When Jasper Tipton married Talithie Burwell and settled on Tipton's Fork in Crockett's Hollow, folks said no one could ask for a better start. The Tiptons had given the couple their house seat, a bedstead, a table. Jasper had a team of mules he had swapped for a yoke of oxen, and he had a cookstove that he had bought with his own savings. A step stove it was, two caps below and two higher up. The Burwells had seen to it that their daughter did not go empty-handed to her man. She had a flock tick, quilts, coverlids, and a cow. But, old Granny Withers, a midwife from Caney Creek, sitting in the chimney corner sucking her pipe the night of the wedding, vowed that all would not be well with the pair. Hadn't a bat flitted into the room right over Talithie's head when the elder was speaking the words that joined the two in wedlock? Everyone knew the sign. Everyone knew too that Talithie Burwell, with her golden hair and blue eyes, had broken up the match between Jasper and Widow Ashby's Sabrina. Yet Talithie and Jasper vowed that all was fair in love and war. If a man's heart turned cold toward a maid, it was none of his fault. There was nothing to be done about it. You can't change a man's way with woman, they said. It's writ in the Book. And soon as Jasper had cast her off, Widow Ashby's Sabrina took to her bed and there she meant to stay, so she said, the rest of her life. Or--until she got a sign that would give her heart ease. Sabrina Ashby didn't mince her words either. "I don't care what the sign may be," she said it right out, before Granny Withers. That toothless creature cackled and replied, "I'm satisfied you're knocking center." Indeed Sabrina was telling the truth. She meant every word of it. The jilted girl did not go to the wedding. She didn't need to, as far as that was concerned, for old Granny Withers came hobbling over the mountain fast as her crooked old legs would carry her, and it in the dead of winter, mind you, to tell Widow Ashby's Sabrina all that had happened. How lovely fair the bride looked beside her handsome bridegroom! "Eh law, they were a doughty couple, Jasper and Talithie," Granny Withers mouthed the words. She lifted a bony finger, "Yet, mark my words, ill luck awaits the two. When the bat flew into the house and dipped low over the fair bride's head, she trembled like she had the agger--and--" "The bat flew over her head?" Sabrina interrupted, eyes glistening. "A bat--it's blind--stone blind!" the jilted girl echoed gleefully. "There's a sign for you, Mistress Jasper Tipton, to conjure with!" She let out a screech and then a weird laugh that echoed through Crockett's Hollow. She cast off the coverlid and in one bound was in the middle of the floor, though she had lain long weeks pining away. She clapped her hands high overhead like she was shouting at meeting. Sabrina laughed again and again, holding her sides.