That the corpse was that of Alexander Montague seemed incontrovertible. The deplorable state of the clothing—the haggardness of the frame—the sparse, grizzled tufts sprouting from the temples of the otherwise hairless skull—all clearly betokened that the body was that of a pitiably undernourished and indigent old man. Even his most intimate acquaintances, however, would have been unable to identify the deceased from what remained of his features—so fearful—so gruesome—so inhumanly savage—were the wounds that had been inflicted on the victim’s countenance!

The eyes had been gouged from their sockets, leaving a pair of loathsome, blood-encrusted cavities. The nose had been entirety excised, and, in its place, a ragged, roughly triangular hole gaped in the center of the face. As ghastly as these mutilations were, however, they did not compare—in terms of sheer grotesqueness—to the awful condition of the mouth, whose corners had been brutally sliced upwards, almost to the level of the ears, endowing the dead man with the leering—the indescribably macabre—appearance of a Hallowe’en “Jack-o’-lantern.”

In a voice half-choked with revulsion and outrage, Captain Russell observed: “Never, in all my years as an officer of the law, have I been witness to a crime of so bloodthirsty—so fiendish—a nature.”

“I reckon I ain’t neither,” Crocked: said grimly—then added: “Except only once.”

Shooting him a sharp, inquisitive look, Captain Russell asked: “Yes? And when was that?”

The frontiersman folded his arms across his capacious chest, and—turning towards Captain Russell—replied thusly: “Way back in the winter of ’14, when I was fighting alongside Ol’ Hick’ry in the Redstick Wars. We had us a young feller in our troop—maybe eighteen years of age—by the name of Gibson. Rance Gibson. To look at him, you’d a reckoned he hadn’t no more harm in him than a newborn baby lamb. Had curly blond hair as soft as any school-gal’s, and eyes as dear and blue as a Tennessee mountain stream. But when the killing commenced, why, them eyes’d blaze like the devil’s—and that sweet li’l ol’ lamb would turn uglier’n a copperhead in July.

“I recollect one time in particular, when we was heading southwards to join forces with Major Daniel Beasley’s company down around Fort Talladega. We were fording the Coosa River when a whole passel of Creek warriors come a-whooping and a-hollering out of the woods like a cloud of Egyptian locusts. Well, me and the boys yanked out our firearms and, in less time than it takes to skin a badger, we had ’em on the run. Chased ’em all the way down to Tallusahatchee, where a couple dozen of the varmints took refuge in an empty log house. Well, we set that house on fire, and every time one of them red devils come running out through the door, we shot ’em down like dogs.