d in despair. "I couldn't have dreamed
those tools fell down, and yet where could they have gone? There's no
hole in the floor--"

Now Betty's nerves were sorely tried by the lonely imprisonment, the bad
air, the heat, and the darkness, and it is not to be wondered at that her
usual sound common sense was tricked by her imagination. Her fancy
suggested that the weight of the tools might have torn a hole in the
floor, they might have dropped through to the roof, and Betty herself
might be in momentary danger of stepping into this hole.

Nonsense? Well, wiser minds have conceived wilder possibilities under
similar trying conditions.

"I won't walk another step!" cried poor Betty, as she visioned this
yawning hole. "Not another step. I'll wait till it's light."

But she waited, fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes, and the darkness if
anything grew blacker. She had no idea how long she had been locked in
the room, and she could not calculate how far off the morning might be.

"I'll put my hands out before me and creep," she said finally. "That
ought to be safe. Perhaps I can find something to stand on to reach that
window. I guess I could drop to the roof from there."

Stiffly and painfully, she began to crawl, holding out her hands before
her and starting back time and again as she fancied she felt an opening
just ahead. But when she brought up against a step ladder she forgot her
fears in the joy of her discovery.

It was a short ladder, but she dragged it over to the window and put it
in place and mounted it, all in the twinkling of an eye. By stretching to
her full height, she was able to raise the creaky window, but to her
dismay the roof offered a very long drop. She had not realized how high
she had climbed.

"Dave was fussing with ropes and buckets the other day," she recalled.
"Now I wonder--wouldn't it be the best luck in the world if I could
find a rope?"

Hope was singing high in her heart now, but she almost despaired of such
good fortune after a diligent search. Then something told her to feel
about again on the floor. Round and round she went, getting her fingers
into spider webs and sticky substances that renewed her inward shudders
because she could not identify them. And when she found the rope, a tarry
coil, she also solved the mystery of the tools. They had fallen down
behind the coil of rope and were effectively fenced off from the circle
of floor explored by the bewildered Betty.

It was the wo