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.