Page:Flying Death.pdf/103

 brown head, in the shaft of the sun, shrank. The dark, indolent head between Pete and me inclined lazily as Sally Gessler cut the white slices of fowl with satisfied and triumphant knife and ate with slow, studied voluptuousness of her thin lips. Lazily she lifted her dark and gazed across the table.

Pete and I proceeded to eat. I felt, actually, something like appetite started by this quarrel at the table. I realized, by contrast, that previously I had not believed there was any way out, for Pete and me, from the grip of this man, so "completely sane", who killed pilots for practice or his amusement and who armed himself with automatic airplanes and ton bombs of TNT. But this quarrel at the table seemed, slightly at least, to loosen his grip on me.

The girl across the table shrank under exactly the opposite sensation. She felt his grip suddenly fasten upon her. She had not appreciated, until now, his nature and the quality of his company and the character of his house. How was it that she was here?

I glanced again at her father. He had