“Oh, no! This is too bad! I expressly said I was not to be disturbed today!” Bird clumsily extricated himself from the cupboard in which he had been searching for wineglasses. “Davies cannot find the muster roll. Or he’s lost the pay books! Or he cannot add twenty cents eight times over! I shall ignore it.” Davies was a young lieutenant who was supposed to assist Bird with the Legion’s paperwork.

“It’s raining hard,” Priscilla pleaded for the unknown caller.

“I don’t care if it’s raining fit to drown the planet. I do not care if the animals are lining up two by two to get aboard. If a man cannot be left in peace on his wedding day, when can he hope for rest? Am I so indispensable that I must be dragged from your company whenever Lieutenant Davies discovers that his education is entirely insufficient for the demands of modern life? He was at Centre College in Kentucky. Have you ever heard of such a place? Is it possible that there could be anyone capable of teaching anything worth knowing in Kentucky? Yet Davies boasts of having been educated there! Boasts of it! Why I entrust the regiment’s books to him, I don’t know. I might as well hand them over to a baboon. Let the fool get wet. Maybe his Kentucky brains will improve after a drenching.”

The knocking redoubled in intensity. “I really do think, my dear,” Priscilla murmured in the gentlest of all possible reproofs.

“If you insist. You’re too kind, Priscilla, altogether too kind. It’s a womanly fault, so I won’t dwell on it, but there it is. Too kind altogether.” Thaddeus Bird took a candle into the hallway and, still grumbling, made his way to the front door. “Davies!” he snapped as he pulled the door open, then checked, for the caller was not Lieutenant Davies at all.

Instead a young couple stood at Thaddeus Bird’s street door. Bird noticed the girl first for, even in the wet windy darkness that threatened to overwhelm his candle’s flame, her face was striking. More than striking for she was, Bird realized, truly beautiful. Behind her was a sturdy young man holding the reins of a tired horse. The young man, scarce more than a boy and still with a child’s innocence on his face, looked familiar. “You remember me, Mister Bird?” he asked hopefully, then supplied the answer anyway. “I’m Robert Decker.”

“So you are, so you are.” Bird was shielding the candle flame with his right hand, peering at his callers.

“We’d like a talk with you, Mister Bird,” Robert said courteously.

“Ah,” Bird said, to give himself time to devise a reason to send them packing, but no reason occurred to him so he stepped grudgingly aside. “You’d better come in.”

“The horse, Mister Bird?” Robert Decker asked.