She had scarcely spoken the words when a mysterious and horrible thing happened. The solid ground beneath her feet seemed suddenly to give way and she felt herself sinking, sinking, into a bottomless abyss.
CHAPTER XVI
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!