“Now I’ve done it,” she admitted, as with a clatter and a bang that, she was sure, could be heard a mile away, an evident avalanche of tools tumbled to the floor.  Her crowbar had struck a box of tools.

But the silence shut down again after that.  Betty did not realize that the water tower was so isolated that even unusual noises inside it would not carry far, and with the door and the window both closed the room was practically sealed.

The sawing noise was not repeated, there was that much to be grateful for, Betty reflected.  She wondered if she could batter down the door.

“I’ll try, anyway,” she thought wearily.

And then she could not find the crowbar!  Around and around she went, feeling on the floor for the tools that had clattered down with such a racket and for the iron bar she had hurled among them.  Not one tool could she put her hands on.

“I must be going crazy,” she cried 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?”