“No! No! Let me go! You are older. If anything goes wrong, you’ll be needed here. You must remember the women.”
“All—all right.” Drew backed away reluctantly. Then, standing up at full height, ready for instant action, he prepared to protect Johnny as best he might.
Johnny was out of the door and away like a shot. Not so fast, however, but that a dark, muffled figure followed him.
Reaching the first prostrate form, he uttered a low exclamation. It was a man. Apparently quite unconscious, he lay there, his face half buried in the snow. There was a curious odor about the place. Johnny felt a faint dizziness in his head.
He stepped to the next figure. To his surprise and horror he saw it was Spider. He too lay motionless.
“Gas!” a voice said in his ear. “Can’t you see they’ve been gassed?”
He wheeled about to find himself staring in the face of the little French Canadian girl, Alice.
“You!” he murmured.
“Come out of it!” She dragged him away. “There is still some of that gas in the air.”
Johnny had got a little more of that gas than he thought. He did not lose consciousness, but he did have only a hazy notion of that which went on about him. It will always remain so—how the other members of the party came swarming out, how they found four members of the “Massacre Parade” prostrate on the snow, and Spider beside them on the ground with a broken arm—all this will always be a dream to Johnny. So too will be the story of how Drew and Tom went after the missing Iggy, who was not one of the four under the tree, and how they found him waiting in a high-powered car, and, having been fired upon, how they mowed him down with the very machine gun that had been loaded for the purpose of massacring women, men and girls alike.