“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.