where they fell exhausted. They went back to the search the next
day and the next and the next and the next.

And nowhere did they find traces of their prey.

"Where are they?" Ralph said again and again in a baffled tone. "They
couldn't have flown away, could they?"

And, as often as he asked this question, his companions answered it in
the varying tones of their fatigue and their despair. "Of course they
couldn't--their wings were too short."

"Still," Frank said once. "It's now long past the half-yearly shearing
period." He added in another instant, "I don't think, though, that their
wings could more than lift them."

"Well, it's evident, wherever they are, they won't budge until we go
back to work," Billy said at the end of a week. "This is useless and
hopeless."

The next day they returned to the New Camp.

"Here they come," Billy called joyously that noon. "Thank God!" he added
under his breath.

Again the five women appeared at the beginning of the trail. Their
faces were white now, hollow and lined; but as ever, they bore a look
of extraordinary pristineness. And this time they brought the children.
Angela lay in her mother's arms like a wilted flower. Her wings sagged
forlornly and her feet were bandaged. But stars of a brilliant blue
flared and died and flared again in her eyes; roses of a living flame
bloomed and faded and bloomed again in her cheek. Her look went straight
to her father's face, clung there in luminous entreaty. Peterkin, more
than ever like a stray from some unreal, pixy world, surveyed the scene
with his big, wondering, gray-green eyes. Honey-Boy, having apparently
just waked, stared, owl-like, his brows pursed in comic reproduction of
his father's expression. Junior grinned his widest grin and padded the
air unceasingly with his pudgy hands. Honey-Bunch slept placidly in
Julia's arms.

Julia advanced a little from her group and dropped a single
monosyllable. "Well?" she said in an inflexible, questioning voice.

Nobody answered her. Instead Addington called in a beseeching voice:
"Angela! Angela! Come to me! Come to dad, baby!"

Angela's dead little wings suddenly flared with life; they fluttered in
a very panic. She stretched out her arms to her father. She turned her
limpid gaze in an agony of infantile entreaty up to her mother's face.
But Peachy shook her head. The baby flutter died down. Angela closed her
eyes, dropped her head on her mother's shoulder; the tears started f