en as well as ashen; he looked
dead. "Do you suppose they'll hurt themselves pulling against those
ropes?" he asked tonelessly.

"Let them struggle for a while," Ralph advised. Like the rest of them,
Ralph was exhausted-looking and pale. But at intervals he swaggered
and glowed. With his strange, new air of triumph and his white teeth
glittering through his dark mustache, he was more than ever like some
huge predatory cat. "Serves them right! They've taken it out of us for
three months."

Billy did not speak, but he swayed as he followed Frank. He fell on
his bed when they reached the camp. He lay there all night motionless,
staring at the ceiling.

There was a tiny spot of blood on one hand.

V

A.

Dawn on Angel Island.

A gigantic rose bloomed at the horizon-line; half its satin petals lay
on the iron sea, half on the granite sky. The gold-green morning star
was fading slowly. From the island came a confusion of bird-calls.

Addington emerged from the Clubhouse. Without looking about him, he
staggered down the path to the Camp. The fire was still burning. The
other men lay beside it, moveless, asleep with their clothes on. They
waked as his footsteps drew near. Livid with fatigue, their eyelids
dropping in spite of their efforts, they jerked upright.

"How are they?" Billy asked.

"The turn has come," Ralph answered briefly. As he spoke he crumpled
slowly into a heap beside the fire. "They're going to live."

The others did not speak; they waited.

"Julia did it. She had dozed off. Suddenly in the middle of the night,
she sat upright. She was as white as marble but there was a light back
of her face. And with all that wonderful hair falling down--she looked
like an angel. She called to them one by one. And they answered her,
one by one. You never heard--it was like little birds answering the
mother-bird's call. At first their voices were faint and weak. But she
kept encouraging them until they sat up--God, it was--."

Ralph could not go on for a while.

"She gave them a long talk--she was so weak she had to keep
stopping--but she went right on--and they listened. Of course I couldn't
understand a word. But I knew what she said. In effect, it was: 'We
cannot die. We must all live. We cannot leave any one of us here alone.
Promise me that you will get well!' She pledged them to it. She made
them take an oath, one after the other. Oh, they were obedient enough.
They took it."

He stopped a