and swung aboard and vanished around a corner on the shrieking rails and were borne away in the sun-blazed distance to leave only the sound of tortillas frying on the market stoves, or was it merely the ever rising and falling hum and burn of static quivering along two thousand miles of copper wire…?

The old man sat on the floor.

Time passed.
A downstairs door opened slowly. Light footsteps came in, hesitated, then ventured up the stairs. Voices murmured.
‘We shouldn’t be here!’

‘He phoned me, I tell you. He needs visitors bad. We can’t let him down.’
‘He’s sick!’
‘Sure! But he said to come when the nurse’s out. We’ll only stay a second, say hello, and…’

The door to the bedroom moved wide. The three boys stood looking in at the old man seated there on the floor.
‘Colonel Freeleigh?’ said Douglas softly.

There was something in his silence that made them all shut up their mouths.
They approached, almost on tiptoe.

Douglas, bent down, disengaged the phone from the old man’s now quite cold fingers. Douglas lifted the receiver to his own ear, listened. Above the static he heard a strange, a far, a final sound.

Two thousand miles away, the closing of a window.

The end