She was attired in a handsome dress of dark, plum-colored satin, trimmed with black lace and ornamented with a large cameo brooch. What struck the eye of the observer, however, was not the richness of her garb but the extraordinary dimensions of her physique. To put the matter with the greatest sensitivity and tact, Mrs. Henrietta Nicodemus was a being of remarkable corpulence, with arms as meaty as a pair of smoked Virginia hams, and a row of double chins that descended like a marble staircase to the snowy vastness of her bosom. That her late husband, whose fortune had been founded in the whaling business, had taken such a woman for his wife seemed entirely apt, since her flesh appeared to be composed of the same cretaceous material to which the former ultimately owed his remarkable success—viz. that oil-rich substance commonly known as “blubber.”

Notwithstanding her unwieldy size, the widow—whose age was impossible to determine, though she could not have been younger than fifty—proved to be as agile as her wizened manservant; for, upon spying the frontiersman, she heaved her bulk from the seat and came waddling toward him with surprising celerity.

“It is you, my dear man!” she cried, gazing up at my companion with her dark, if exceptionally small and rounded eyes, which resembled nothing so much as a pair of plump little raisins embedded in a mound of bread dough. “I did not believe Toby when he said so.”

“It’s me for a certainty,” replied Crockett, gazing inquisitively at the woman. “Though I can’t rightly say that I recollect ever meeting you before.”

“You never have. And yet, I feel as though I know you as a friend, for I have been positively enthralled by your wonderful autobiography. What an adventurous life you have led! And how thrillingly you recount it in your book!”

“Why thank you, ma’am,” Crockett said with a little bow of the head. “I am right tickled to hear it.”

Scrutinizing my companion with a look of undisguised admiration, the widow continued: “You look precisely as I imagined you would—though far more fashionably dressed than I would have expected ‘The King of the Wild Frontier’ to be!”

Emitting a low chuckle, my companion replied: “Them ol’ buckskins of mine is the very thing for hunting varmints in. But they just won’t do when it comes to calling on a purty gal.”

A delighted ejaculation—not dissimilar in both volume and pitch to the distinctive cry of the North American whooping crane—erupted from the matron’s throat. “You have my express consent to keep talking, Colonel Crockett,” she exclaimed. “I could listen to your delightful ‘palaver’ all day.”