“C’mon, you sorry-assed sumbitch,” exclaimed this third ruffian, administering a sharp, painful kick to the region of my upper rib cage. “On your feet.”

All at once, rough hands seized me by the left elbow—violently pulled me to a standing position—and tore the burlap hood from my head.

The day—as it had been when I first left home that morning—was heavily overcast; but even in the gray, dismal light, my eyes required several moments to adjust, having been deprived of any retinal stimulation for so many hours. Gradually, I was able to take stock of my surroundings. My deductions, I now perceived, had been correct. I had been conveyed somewhere out into the countryside. I was standing in a small, roughly quadrangular clearing, surrounded on three sides by a thick forest of deciduous trees. On the fourth side rose a small hill, upon whose gently ascending slope a trio of saddled horses—obviously belonging to my abductors—grazed serenely.

Several yards to my right—leaning upon the long wooden handle of a shovel whose blade was plunged into a substantial mound of dirt—stood a figure I recognized at once as the unsavory, shaggy-browed wretch with whom I had exchanged such acrimonious words on the day of Crockett’s battle with Neuendorf. At his feet stretched a freshly excavated hole whose dimensions left no doubt as to its intended purpose as a makeshift human grave.

Neuendorf himself sat directly before me, coolly observing me from his vantage point atop a large, oblong rock. The third member of the gang—the wretch who had pulled me so unceremoniously to my feet—was positioned to my rear, his visage being entirely concealed from my view. All at once, he released his grip on my elbow, walked over to Neuendorf, and turned towards me with a smile of fiendish delight—thus disclosing a set of gruesomely discolored teeth from which the two upper incisors were missing. At my first glimpse of his repellent dentition, I recognized him as the second of the two illbred louts I had encountered at the time of Crockett’s wharfside battle.

“He’s wide awake now, Hansie,” said the toothless one. “Let’s get down to business.” His countenance, as he uttered this statement, was suffused with a singular excitement—his small eyes gleaming with anticipation, his pale tongue avidly moistening his lips.

For a moment, Neuendorf continued to scrutinize me in silence. Then he slowly slid from the rock, took several lumbering steps in my direction, and growled: “Why not?”

That my death was imminent seemed certain. That my interment would be ignominious in the extreme was incontrovertible. To be horribly murdered and left to molder underground somewhere deep in the wilderness—surely, this was a most appalling, a most unimaginable fate. And yet, I was powerless to prevent it. With my hands tightly bound behind my back and three implacable brutes surrounding me, resistance and flight appeared equally impossible.