ntained itself; even in their
Eveless Eden, he presented a certain tailored smartness. Billy Fairfax
selected kitchen utensils and tools. Later, he came across a box filled
with tennis rackets, nets, and balls. The rackets' strings had snapped
and the balls were dead. He began immediately to restring the rackets,
to make new balls from twine, to lay out a court. Like true soldiers of
fortune, Honey Smith and Pete Murphy made no special collection; they
looted for mere loot's sake.

One day, in the midst of one of their raids, Honey Smith yelled a
surprised and triumphant, "By jiminy!" The others showed no signs, of
interest. Honey was an alarmist; the treasure of the moment might prove
to be a Japanese print or a corkscrew. But as nobody stirred or spoke,
he called, "The Wilmington 'Blue'!"

These words carried their inevitable magic. His companions dropped
everything; they swarmed about him.

Honey held on his palm what, in the brilliant sunlight looked like a
globe of blue fire, a fire that emitted rainbows instead of sparks.

He passed it from hand to hand. It seemed a miracle that the fingers
which touched it did not burst into flame. For a moment the five men
might have been five children.

"Well," said Pete Murphy, "according to all fiction precedent, the rest
of us ought to get together immediately, if not a little sooner, and
murder you, Honey."

"Go as far as you like," said Honey, dropping the stone into the pocket
of his flannel shirt. "Only if anybody really gets peeved about this
junk of carbon, I'll give it to him."

For a while life flowed wonderful. The men labored with a joy-in-work at
which they themselves marveled. Their out-of-doors existence showed its
effects in a condition of glowing health. Honey Smith changed first to
a brilliant red, then to a uniform coffee brown, and last to a shining
bronze which was the mixture of both these colors. Pete Murphy grew one
crop of freckles, then another and still another until Honey offered to
"excavate" his features. Ralph Addington developed a rich, subcutaneous,
golden-umber glow which made him seem, in connection with an occasional
unconventionality of costume, more than ever like the schoolgirl's
idea of an artist. Billy Fairfax's blond hair bleached to flaxen. His
complexion deepened in tone to a permanent pink. This, in contrast
with the deep clear blue of his eyes, gave him a kind of out-of-doors
comeliness. But Frank Merrill was the surprise o