For a moment, Crockett stood panting over his vanquished foes, eyes still enkindled, clothing dishevelled, hair hanging wildly about his flushed and weather-creased countenance. His shovel was poised to deliver another blow—if needed—to the prostrate figure sprawled at his feet. At length—perceiving that his antagonist would never rise again—Crockett dropped his heavy implement to the ground and stepped in my direction, pausing momentarily to extract Neuendorf’s long-bladed dagger from the tree trunk in which it was lodged.

“I am happy as a soaped eel to see you alive and kicking, Poe,” he declared as he came up beside me. “Here. Swivel around, and I will have you free quicker than winking.”

Obeying, I turned my back to the frontiersman and—tilting my body forward from the waist up—extended my tethered wrists in his direction. “But how,” I inquired as he proceeded to saw at the rope with his blade, “did you manage to arrive so expeditiously—even before Neuendorf and his minions could put their unspeakable design into action and entomb me, while still living, in the earth?”

“Why, that’s easily told,” answered Crockett. “I woke a mite earlier than I figured, had me a thumping big breakfast, and headed off for your home. But when I showed up, your Aunty Clemm told me that you had set out to find me. Well, that struck me as rather queer, since I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of you. So I backtracked, and soon come across a feller who said he’d seen something almighty peculiar a while afore. It appears he was out on a stroll earlier that morning when he spied a couple of ornery-looking varmints slinging a big heavy sack onto the back of a hoss. Only the sack had two legs poking out of it!

“Well, I suspicioned the truth right off. So I borrowed a mount and lit out after the varmints like the devil on a gambler’s trail. Before I’d gone too far out of the city, I run into that rapscallion named Dawson, who was sent to fetch me. After exchanging a few words, I pitched into him like a streak of forked lightning, and sent him straight to kingdom come. Then I took his firearm and followed his trail back here as easy as falling off a log.”

By this point, Crockett had succeeded in severing the rope. Massaging the sorely chafed wrists of my now-liberated hands, I turned to face my comrade, whose back was to the tree against which he had leaned Dawson’s flintlock.

“Well, Colonel Crockett,” I began in a tone of the warmest gratitude, “owing to the frontier skills of which you are so supremely possessed, I have once again been saved from—” I did not, however, manage to complete this heartfelt declaration; for—glancing over Crockett’s right shoulder—I was startled into silence by a paralyzing sight.