Snatching it from his hands, Sissy buried her face in the blossoms, deeply inhaled their aroma, then looked up at Crockett with her face all aglow. “Oooh, thank you, thank you, thank you! They are so very beautiful!”

“Not half so much as you, Miz Virginny,” replied the frontiersman with a smile.

“Oh, where shall I keep them?” cried Sissy, casting an inquiring look at Muddy.

“Come, dear,” said the good woman. “Let us find a nice jar and put them in water.” Then—excusing herself with a little curtsy—she turned and led Sissy in the direction of the kitchen.

As my two loved ones bustled down the hallway, Crockett turned in my direction and—after scrutinizing my visage for a moment—said with a frown: “Why, you are looking kind of blue around the gills, Poe.”

“The lineaments of distress that you perceive upon my countenance,” I replied, “are merely the natural response to the deeply unsettling events of the past several days.”

“Why, I can’t hardly blame you for that,” said Crockett. “Danged if this business ain’t left me feelin’ downright uneasy myself. Tell you what. Let’s me and you have us a pow-wow before I leave, so we can cipher out our next move.”

“I endorse your suggestion wholeheartedly,” I declared.

“All right, then,” said the frontiersman, reaching out a hand and clapping me upon the shoulder. “Now let’s go hunt up them two purty gals and have ourselves a time. Hang me up for bear-meat if I ain’t as hungry as seven wolves tied together by the tail!”

The frontiersman’s irrepressible enthusiasm, undiminished even by the grisly horror we had so recently witnessed in the home of Alexander Montague, ensured that the dinner would be an exceptionally lively one—at least from the viewpoint of Muddy and Sissy. As for me, the evening proved even more trying than I had anticipated; for I was compelled—despite my intensely agitated mood—to sustain an air of polite attentiveness while Crockett regaled us with endless tales of his heroic and wildly improbable frontier exploits.

Even the most far-fetched of these anecdotes, however—such as his wholly incredible account of capturing an enormous mammal of the species Procyon lotor (more commonly known as a raccoon) by grinning at the creature until it plummeted from its perch on a tree-branch—seemed reasonable in comparison to his concluding story. This outrageous narrative was related as our dinner finally drew to an end, in response to a somewhat impetuous query tendered by my darling Sissy.