THE TOOLS WHICH TREVORS USED
To Judith life had changed from a pleasant game in the sunshine to a hideous nightmare. In a few dragging hours she had come to know incredulity, anxiety, misery, dejection, black hopelessness, and icy terror. She had come to look through a man's eyes at that which lay in his heart, to feel for the first time in her fearless life that the fortitude was slipping out of her bosom, that the strength was melting in her.
She lay on a rude bed of fir-boughs, an utter, impenetrable blackness like a palpable weight on her eyeballs. When it was silent about her, and for the most part silence reigned with the oppressive gloom, she yearned so for a little sound that she moved her foot along the rock floor under her or snapped a dry twig between her fingers or even listened eagerly for the coming of the terrible woman who was her jailer.
Gropingly, again and again she went over in her thoughts the long journey here, seeking fruitlessly to know whether she had come north, south, or east from the ranch-house. It was one of these three directions, for there were no such mountains as these to the west, no such monster cliffs, no deep cavern reaching into the bowels of the earth The sense that, even were she freed, she had no slightest idea where she was, which way she must go, stunned her.
"Will I go mad after a while?" she wondered miserably. "Am I already going mad? Oh, God, have mercy on me——"
From the instant when, Saturday night, she had been gripped suddenly in a man's strong arms, when another man had smothered her outcry, she had known in her heart that Bayne Trevors was taking his desperate chance in the game. But in the darkness she had had only the two vague blurs of their bodies to guess at. They had been masked; her own eyes were covered, a bandage brought tightly over them, her mouth gagged, her hands tied behind her, her body lifted into the saddle—all in a moment. Neither man had spoken. Then, tied in the saddle, she only knew that she was riding, that one man rode in front of her, leading her horse, the other following close behind. The sense of direction which she had lost in those first five minutes she had never been given opportunity to regain. She might, even now, be a gunshot from her own ranch; she might be twenty miles from it.
For the greater part of that Saturday night they had ridden; and when trails died under them and rocks rose steeply, they walked, she and one man. The other stayed with the horses. Not once did she hear a man's voice; she did not know whether it was Trevors himself, or Quinnion, or some utter stranger who forced her into this hiding.
They had climbed cliffs, now going down into chasms, now following roaring creeks or making their way along the spine of some rocky ridge. The one man with her was masked, his eyes rather guessed at than seen through the slits of his bandanna handkerchief. He had jerked the bandage from her eyes, since blindfolded she would make such poor progress. But still he guarded his tongue.
"He would speak," she thought, "but that I would recognize his voice. Trevors or Quinnion? Which?"
Feeling the first quick spurt of hope when she saw that there was but one man to deal with, she was aquiver to seize the first opportunity for flight. But that hope died swiftly as she recognized that no such opportunity was to be granted her. Once she paused, looking to a possible leap over a low ledge and escape in a thick bit of timber. But the two eyes through the slits in the improvised mask had been keen and quick, a heavy hand was laid on her arm, she felt the fingers bite into her flesh as he sought to drive into her a full comprehension of his grim determination that she should not escape.