"Gee! I believe Marm Parraday's on the rampage," exclaimed Joe Bodley, with a silly smile on his face.
The door from the hall flew open. In the dusky opening the woman's lean and masculine form looked wondrous tall; her hollow eyes burned with unnatural fire; her thin and trembling lips writhed pitifully.
With her coming another awful flash and crash illumined the room and shook the roof tree of the Inn.
"It's come! it's come!" she said, advancing into the-room. Her face shone in the pallid, flickering light of the intermittent flashes, and the loafers at the bar shrank away from her advance.
"I told ye how 'twould be, Lem Parraday!" cried the tavern keeper's wife. "This is the end! This is the end!"
Another stroke of thunder rocked the house. Marm Parraday fell on her knees in the sawdust and raised her clasped hands wildly. The act loosened her stringy gray hair and it fell down upon her shoulders. A wilder looking creature Janice Day had never imagined.
"Almighty Father!" burst from the quivering lips of the poor woman.
"Almighty Father, help us!"
"She's prayin'!" gasped a trembling voice back in the shrinking crowd.
"Help us and save us!" groaned the woman, her face and clasped hands uplifted. "We hear Thy awful voice. We see the flash of Thy anger. Ah!"
The thunder rolled again—ominously, suddenly, while the casements rattled from its vibrations.