordinary pristineness. And this time they brought the children. Angela lay in her mother’s arms like a wilted flower. Her wings sagged forlornly and her feet were bandaged. But stars of a brilliant blue flared and died and flared again in her eyes; roses of a living flame bloomed and faded and bloomed again in her cheek. Her look went straight to her father’s face, clung there in luminous entreaty. Peterkin, more than ever like a stray from some unreal, pixy world, surveyed the scene with his big, wondering, gray-green eyes. Honey-Boy, having apparently just waked, stared, owl-like, his brows pursed in comic reproduction of his father’s expression. Junior grinned his widest grin and padded the air unceasingly with his pudgy hands. Honey-Bunch slept placidly in Julia’s arms.
Julia advanced a little from her group and dropped a single monosyllable. “Well?” she said in an inflexible, questioning voice.
Nobody answered her. Instead Addington called in a beseeching voice: “Angela! Angela! Come to me! Come to dad, baby!”