eart was that faith which is born of love.

XXV

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