The danger was past. My life had again been spared. A feeling of profound, of overpowering,. relief flooded through my bosom. As I attempted to rise from the ground, however, I became cognizant of an altogether different—and infinitely less pleasurable—sensation: an intense, if not excruciating, pain in the area of my right wrist, upon which I had fallen with the full weight of my body when hurled to safety by my companion.

“Are you all right, Poe?” Crockett solicitously inquired as he stepped to my side and, reaching down to grasp my left arm, assisted me to my feet.

“I am still among the living,” I replied, “a condition I owe entirely to the extraordinary prowess for which you are so universally—and, I have come to perceive, so justly—renowned.” Indicating my right wrist, which had begun to assume a most unnatural coloration, I added: “I fear, however, that I have badly sprained, or perhaps even broken, my arm.”

Closely examining the limb in question, Crockett clucked his tongue and declared: “She’s swole up mighty bad, for a certainty.” Tearing off his striped cravat, he quickly draped it about my neck—arranged it into a makeshift sling—and tenderly slipped my wounded arm inside.

As he performed this deft maneuver, I took the occasion to articulate a concern that had been gathering force within my bosom. “Perhaps,” I suggested, “it would be prudent to make a closer inspection of the main instigator of this entire catastrophe, Hans Neuendorf. It would be most inconvenient if he, too, should suddenly surprise us by unexpectedly emerging from his seemingly inanimate state.”

“That ain’t no slouch of an idea,” Crockett said. Stepping over to the prostrate body of Neuendorf, he extended the toe of his boot and nudged the fallen man’s head. From the utter limpness with which it lolled to one side—as well as from the sheer quantity of blood that had issued from his nostrils, ears, and mouth—I perceived that our nemesis was in fact absolutely deceased: slain by the unintended blow from his henchman’s shovel.

“Deader than a herring,” Crockett said as he returned to my side. “Killed by his own pard.”

No sooner had these words issued from Crockett’s lips than the black, roiling clouds above the horizon released a jagged bolt of lightning. This was followed, seconds later, by a booming peal of thunder. Then heavy droplets of rain began to fall from the sky, pattering on the grass around us.

“Poe,” said Crockett, casting an appraising glance at the heavens. “I reckon you and me best find us a place to hole up for a spell. We don’t stand a Chinaman’s chance of getting back home afore that storm lets rip—especially since there ain’t but one mount for the two of us.”

“One?” I exclaimed. “But what about the steeds belonging to our vanquished opponents?”