“One week more of this,” commented Honey Smith, “and we’ll be serving meals in courses. I hope that our lady-friends will call sometime when we’re dressed for dinner. I’ve tried several flossy effects in ties without results. But I expect to lay them out cold with these riding-boots.”
Nevertheless many days passed and the flying-girls continued not to appear.
“I don’t believe they’re ever coming again,” Pete Murphy said one day in a tone of despair.
“Oh, they’ll come,” Ralph Addington insisted. “They think themselves that they’re not coming again, after having proved to us that they could fly just as well as ever. But they’ll appear sometime when we least expect it. There’s something pulling them over here that’s stronger than anything they’ve ever come up against. They don’t know what it is, but we do—Mr. G. Bernard Shaw’s life-force. They haven’t realized yet what put the spoke in their wheel, but it will bring them here in the end.”
But days and days went by. The men worked hard, in the main good-naturedly, but with occasional outbreaks of discontent and irritation. “How about that proposition of the life-force?” they asked Ralph Addington again and again. “You wait!” was all he ever answered.
One day, Honey Smith, who had gone off for a solitary walk, came running back to camp. “What do you think?” he burst out when he got within earshot. “I’ve seen one of them, the little brunette, the one with the orange wings, the ‘plain one.’ She was flying on the other side of the island all by her lonesome. She saw me first, and as sure as I stand here, she called to me—a regular bird-call. I whistled and she came flying over in my direction. Blamed if she didn’t keep right over my head for the whole trip.”
“Low?” Ralph questioned eagerly.
“Yes,” Honey answered succinctly, “but not low enough. I couldn’t touch her, of course. If I stopped for a while and kept quiet as the dead, she’d come much closer. But the instant I made a move towards—bing!—she hit the welkin. But the way she rubbered. And, Lord, how easy scared. Once I waved my handkerchief—she nearly threw a fit. Strangest sensation I’ve ever had in my life to be walking calmly along like that with a girl beside me—flying. She isn’t so plain when you get close—she does look like a Kanaka, though.” He stopped and burst out laughing. “Funny thing! I kept calling her Lulu. After a while, she got it that that was her tag. She didn’t exactly come closer when I said ‘Lulu,’ but she’d turn her head over her shoulder and look at me.”
“Well, damn you and your beaux yeux!” said Ralph. There was a real chagrin behind the amusement in his voice.
“Did you notice the muscular development of her back and shoulders?” Frank Merrill asked eagerly.