Their wings moved in rotation, and with machine-like regularity. First one pair flashed up, swept back and down, then another, and another. As they neared, the color seemed the least wonderful detail of the picture. For it changed in effect from a column of glittering wings to a column of girl-faces, a column that floated light as thistle-down, a column that divided, parted, opened, closed again.
The background of all this was a veil of dark gauze at the horizon-line, its foil a golden, virgin moon, dangling a single brilliant star.
“They’re talking!” Honey Smith exclaimed. “And they’re leaving!”
The girls did not pause once. They flew in a straight line over the island to the west, always maintaining their columnar formation. At first the men thought that they were making for the trees. They ran after them. The speed of their running had no effect this time on their visitors, who continued to sail eastward. The men called on them to stay. They called repeatedly, singly and in chorus. They called in every tone of humble masculine entreaty and of arrogant masculine command. But their cries might have fallen on marble ears. The girls neither turned nor paused. They disappeared.
“Females are certainly alike under their skins, whether they’re angels or Hottentots,” Ralph Addington commented. “That tableau appearance was all cooked up for us. They must have practised it for hours.”
“It has the rose-carnival at Tetaluma, Cal., faded,” remarked Honey Smith.
“The ‘quiet one’ was giving the orders for that wing-movement,” said Billy Fairfax. “She whispered them, but I heard her. She engineered the whole thing. She seems to be their leader.”
“I got their voices this time,” said Pete Murphy. “Beautiful, all of them. Soprano, high and clear. They’ve got a language, all right, too. What did you think of it, Frank?”
“Most interesting,” replied Frank Merrill, “most interesting. A preponderance of consonants. Never guttural in effect, and as you say, beautiful voices, very high and clear.”
“I don’t see why they don’t stop and play,” complained Honey. His tone was the petulant one of a spoiled child. It is likely that during the whole course of his woman-petted existence, he had never been so completely ignored. “If I only knew their lingo, I could convince them in five minutes that we wouldn’t hurt them.”