Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/58

 was not the fact that during the last three days a dictaphone had been placed in her room—as my duly transcribed shorthand will later show. She knew she was near her last ditch. She had courage, and she had cleverness, so she engineered this particular shooting-scene, promptly and deliberately engineered it with that poor dupe of hers, for the purpose of throwing us off the track, if only for half an hour. During that half-hour, as you very well know, Lieutenant Diehms, you and she would be out of this hotel and in a motor-car headed for the Mexican border."

Diehms stood with unseeing eyes.

"What," finally asked the young officer, "what will this mean—for her?"

"From twelve to twenty years in federal prison at Atlanta," was Kestner's answer.

A visible muscular twinge ran through the man's rigid body. "And for me?" he added.

"Only one thing—court-martial."

The young officer with the premature gray about the temples folded his arms. He stood for several moments staring heavily ahead of him.

"I'd prefer . . . ending things . . . in the other way," he slowly announced.