Robert Gordon Anderson

“ After Ben had departed on some errand, Sally sat cross-legged, watching Spanish Dick as he moved about, preparing supper, his bare legs, tatooed arms, and chest, coppery-swart in the levelling sun-rays, his melting brown eyes full of dreams and fancies as usual.
"Well this island hasn't floated away yet, Dick," was the bait Sally offered him, adding a little slowly, "though I must confess it is a strange place."
"Wait and see, Señorita. Some day it go, if we stay here long."
He shook his curly head and great earrings uncertainly.
"Your uncle is a good man but very foolish. ”

“ He never finished the sentence, and Sally thinking he had had enough of spookiness, jumped up. "Let's see that trail," she said.
So hand and hand, as all true lovers at one and twenty should, they passed along the curve of the shining sands to Coral Cove. Behind them rose the terraces of the green isle, in varying shades of that lovely colour, ascending to the cone of mountain, tinted richly blue, like a swallow's wings, and sharply picked out against a turquoise sky as innocent of white clouds as the surrounding sea of human sail—all crystal clear and yet unreal, as the boy had said. ”

“ He was spitting blood.
"Stop them," shrieked Sally, then looked around. Jack Beam, Benson, Yeo, and the gypsy, had joined the group, forestalling any foul play.
The fighters clinched and struggled over the smooth place to the north of the palm. Three neat ones, right, left, and right again, Ben got to the ribs, and Pete clinched, crouching still lower in agony like a wounded bear. Recovering in the infighting, he curved his fist viciously around to the kidney—again—and again. As they lurched, panting and writhing, in a gleam of the moonlight, the girl saw her lover's face. ”

“ It was like Ben's measuring glance. Again Ben's fist shot out, straight for the jaw with the silly grin, and the stricken fighter crumpled in a heap like the falling steer.
"No need of countin' this time," said Jack Beam.
His face, like the others gathered round under the murmuring palm, had a savage look. Even the good-natured dancer's was gazing in an unholy fascination at the victor's. Why were men like that—and women, too? Were they human beings after all? Even Uncle Harve—and Ben. She sobbed aloud. Then she saw the boy's bleeding face, his figure, relax. ”

“ Sally said. "It was a floating island, and it has drifted away—over the edge of the world."
Once she thought she saw or, for the children's sake, tried to think she saw, its blue summit and emerald terraces, shining many fathoms deep under the ocean, the green stairways peopled with beautiful beings and gleaming with gold. Ben tried to explain it away by an earthquake of great violence that had occurred in that latitude three years before. But she shook her head, and be that as it may, you will not find The Island of Seven Moons on any chart. ”

“ The moon came up, gleaming wanly like a pale yellow moth through the clouds of smoke pouring from the inverted funnel of the mountain. The whirling eddies of these black columns, the motion of the moon, which appeared to float against their dark tides, and—to those that could see them—her six white shadows, were the only evidences that Nature was not slumbering. All else was motionless. No silver lip of wavelet kissed the cutwater of the ship; her deck did not heave—it was quite as steady as when, the voyage ended, she would rest in drydock. ”

“ Again they became ships' bells telling the time.
"How long have I been drifting, drifting! They must have tolled a thousand, thousand hours—enough time for all eternity."
"Ding-dong, ding-dong," to the rising and falling of the waves. Why couldn't he get them out of his head!
Perhaps back in her home in Salthaven, Sally, with the premonition God gives, they say, to faithful lovers, was praying hard for him, for a favouring wind sprang up, refreshing the shipwrecked sailor, silencing the incessant tones of those dreadful bells, and wafting him towards an unknown shore. ”

“ Still, as she flung herself like a full-fed panther on the bed in her hotel room, Carlotta was rather pleased with herself, that is as long as she could shut out that warning prophecy which sometimes threatened to become an obsession. Her heartache was lost in the sense of the dramatic, in her delighted approval of the makeup of the loungers in the hotel, small-part people in the production she was staging. The situation held sufficient of both tragedy and farce to satisfy the most jaded appetite, and there was promised a most astonishing denouement and curtain, that night. ”

“ But to the three explorers these traces of their own kind did not clear, but seemed to deepen the mystery, just as had the decaying foundations of the squatters huts, and the keel and ribs of a long-boat imbedded in the sand, which they had noticed from the cliff, a little farther back.
Men had dwelt here once—and had gone. The natives had vanished, too. Had never-ending misfortunes visited civilized white and naked black, as it had the wild buccaneers of the Spanish Main, until the very place seemed cursed by the "Voodoos" whom all born in the Caribbees fear! ”

“ THE BLACK YACHT
Her grief for the lifeless changed to concern for the living, as she saw Linda walking towards them. That same strained expression—of alarm, bitterness, and appeal, harshened the soft curves of the other's features, now at the height of their bloom.
Two teeth, as white as foam, bit the coral corner of Sally's mouth, as she puzzled over it all. People were so foolish. Why couldn't they be sensible! Ben was bad enough lately. Could it be? No it must not be. He (she wasn't thinking of Ben in that flash) was just the sort of a man to make a girl happy. ”

“ And still that stone was rising inch by inch. Now, even in the darkness, she could see the gleam of a white arm, but the owner of it had uttered no sound.
Then, as if some mighty force were behind it, the stone fell back crashing against the walls, waking a thousand new voices of the cavern. She did not faint, but strangely she felt that now she knew what the end, what Death, must be like.
The human voices were coming nearer, and around the elbow, the flickering flame of a torch illumined the walls of the curving passage with a ghostly light. ”

“ Spanish Dick crossed himself hurriedly, calling on the name of another new saint—Sally did not hear—she had long ago lost count.
"Now mebbe, Señorita, you believe my tale of the islan'."
"Of course, Dick," said Sally soothingly over her shoulder, but she whispered to Ben:
"Don't think I'm silly enough to really believe all his stories, but they're always pretty and interesting, and that's the main thing. I'd rather have Spanish Dick with me any day than Aunt Abigail, who's always so keen for the truth, and kills all the joy in life. And, as Cap'n Harve says, we're young only once. ”

“ So they rowed and rowed until they reached the great sea wall, rising sheer above the foam that laced its foot like swirling chiffon in a breeze. The boy and girl gazed up at the white sea-birds sailing in circles around it, and saw the opening of the cavern, approached by the perilous path. Quite innocent in the bright daylight it looked, but still they shuddered, remembering.
Now they sighted the Cape and there, in the very centre, waving in the morning breeze, stood the solitary palm, per haps the key to the whole puzzle. ”

“ THE DIVINE CARLOTTA
Of precisely the same height were Sally Fell and Rosey Cohen, but as different in habitat and appearance as a fallow deer and a gayly-striped zebra. Rosey was a daughter of the slums, a foster child of the cafés. Her first cry—even in that hour it was harsh and forceful—was heard in a close room behind a fire-escape draped with a vari-coloured bed-cling, one of a thousand such crude balconies ranging above the crowded East Side street and its jostling many-tongued thousands. ”

“ But it was not unlike it,—the question,—"Do you, Philip, take this woman?" and the answer taken from his mouth,—
"I'll be damned if I do!" shattering the silences to the very belfry rafters—not from the rouged lips of Carlotta, peering down from the gallery, the spot she had chosen as most effective, but from some seemingly preternatural being in that strange procession, as weird and motley as any in Spanish streets, and now advancing up the aisle.
A little man led it, grinning widely and looking as self-important as only a little man can feel. ”

“ At the bottom, far below the wavering features, little bubbles welled like tiny ascending spirits.
"How pretty!" she exclaimed—and then started back with a shudder as she made out—other things besides those silver bubbles in the gravel at the bottom,—a human breast bone with its ribs still intact, and worn even whiter by the action of the waters than its fellows on the sands a mile away.
"You did jump, Sally," said Ben, "but never mind, I did, too, when I first saw it." ”

“ As he glanced at the treasure in the chest, then at the awestruck mariners, the sadness of his eyes was lost in that half-quizzical expression, so mixed with shadow and sunshine that it had won Sally's heart—in a way.
That sense of the proportion of things, which we call humour, grows acute after one has wandered up and down the world, as that tiny bubble spins round its sun through unfathomed space. ”

“ Sally thought the dark rich olive line of the cheeks and throat, so flawlessly curved, and the soft brown eyes, really beautiful. The newcomer was dark, like that other visitor of the island, who called herself Carlotta, but her beauty was gentler than the metallic hardness of the good-natured dancer. It didn't occur to Sally that her own loveliness, with all the purity and delicacy of outline, compared not unfavourably with the other types. ”

“ The landscape to the West, undulating too, back from the rocky shore in sandy billows, is covered with fish-rod-jointed "mare's-tail," and, inland, clumps of cedar, feathery pine, and silver birch, and here and there a solitary hunchback of a house, white and gray against the silver and green. To the South stretches a narrow tongue of land, buff and very barren, and between the two capes, the crescent shoreline and the village,—roofs and chimneys, masts and ropes, a delightful jumble of dark lines, arcs, and angles against the gold and blue of a summer sky. ”