Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/74

 Corps at San Diego, together with Madame Theophile Garnier, the wife of a Continental inventor, met their death in the Pacific. The accident occurred while Colonel Diehms was experimenting with the new Garnier gyroscopic stabilizer for aircraft. The trial, which was under governmental supervision, involved an altitude-test with passenger. At an estimated height of about five thousand feet the machine was seen suddenly to dip and fall. As, unfortunately, both pilot and passenger had neglected to wear life-belts, neither body has been recovered. . ."

It was Sadie who spoke up out of the silence.

"Yuh don't mean to say that Kestner cooked up that end for 'em?"

Wilsnach looked at her out of unseeing eyes. Then he slowly nodded his head.

"I suppose it was the best way!" he meditated aloud.

"Hully gee," Sadie cried, as she sat absorbing the significance of the words to which she had been listening, "ain't that just what I've been tryin' to tell yuh? Don't that show yuh it's just dog eat dog, and the Old Boy take the guy who's too good to sneak a chance?"

Wilsnach, at the moment, was remembering what Kestner, only one short week before, had said to