Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/160

 plainly awaiting her approach. And still there seemed nobody in sight to whom she could appeal for help.

It was not that she was greatly afraid for her own sake. More than once, in her earlier days of adventure, she had proved to the predatory male a captive only too readily liberated and too willingly abandoned. But she remembered the gun plans hidden away behind the flimsy barrier of her shirt-waist front, and she knew what to expect from any agent of Keudell. A five-minute search in the darkened body of either of those cabs, she knew, would cause her and poor Wilsnach's papers to part company forever. And she wanted this to be a home run. Since she had gone through so much on that day of days, she did not intend to give up until the last ditch was reached. That much at least she owed to Willsie.

Suddenly, as she ran, she veered diagonally across the rain-pooled street, her instinct telling her that the farther she kept away from that waiting taxi-cab with its sinister shadowed hood the better would be her chances. The driver, who was not ignorant of her maneuver, stepped promptly about the front of his car and crossed the side-street ahead of her.