The door opened to a gaunt figure, partly composed of bed-quilt and
partly of plaid shawl. A predominance of the latter and a long wisp of
iron-gray hair determined her sex. She leaned against the post with an
air of fatigue, half moral and half physical.

"How ye kin lie thar, abed, Jeff, and read and smoke on sich a night!
The sperrit o' the Lord abroad over the yearth--and up stage not gone by
yet. Well, well! it's well thar ez SOME EZ CAN'T SLEEP."

"The up coach, like as not, is stopped by high water on the North Fork,
ten miles away, aunty," responded Jeff, keeping to the facts. Possibly
not recognizing the hand of the beneficent Creator in the rebellious
window shutter, he avoided theology.

"Well," responded the figure, with an air of delivering an unheeded and
thankless warning, "it is not for ME to say. P'raps it's all His wisdom
that some will keep to their own mind. It's well ez some hezn't narves,
and kin luxuriate in terbacker in the night watches. But He says, 'I'll
come like a thief in the night!'--like a thief in the night, Jeff."

Totally unable to reconcile this illustration with the delayed "Pioneer"
coach and Yuba Bill, its driver, Jeff lay silent. In his own way,
perhaps, he was uneasy--not to say shocked--at his aunt's habitual
freedom of scriptural quotation, as that good lady herself was with
an occasional oath from his lips; a fact, by the way, not generally
understood by purveyors of Scripture, licensed and unlicensed.

"I'd take a pull at them bitters, aunty," said Jeff feebly, with his
wandering eye still recurring to his page. "They'll do ye a power of
good in the way o' calmin' yer narves."