At the first far-away glimpse, the men dropped their tools and ran to the water’s edge. Honey Smith waded out, waist-deep.
“Well, what do you know about that?” he called out. “Pipe the formation!”
They came massed vertically. In the distance they might have been a rainbow torn from its moorings, borne violently forward on a high wind. The rainbow broke in spots, fluttered, and then came together again. It vibrated with color. It pulsed with iridescence.
“How the thunder—” Addington began and stopped. “Well, can you beat it?” he concluded.
The human column was so arranged that the wings of one of the air-girls concealed the body of another just above her.
The “dark one” led, flying low, her scarlet pinions beating slowly back and forth about her head.
Just above, near enough for her body to be concealed by the scarlet wings of the “dark one,” but high enough for her pointed brown face to peer between their curves, came the “plain one.”
Higher flew the “thin one.” Her body was entirely covered by the orange wings of the “plain one,” but her copper-colored hair made a gleamy spot in their vase-shaped opening.
Still higher appeared the “peachy one.” She seemed to be holding her lustrous blonde head carefully centered in the oval between the “thin one’s” green-and-yellow plumage. She looked like a portrait in a frame.
Highest of them all, floating upright, a Winged Victory of the air, her silver wings towering straight above her head, the cameo face of the “quiet one” looked level into the distance.