r 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