“Cricket” he replied, “I’m right sorry to come bullin’ my way into yer home at such an uncivilized hour. But there’s been a heap of bad doings, and I’m plumb eager for you ’n’ me to have a pow-wow.” Then, with a nod towards Virginia, he added, “That was awful purty singin’, young miss. If you don’t warble as sweet as a bluebird in a cottonwood tree, why, I’m an injun.”

“Thank you!” chirped Virginia, favoring the intruder with the prettiest curtsy imaginable. Then, in a voice so sweetly ingenuous that it might have emanated from an angel, she inquired, “Are you really the famous Colonel Crocked:—the same one that Eddie was saying such terrible things about at dinnertime?”

“I am the genu-wine, blowed-in-the-glass article, there ain’t no buts about it,” the frontiersman acknowledged with a low-throated chuckle. “And hearin’ that Cricket’s been castin’ dispersions on me don’t exactly come as no surprise. There ain’t much love lost atwixt us, that’s for a certainty. But”—and here, he turned to regard me with a look of solemn intensity—“I’m hopin’ him ’n’ me can bury the hatchet. There’s some mighty bad business that needs attendin’ to—and there ain’t no time to waste.”

“The ‘business’ to which you allude,” I retorted, “must be urgent indeed if it has impelled you, once again, to disrupt in so precipitate a manner the tranquillity of our domestic milieu.”

“It is for a fact, Cricket,” came the somber reply.

At this moment, Muddy—who had been gazing at our visitor with (it pains me to say) a most irksome look of admiration on her countenance—stepped forward and extended one hand in Virginia’s direction. “Come, dear,” she said. “Let us leave Eddie and Colonel Crockett to their affairs.”

“Okay!” chirped the darling maiden. Skipping across the floor, she grasped her mothers hand, where-upon the two angelic creatures exited the room. Just before they vanished over the threshold, however, Virginia turned to look at Crockett. “I hope you will come again soon,” she exclaimed, “and I will sing another song for you!”

“You can depend on it, gal,” replied Crockett.

By now, the logs in the fireplace had been reduced to a mound of glimmering embers. The parlor, though still comfortably warm, was half-hidden in shadow. Stepping to the oil lamp that sat on a small, claw-footed tea-table in the center of the room, I raised the glass chimney and ignited the wick with a sulfur match. Then—still clutching the paper sheet upon which I had inscribed the enigmatical letters—I returned to my place and gestured towards the high-backed elbow-chair facing me.

Settling into this seat, the frontiersman crossed one leg over the other and rested his felt hat upon the peak of his knee. “That’s a right purty gal you got there, Cricket, Why, I had no idea you was a daddy.”