TRAPPED
That the abyss into which she had fallen was not bottomless at all,
Ruth found out to her sorrow when she came down with a thump upon
something that was extremely solid and very hard.
For a moment she was dazed and half stunned by the fall and sat where
she had fallen, groping in bewilderment for some explanation of this
phenomenon.
She had stumbled into some brushwood that must have pretty
effectually hidden a hole of some sort. A bear trap, possibly. She
had heard that they set traps of this sort for Bruin, covering a hole
in the ground with a clever camouflage of twigs and leaves.
However, they would hardly set traps so near the settlement. Bears
did not venture this close to humanity as a rule.
Ruth shook herself impatiently. What did it matter how this awful
thing had happened? The important thing was that it had and that
she was now faced with the necessity of getting herself out of the
predicament as well as she could.
Very cautiously Ruth got to her feet. Groping with her fingers along
the dirt walls of the hole into which she had fallen, she moved
forward a step or two.
It was fearfully dark down there, and suddenly Ruth was conscious of
a chilling terror.
Suppose this dark hole was the entrance to the cave of some animal?
Suppose her fingers, groping in the darkness, were to touch, not the
earth sides of the hole, but the fur or cold snout of some creature
of the wild!
“Come, come, this will never do!” she said aloud, and gained some
measure of assurance from the sound of her own voice. “There must be
a way out of this. Perhaps I can get up again the way I came in!”
She looked up and saw far above her head a dim glimmer of light.
Again that chill of horror shook her.
Impossible to scale the sheer sides of the hole without the aid of a
rope in the hands of some one above.
“Oh, Tom, Tom, if I had only done what you begged me to and not
started out alone in this country that is so strange to me! Oh, what
shall I do? What can I do?”
With a great effort Ruth managed to control her rising panic. In an
emergency like this it would never do to lose her head. And, really,
she had been in much tighter places before.
She forced herself to think slowly and carefully.
It was evident that there was little chance of getting out of this
place the way she had entered it. Then, too, there was little
likelihood that a rescue party would be sent out after her for hours
to come.
Her very independence and self-sufficiency, Ruth realized now a bit
ruefully, might well prove her undoing. In her capacity of director
she was accustomed to roaming around for hours alone in search of
locations. So, until several hours had elapsed, no one would feel any
particular alarm over her absence.
In such circumstances Ruth saw that she must, if she could, be her
own salvation.
She could not go up, but there was a bare possibility that she might
go forward.
“If I only had matches with me,” she muttered beneath her breath. “As
it is, I can’t see a foot before my face!”
She groped forward again, and after feeling about cautiously for what
seemed to her an endless time finally felt her hand slip forward into
emptiness.
“A hole!” she thought, with transient triumph.
“Then there is some sort of passage leading from this place!”
However, it takes the highest form of courage to go forward,
accompanied by pitch darkness, into an unexplored place. Even Ruth,
valiant as she always was in the face of emergency, hesitated for a
moment before this test of courage. Then——
“Carry on, Ruth,” she said. “Better any known thing than this
uncertainty!”
She did not really mean that. The cautious half of her begged that
she stay where she was, for hours, if necessary, until the inevitable
rescue party came to her aid, rather than venture into that black
hole of mystery into which her hand had slid. But—would they be able
to pick up her trail?
“I don’t even know that I can get all of myself into that hole,” she
murmured, turning her thoughts resolutely to the present situation.
She forced herself forward again and found that the aperture was
large enough to admit her if she entered in a stooping posture.
There was one more moment of indecision. Then, like a swimmer
prepared to plunge head-first into icy water, she gave a little gasp
and entered the opening.
It was so narrow that her body grazed both sides of it as she groped
slowly and painfully forward. She was now in complete darkness. The
air was heavy and devitalized, and Ruth found herself breathing with
difficulty.
Ahead of her there came a faint and ominous sound—the staccato drop
of pebbles on the earth floor of the tunnel.
That sound caught at Ruth’s breath and for a moment she pressed a
hand hard against her wildly beating heart.
Who knew at what moment the tunnel might cave in, burying her beneath
a smothering weight of dirt and rock? Ruth knew that this was an
actual and imminent peril.
She tried to turn with some vague idea in her mind of returning to
the comparative safety of the place she had left.
But the movement of her shoulders against the sides of the tunnel
brought with it such a terrifying rattle of stones that Ruth decided
to push on at any cost.
“There must be an outlet somewhere!” she gasped sobbingly. “There
must be! There must!”
All the time she knew that the chances were that the tunnel ended in
a dead wall of dirt and rock. Any moment now her hand might touch a
solid surface, showing that she had reached the farther end of the
underground passage.
Still her hand groping ahead of her touched nothing and she pushed
on, panting, almost smothered, nearly exhausted.
“What a hideous, nightmare place!” she sobbed. “How could I have
fallen into such a trap! How could I?”
Still she struggled on, losing all sense of time or distance,
commanding her aching muscles to move automatically, convinced in a
dazed, half-delirious sort of way, that she would never come to the
end of this maddening tunnel because there _was_ no end.
“Tom! Helen!” she kept muttering over and over, staggering,
stumbling, falling to her knees and forcing herself to her feet again
to stagger and stumble on. “I’ll never see you again! Never! This is
the end! I can’t get out! I can’t, I can’t—I—can’t——”
The words died out in a vague silence of utter incredulity. She must
have gone out of her head. She must be mad at last.
There, before her, the faintest beckoning glimmer, was light!