However, the door was locked and she was a prisoner. It was inky black and at every step she seemed to knock over something or stumble against cold iron. Gradually her eyes became accustomed to the lack of light, and she made out the outlines of something against the wall.
"Why, there is a window—I remember!" she said aloud. "I wonder if I can reach it."
Cautiously she felt her way around and stretched up tentative fingers.
She could barely touch the lower frame.
Then, for the first time, Betty felt a little shiver of fear and apprehension. It was close in the tower room, and the smell of oil and dead air began to be oppressive. She had no wish to shout, even if she could be heard, a doubtful probability, for she had no mind to be rescued before the curious eyes of the entire school.
"I'll get out of it somehow, if I have to stay here all night," she told herself pluckily. "Oh, my goodness, what was that?"
A tiny sawing noise in one corner of the room sent Betty scurrying to the other side. She would have indignantly denied any fear of mice or rats, but the bravest girl might be excused from a too close acquaintance thrust upon her in the dark. Betty had no wish to put her fingers on a mouse.
"How can I get out?" she cried aloud, a little wildly. "I can't breathe!"
In the uncanny silence that followed the sound of her voice, the sawing noise sounded regularly, rhythmically. In desperation Betty seized an iron crowbar she had backed into on the wall, and hurled it in the direction of the industrious rodents.
"Now I've done it," she admitted, as with a clatter and a bang that, she was sure, could be heard a mile away, an evident avalanche of tools tumbled to the floor. Her crowbar had struck a box of tools.
But the silence shut down again after that. Betty did not realize that the water tower was so isolated that even unusual noises inside it would not carry far, and with the door and the window both closed the room was practically sealed.