"Wot'll we do now?" asked Bill, his face pale with fright. "They'll be on us before morning, sure!"
"I ain't goin' back," said Sam doggedly. "I'm fed up." He stood and tried to think, his mind harassed by the necessity for a disguise which had been suggested to it.
Bill drank deeply from his tankard and, in the middle of the draught, was visited by a brilliant idea.
"I know," he cried. "Let's cut the letters orf our uniforms. They won't be able to tell w'ere we come from an' we can make up some yarn--say we found 'em--'ad our own togs pinched by the soldiers."
The others seized on the suggestion. To their alcoholised brains the plan seemed more than feasible; it was certain of success. Feverishly and clumsily they ripped the regimental letters from each other's uniforms and cast them into the fire. The identification labels, everything which could point to their connection with the army, followed. They stood, anonymous it seemed to them, in their stripped khaki.
"That's done wiv," said Sam, with a heavy sigh. "Let's 'ave some more beer."
Joyous now, their minds relieved of the fear of recapture, the trio refilled their tankards and their pipes. They settled themselves again.
"I say, mates," said Oswald, "ever 'eard the yarn of the bloke 'oo----?" He told the story and, ere the noisy laughter which greeted the end had died away, began another. He revealed himself as a fellow of rare social qualities. His repertory of anecdotes, many of them relating shady episodes of his own career, was inexhaustible. On his own confession he was a sharper or worse; the humour of his experiences the eternal humour of the sharp-witted clown and the dull policeman. He diversified his entertainment with comic songs rendered with more verve than elegance. Bill obliged with others of a sentimental nature. They drank beer and more beer. They bellowed out choruses whose rhythm was marked by the heavy beating of tankards upon the table and laughed and shouted as though they sat at a "free-and-easy" in the Old Kent Road. The fire blazed up the chimney, fed by chairs demolished one after another. Such merry men as they could not condescend to the fetching of fuel. The room was thick with tobacco-smoke. On the floor little lakes of beer communicated by a rivulet whose source was the spigot of the barrel. The three men gave themselves up to a roaring orgy. They forgot entirely the army which was marching away from them, the other army which approached.