m. After a mile of it the
leader ordered three of them out on the south side. They left
silently, rode five miles across country and separated, each taking a
different route. Patten and one companion kept on with Pauline who was
now almost insensible. At last they left the stream on the north bank
and climbed into the higher hill country where they entered a thicket
and stopped.

"Here we are," said Patten. His companion dismounted and lifted
Pauline from the other's saddle.

With a swift daring and dexterity, born of fear, she flung aside his
arms and sprang toward the horse he had just left. She tried to mount,
but her strength was gone. They tied her feet with a rope and seated
her on a great fallen tree, while they cleared away a tangle of bushes
and began to tug with their combined strength at a giant rock, which
the bushes had concealed.

The stone moved inch by inch until behind it Pauline saw, with a chill
shudder, the black opening of a cave.

She flung herself from the log pleading piteously. They cut the rope
that bound her feet and led her to the cave. As the giant stone was
rolled back into its place she uttered one wild far-echoing cry. Then
darkness!

For many minutes Pauline lay prostrate. A dim light from some hidden
orifice in the top of the cave behind a shelving wall, seemed to become
brighter as her eyes became more accustomed to the shadows. She arose
and began to inspect the cave.

It was a chamber of rock about forty feet long and twenty feet wide.
The bottom and roof converged slightly towards the end farthest from
the giant boulder that formed the door. But even there the cave was
twenty-five feet high.

The boulder door was set into the rock portal, and not a wisp of light
came through the brush that, covered the crevice. Pauline, after a
brief hopeless test of her frail strength against the weight of the
granite mass, moved slowly along the wall to the extremity of the
chamber.

Here, about seven feet from the floor, ran a ledge of rock, between two
and three feet in width; and, from this ledge upward the wall slanted
at an angle of forty-five degrees to a wide shelf or fissure. It was
from this fissure that the faint light came.

Pauline groped her way back along the other wall to the front of the
cave again. Despairing, she sat down on the chill stone. The events
of the last few hours had left her in a state of mental vertigo. The
hold-up of the buckboard and