“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!
CHAPTER XVII
A NIGHTMARE JOURNEY
Ruth Fielding began to laugh and then to cry—her throat working convulsively.
She forced her exhausted muscles to action again, ran, stumbled, fell, and ran again, bruising arms and knees and shoulders without knowing, without caring!
“Light! Light!” she cried over and over again, her voice weird and smothered in that breathless place. “There is a way out. There is!”
But the beckoning light was cruelly deceptive. It seemed so near and yet appeared ever to recede as Ruth’s eager hands groped toward it.
Several times she gave up the unequal struggle and sank to the ground, with all the strength gone from her limbs.
Then up again and on, sometimes crawling on hands and knees, sometimes struggling to an upright position and, by an almost superhuman effort holding to it, staggering onward—upward—always toward that summoning, faint glimmer of light.