And indeed, though the rains had abated, the sky remained shrouded in gray. Grim, leaden clouds seemed to press down upon the very rooftops of the city. In contrast to the previous evening, however, the unrelieved gloom of the atmosphere found no inner counterpart in my own spiritual condition. Perhaps it was due to the warming aftereffects of Muddy’s salubrious beverage, or perhaps it was a consequence of her own inspiriting love. I could not say. It was nevertheless the case that I felt infused with a fiery determination—prepared to teach the vaunting Crockett a lesson in etiquette that would not, at any time soon, fade from his consciousness.

Alas, this buoyant mood was not destined to persist. For as I strode along the puddled street, a shrill, unearthly yowl sent shivers of terror coursing through every fibre of my being. I froze in mid-stride, paralyzed with fright. At that instant, a feline of the tomcat variety flung itself from the gap between the two houses on my right. Its coat was of the blackest midnight hue—and as it darted specter-like across my intended path, my heart quailed—and quavered—and sickened—from a sudden violent spasm of superstitious dread!

CHAPTER 4

The establishment at which Crockett was lodging was operated by Mrs. Elmira Macready, an elderly widow known to me solely by name—although her deceased husband had been a personage of such lofty repute in our city that, without ever having set eyes upon him, I knew something of his remarkable history. One of Baltimore’s most prosperous merchants, Junius Macready was renowned not merely for the magnitude of his fortune but for the singularly enlightened uses to which he had applied it. Entirely free of the philistinism so characteristic of his class, he had been a lifelong devotee of the arts, whose passionate dedication to the elevation of public taste was reflected in his repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive patronage.

In his later years, however, this worthy gentleman had suffered business reversals of such awful severity that they had cost him the bulk of his fortune. The blow proved equally calamitous to his health, and he had died within months of his financial ruin, leaving his elderly widow in sadly degraded circumstances. Compelled to divest herself of virtually all of her worldly possessions—not excluding the stately manse in which she and her husband had passed the long, happy years of their marriage—she had moved into the modest house on Howard Street that was her sole remaining inheritance and managed to subsist by providing rooms to boarders.