Finally, Honey Smith absently stooped and picked up a pebble. He threw it over the silver ring of the flat, foam-edged, low-tide waves. It curved downwards, hissed across a surface of water smooth as jade, skipped four times, and dropped.
The men strained their eyes to follow the progress of this tangible thing.
“Where do you suppose they’ve gone?” Honey said as unexcitedly as one might inquire directions from a stranger.
“When do you suppose they’ll come back?” Billy Fairfax added as casually as one might ask the time.
“Did you notice the red-headed one?” asked Pete Murphy. “My first girl had red hair. I always jump when I see a carrot-top.” He made this intimate revelation simply, as if the time for a conventional reticence had passed.
“They were lookers all right,” Ralph Addington went on. “I’d pick the golden blonde, the second from the right.” He, too, spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, as though he were selecting a favorite from the front row in the chorus.
“It must have happened if we saw it,” Frank Merrill said. There was in his voice a note of petulance, almost childish. “But we ought not to have seen it. It has no right to be. It upsets things so.”
“What are we all standing up like gawks for?” Pete Murphy demanded with a sudden irritability.
“Sit down!”
Everybody dropped. They all sat as they fell. They sat motionless. They sat silent.