Our meal—a simple but savory stew of beef potatoes, and various seasonal vegetables—having been completed, we were seated round the table, enjoying our post-prandial beverages while partaking of the store-bought confections Crockett had purchased. All at once, Sissy, who had been attending to our guest’s fantastical narratives with a look of delighted (and, to my eyes, intensely irksome) admiration, set her tumbler of milk down upon the table and exclaimed: “Colonel Crockett. You have told us such wonderful tales about your adventures! But there is one thing you haven’t told us. Have you ever been in love?”

“Virginia!” Muddy gasped in consternation, placing the fingers of one hand upon her lips. “What a little nosy-parker you are!”

“No, no, Miz Clemm!” chuckled the frontiersman. “No need for reproving the gal. It’s a natural enough question.” Then quaffing the remainder of his coffee, he replaced the cup upon its saucer, swivelled in his chair, and gazed at Sissy with a look of utter solemnity upon his countenance. “Yes, Miz Virginny, there was once a gal I loved so bad my heart would rise smack up into my throat and choke me like a cold potato whenever I thought of her.”

“Really?” cried Virginia. “And what happened?”

“Why, I couldn’t hardly go around feeling so tee-totaciously out-of-sorts all the time,” Crockett replied. “So I found a way to cure myself”

“Cure yourself ?” Virginia exclaimed.

“Yes, ma’am. Through the splendiferous healing powers of e-lectricity.”

Then, as both Muddy and Sissy gaped at him in wonder, the frontiersman folded his arms across his chest and continued thusly: “You see, a few years back, when I first came to Washington City, I heard-tell about this monstrous smart doctor that had found a way to put e-lectricity into glass bottles. And when a feller had the rheumatiz or the Saint Vitals dance or just about anythin’ else that was plaguing him, why this ol’ doc would just pour some of that e-lectricity down that feller’s throat, and blamed if it wouldn’t cure him as clean as a barked tree!

“So I saw how it was done and determined that whenever anything ailed me, I would try it. Only I didn’t give a hoot about the bottles, for I reckoned I could just as well take some e-lectricity in the raw as it came shooting from the clouds during a thunderstorm. You see, I had been used to drinkin’ out of the Mississippi without a cup, so I figgered I could just as well swallow the lightning straight from the sky.

“Now, as I was saying, along about this time, I fell in love with a gal by the name o’ Margaret Botts. Just looking at that little filly made my heart begin to flutter like a duck in a puddle. There was a problem, though. I’ll be hanged if that pesky little gal wasn’t already hitched to another feller!