“There now!  We are all ready,” she said, with a happy sigh.

“Yes, the coffee is the first thing on the top of the basket,” said Miss Penelope, coming in from the kitchen.  “That’s it in the biggest bottle.  You can have it warmed over the campfire.  I shouldn’t like to drink warmed-over coffee, myself.  But then nobody in this house ever thinks as I do about anything.  It isn’t my notion of what’s right and proper—­to say nothing of Christian—­to be a-dancing when everybody ought to be a-praying.  Not a day passes without something in the way of a warning.  Now there is the big hole that they’ve just found in the earth right over yonder—­a hollowness without end or bottom, and as dark as the bottomless pit.  That’s what it ought to be called, too—­instead of the Mammoth Cave.  For if that don’t show that there is nothing but a dreadful, empty shell left of this awful world, I don’t know what any true sign is.  But all the same, I know very well that nobody in this house pays any attention to what I say.  Howsomever, the works of the light-minded who are a-dancing on the edge of perdition don’t make any difference in my plain duty.  And I am a-going to do it as near as I can so long as I breathe the breath of life.  When my cold, stiff hands are crossed under the coffin-lid, nobody left ’pon top of this mournful earth ever can say that I sat by, like a bump on a log, and never said a word when I saw all these awful calamities a-coming.”

Thus voicing these vague alarms in her sweetest tones, Miss Penelope turned nervously and glanced at her half-sister.  She was always afraid of her, as very talkative, restless people often are of those who say little and watch a great deal.  But the widow Broadnax seemed to be dozing among her cushions, and Miss Penelope felt it quite safe to go on with the softly uttered threats which scattered the small dark servitors, who were still flying about her like a flock of frightened blackbirds, although the basket was packed.

“No,” said Miss Penelope, “it don’t make any difference in my duty.  If folks won’t listen to what I am bound to say, that is no fault of mine.  My duty is to give warning when I see true signs of what’s a-going to happen.  For a true sign is as plain as daylight to me.  I never had a caul, and I don’t lay any claim to second sight.  But I know what it means when I hear the dogs a-baying the midnight moon.  I know, too, what’s a-coming to pass when the death-watch goes thump, thump, thumping in the wall right over my head the whole blessed night.  And more than that, I was a-looking for both these true signs of bad luck before I heard ’em.  That big black ring round the comet’s head that I’ve seen for a night or two back told me plain enough what to expect.  And look at the things that have already happened—­all over the country.  Nobody in this world of trouble surely ever saw the like.  Just look at the twins!”

This was the chance that the widow Broadnax had been waiting and watching for in motionless silence.  She seized it as suddenly as a seemingly sleepy cat seizes an unwary mouse.