In response to this statement, Crockett’s eyebrows leapt upwards in an involuntary gesture of surprise. “You mean what my grandpappy Crockett knowed as a ƒetch?” he said after a moment. “Well, I’ll be jiggered! I have heard of such-like notions being common amongst the old-timers, especially folks that never had no schooling. But I am plumb bamfoozled to hear that an educated feller like yourself believes in them.”

“But I do. Absolutely. Indeed, I have direct and unimpeachable evidence that the phenomenon to which I allude is real.”

“An’ just what in the nation makes you so all-fired certain?”

“Because,” I grimly declared, “on three distinct occasions I have now come face to face with the living incarnation of my own secret self. I have scrutinized—at a distance no greater than that by which we two are presently separated—her wan, her implacable, her utterly uncanny features.”

“Her?” Crockett exclaimed in surprise.

Unable to remain seated in my overwrought state, I sprang to my feet and—striding to the center of the chamber—began pacing wildly about the floor, while Crockett turned his chair in my direction and continued to regard me with a sharp, interrogatory gaze.

“For reasons that I cannot conceive, the phantasmic apparition has taken a feminine form. Indeed, I have described her to you on several previous occasions”

For several moments, Crockett merely stared at me in puzzled silence. All at once, his countenance assumed an expression of startled realization. “You ain’t speaking of that same mysterious she-male you said you spied in Asher’s house, and then again in the bedroom of that Montague feller?”

“I am indeed referring to that dark and sinister being,” I replied, “It was she who—garbed in the ghastly cerements of the tomb—materialized last night within Mrs. Nicodemus’ boudoir! She who wielded the fearful weapon that so horribly struck down our poor hostess!”

“And just how in thunderation do you reckon that, when you never even set eyes on her face?” demanded Crockett.

Pausing in my agitated circumambulation of the room, I cast a penitent gaze at the frontiersman. “Colonel Crockett,” I ruefully declared, “I must beg your forgiveness; for—in an utter violation of the bond of mutual trust upon which even the most transitory partnership must be founded—I have withheld from you a vital piece of knowledge. My sole excuse for this egregious lapse was my own conviction that the information in question was of such a highly anomalous—if not incredible—character that your faith in my veracity would have been taxed to the breaking point by a complete and uncensored disclosure of the facts. I see now, however, that I should have shared this intelligence with you at once.”

“You mean there’s something you ain’t told me?” the frontiersman demanded.