Reaching beneath her outer skirt, she jerked loose her white petticoat, and then began tearing it into long strips which she knotted together.  This done, she bound Juan Cateras’s hand and foot, and, with some difficulty, turned him over on his face after first thrusting into his half-open mouth a gag, which she had fashioned from stray ends of the providential petticoat.

Then leaping to her feet and strapping the ammunition belt and revolver about her waist, she stole on tiptoe to the doorway and peered out; the silent, cavernous passage was empty.

Lithely, like a young panther, she slipped out of the cell and began making down the passageway to a spot of light which she judged to be its opening.  She had scarcely gone ten feet, however, before she stopped short—­somewhere in the dark she heard a voice.

Flattening herself against the sides of the passage, she thought quickly; to return to the cell in which lay Juan Cateras would be unwise, for he might break the bonds, which were none too strong, and, in his fury at having been so easily duped, subject her to unknown but anyway horrible indignities, if not death itself.  But what other course was there?

As she stood there a fraction of a second against the wall, knowing not which way to turn, the girl wished with all her heart that big Jim Westcott, strong, cool, collected, the master of any situation requiring force, tact, and acumen, were there by her side to take her arm and guide her out of this terrible predicament.  But Jim was elsewhere—­where, she could hardly guess.

What was to be done?  Her temples throbbed as the voices sounded nearer.  Then it came home to her—­why not try one of the other cells?  Possibly she would be lucky enough to find an empty one; the chances were, she felt, that most of them were.

Suiting action to the thought, she stepped quietly from the niche in the wall, moved noiselessly along its surface, and came at length to another dungeon similar to She one she had occupied, except that it had no window in its oaken door.  Fumbling with the bunch of keys, she took the first one around which her fingers fell and thrust it hurriedly into the lock.  Would it open the haven to temporary safety?  She struggled with it—­turning it first to the left and then to the right.  The footsteps were sounding nearer and nearer every minute, the voices were growing louder.

Frantic, she gave the key a final desperate twist, and as a sigh of relief escaped her lips the door swung open.  Slipping through the aperture, she closed it softly after her and, panting from excitement and her exertions, turned and faced the recesses of her hiding-place.

It was black, pitch-black, except for a long ray of light that struggled in between the heavy door and its casing, but as Stella Donovan stood there in the gloom she was aware that she was not the only occupant of the cell.  She crouched back, gripped in the hands of another fear, but the next moment her alarm was lessened somewhat by the sound of a soft, well-modulated voice.