Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/380

 at night. And the elapse of even a minute, she next poignantly remembered, might be the means of her salvation—must be the means of her salvation, something indomitable in her cowering body suddenly called up to her. And with that rebound of mortal hope came a return of guile, a forlorn knowledge that life was good and something to be fought for to the end.

"Yuh're goin' to croak me," she said, staring across the shadowy room into the face which she could not distinctly see. "But before yuh do it I'm tellin' yuh where your codes and gun charts are. They're lyin' there in that bureau drawer, And the submarine plans—"

It was both forlorn and foolish, and the truth of this she realized as her dry lips failed in uttering the words themselves. She came to a stop, for Keudell's eye had fallen on her instruments of espionage in the center of the room. And that discovery, she knew, sealed her fate. There was much bitterness in his guttural bark of a laugh, for it took only a glance for him to realize the meaning of the microphone and its wires. "So you got that far!" he said. And again his eye wavered, caught as a child's might be by the