“As we was enjoying this sport, one injun boy—couldn’t a been no older than twelve or thirteen—come a-tearin’ through the door and got shot just a few feet away from the burning house. His arms and legs was all shattered, and he had fallen so near to the fire that the grease was just a-stewin’ out of him. But I’ll be hanged if he wasn’t still alive and doing his damnedest to crawl along the ground. Not a murmur escaped him, neither. So sullen is your redskin when his dander is up that he had sooner die than make a noise or ask for quarters.

“Anyways, I was just taking aim with ol’ Betsy to put the boy out of his misery when I saw one of my own men run up to the redskin, fall upon him with a blood-curdling cry, and commence to carve him up with a big ol’ huntin’ knife. I was plumb dumb-foundered to see such savagerous behavior in a white man. And when I saw just who it was, why, you coulda knocked me over with a feather pillow.

“It wasn’t none other than that sweet-faced young ’un, Rance Gibson!

“Well, I jumped from my hiding place and come a-running up beside him. Before I could reach him, though, he’d already carved up that redskin boy like a Thanksgiving Day turkey. Sliced off his ears, his nose, and was commencing to work on the fingers when I grabbed him by the wrist and asked just what in tarnation he thought he was doing. He looked at me with a smile so mean that I’ll be hanged if it didn’t give me the fantods. Said he was collecting some trophies. Said he planned to dry ’em out like beef jerky and wear ’em on a necklace.

“And that’s just what he done. Strung ’em on a leather thong and wore ’em ’round his neck.”

Here, Crockett breathed a sigh and shook his head slowly, before concluding: “Would a took the injun boy’s pecker, too, if I hadn’t a stopped him.”

By the time Crockett had completed this appalling tale, the stillness in the room was so intense as to be almost palpable. Not only Captain Russell and myself but the three police officers as well—who were huddled around Montague’s corpse—stared at the frontiersman in a state of utter—of awestricken—silence.

It was Captain Russell who finally spoke. “The atrocities you describe, Colonel Crockett, do indeed sound remarkably similar to the horrors that have been inflicted on the present victim. Is there any possibility that this Gibson fellow, now grown into full manhood, is currently residing in Baltimore, where he has embarked on a career of ghastly murder to satisfy his unnatural blood-lust?”