It was only little by little, in fragments which she obtained during the slow days which followed, that she came to understand Trevors's scheme. And the scheme was in keeping with the man; so far as it was possible, Bayne Trevors was still playing safe.
Mad Ruth was an odd mixture of crazed suspicion, shrewd cunning, cruelty, and madness. Perhaps very long ago—Judith came to believe that it had occurred at the time when she had gone mad, for God knows what reason—Mad Ruth had had a little daughter. The girl had been lost to her, whether through death when an infant, or some tragic accident when a young girl, Judith never knew. But Ruth's heart had been bound up in that baby of hers; when madness came, it centred and turned upon the return of her child, "Who had run away from her, but who would come back some time." Trevors, having learned of her mad passion, had shaped it to his purpose.
But that was not all. Judith had been brought to the cave early Sunday morning. Sunday afternoon there came to the cave a well-dressed man carrying a little black bag in his hand. He talked with Ruth; he took up the lantern and came to look at Judith.
"So I'll know you again," he laughed. Then he went away. In fragments which through long, empty hours her busy mind pieced together, bridging the gaps, she grasped the rest of Trevors's plan. This man was a physician, sent here from some one of the many mining towns in the mountains, probably from a camp twenty or thirty miles away. He, too, was a Trevors hireling. Should Judith ever accuse Trevors of having brought her here, there was another story to be told. And this man would tell it: How he had been summoned here to attend a girl who had had a fall, who had wandered delirious through the mountains until Ruth had found her; whom he had treated here, not daring at first to move her for fear of permanent shock to her reason; who could give them no help to establish her identity; who had a thousand absurd fears and fancies and accusations to make; who in her babbling had at one time accused Bayne Trevors of having forcibly abducted her; who at another had cried that it was a man named Carson, a man named Lee, who had brought her here.
Judith spent many a long hour exploring her prison, hoping to find a way out. So far as she knew she had but one person to reckon with, Mad Ruth. True, Trevors had said that he'd have a man on the ledge outside day and night; Judith had never seen such a person, had never heard his voice, and began to believe that it was a bit of bluff on Trevors's part. But she had never again been where she could look out of the cave's mouth, since Mad Ruth had her own pallet on the floor at the narrowest part of the cave where it was like the neck of a monster bottle, and always at the first sound of the girl's approach, was on her feet to thrust her back. Clearly there was no way out of this place of shadows except that through which she had come.
Judith sought an explanation of her imprisonment, and after long groping she came very near the truth: Trevors would work his will with Hampton through Hampton's faith in him and admiration for him. And, in her absence, Hampton was the head of Blue Lake ranch.
Sunday night, hearing Mad Ruth moving cautiously, Judith raised herself on her elbow, listening. She was confident that the woman was moving toward the cave's mouth; she hoped wildly that Mad Ruth was tricked into believing her asleep and was going out. Her shoes in her hands, her stockinged feet falling lightly, Judith moved toward the mad woman's couch.
Ruth was going out; was in fact even now slipping out of the narrow throat of the cave and to the ledge. But Judith could not see her. For a new, unexpected obstacle was in her way. Her outthrust hands touched not rock walls but heavy wooden panels; she knew then that the narrow neck of the cave was fitted with a heavy door and that it had been drawn shut, fastened from without. In a sudden access of fury and despair she beat at it with her two hands, crying out bitterly.
It was so dark, so inky black, and as still, save for her own outcry, as a tomb sealed and forgotten. Such darkness, smothering hope, suddenly was filled with vague terrors; for one worn-out and nervous as Judith was, the darkness seemed to harbor a thousand ugly things which watched her and mocked at her despair and reached out vile hands toward her. She called loudly, and for answer had the crazed laugh of Mad Ruth which floated in to her from without, but which seemed to drop down from the void above.
"Judith, Judith," the girl whispered after the first outburst, when she found that she was shaking pitifully. "You've got to do better than this; I'm ashamed of you."