“I reckon so,” the frontiersman grimly replied. “Why, there wasn’t but one thing you and me was supposed to be doing at that shindig—an’ that was making sure no harm come to poor Miz Nicodemus. I don’t know about you, Poe—but failing is mighty bitter medicine for Davy Crockett to swallow.”

“I am entirely sympathetic to your feelings,” I said gravely. “And yet, I cannot help but wonder whether any efforts on our part would have sufficed. I have begun to conceive”—and here, I could not keep my voice from betraying a slight, though noticeable, quaver—“that the adversary with whom we are faced is a being possessed of no ordinary human powers”

For a moment, Crockett merely stared at me in silence. Then, shifting uneasily in his seat, he declared: “There is something else that’s got me a mite discombobillated, Poe.”

There was, in his voice, a strangely hesitant quality, as though the matter he felt obliged to broach were fraught with the most acute embarrassment An irrepressible tremor of premonitory alarm pervaded my bosom.

“Has anything else transpired since we parted last night?” I nervously inquired.

“I’ll be shot if there ain’t,” Crocket confirmed. “Something mighty troubling.”

With their digits so tightly interwoven that the knuckles showed white, I placed my folded hands upon the surface of the writing table and leaned forward in my seat. “Please apprise me of this matter at once,” I urged.

Several tense and discomforting moments elapsed while the frontiersman continued to scrutinize me in silence. “Dagnab it, Poe,” he ejaculated at last “It’s Cap’n Russell. He came to see me at the hotel this morning while I was eating breakfast. Sat himself right down at the table and begun asking me all sorts of questions.”

“And what was the subject of his inquiries?” I barely managed to utter, my organ of vocalization having been seized with a sudden onset of extreme nervous constriction.

“Why,” exclaimed Crocked, “they was all about you!”

Far from being unexpected, Crockett’s reply only confirmed the foreboding conviction that had been mounting within my bosom for the past several moments. The predictability of his remark, however, in no way mitigated its singularly unnerving impact. Uncoupling my hands, I extended my arms sideways and tighty grasped the edge of the writing table. “And what were his reasons for propounding these queries?” I asked in a tremulous voice.

“Why it’s the most jackass notion I ever struck,” Crockett declared with a snort of incredulity. “I’ll be chewed to death by tree-squirrels if he don’t suspect that you had something to do with killing Miz Nicodemus—and all them other folks, too!”