"All but Johnson."
"The sergeant," said Geoff blankly. "Why, he's to live forever, hang it."
"He's gone."
Geoff was still for a minute, and then burst out, "Well, don't say it like a morbid stuffed owl! After fifty years of civilian life, he smelt the powder and heard the shots again, God be thanked! So he died—so bloody what? It's how he should have gone."
"Right," said I, from the heart. I turned to the aliens then, and found sixteen grinning, drooling, mindless carcasses, staring round with blank dull eyes. They were empty hulks. The usurpers were gone into their silver-blue fastnesses, and the fight was done.
CHAPTER XXIV
A week had gone by. The seven of us sat over our dessert in London's finest dining room: Arold Smiff well-scrubbed and ill at ease, Geoff cheerful as ever. Alec busy savoring the coffee. John cynical again. Colonel Bedford complacent and stolid, my Marion all radiant and lovely, and myself, the erstwhile most savage one-man crime wave since Genghis Khan was a pup, fiddling with the silverware and feeling rather mournful, now that all was over.
At first we spoke of the past, as though each of us hated to think of a future apart from his companions. We asked one another questions of which we had heard the answers a dozen times before. Geoff told again how he had wandered down the secret stair that night, feeling his way along the walls, lonely and worried, and how he had remembered as he came to the ground floor that there was an old hidden exit in the back of the fireplace.
"I give you my word I never meant to use it! I only wanted to see if I remembered the trick of it. You twist one of the hounds on the stone coat of arms, and the door opens behind the logs. Well, I did it, and heard the door clink open; I hadn't tried it since I was a kid, and I thought, By golly, what a lark to go through the underground tunnel and see if the other end's still workable! I guess I had some vague notion of us using it for an escape route, if things got too hot for us in the castle. So I went in, and closed the door behind me.