The terrible stresses—overwhelming anxieties—and fearful ordeals of that long, harrowing day had, by that point, taken a severe toll upon my emotional equilibrium. Indeed, my nerves had at last become thoroughly unstrung. Clutching at the bosom of my shirt with the trembling digits of both hands, I replied—in a voice that quickly ascended from a harsh, desperate whisper to a hysterical shriek: “Oh, do you not see? It means that the fierce, the monstrous will-power of which she was possessed shall not permit even Death to restrain her! It means that she will one day return from the tomb—a grim and ghastly revenant, shrouded in her blood-dabbled cerements—to complete her dreadful mission of revenge!”

“Eddie,” the frontiersman replied, “you do have the beatenest notions in the whole dad-blamed world. That varminous sister of yours is as dead as a bedpost. Don’t you fret none—she won’t be coming back before the final trumpet blasts, no more than anybody else.”

Encircling my shoulder with his powerful right arm, he added: “Come along, ol’ hoss. I don’t know about you, but I am rotten glad this ornery business is over and done with.”

So saying, he led me away from the motionless form and towards the scintillant embers of the still-glowing campfire. There, I would huddle unsleepingly at his side, recounting the bizarre, blood-chilling events that had transpired during his absence.

With the coming of the dawn, we prepared to bear the pallid corpse of my mad, monomaniacal sibling back to the police. In the clear light of the newborn day—as we arranged the cadaver across the saddle of Crockett’s steed—I perceived that he had been both right and wrong. It was not Lenore herself that I had to fear; for, indeed, she was utterly and irrevocably dead. But the memory of her brief—anguished—and wildly destructive existence was another matter entirely. Even then, I knew it would remain with me always: a grim and sorrowful shadow that would cease to haunt me—nevermore!

EPILOGUE

I have said that—however justly deserved—the death of my demented half-sister cast a deep and sorrowful shadow upon my soul. For the citizens of Baltimore, however—whose wonted tranquillity had been severely disrupted by the string of savage killings—the resolution of the case meant that a fearful pall had been lifted.

My own invaluable contributions to the affair did not fail to make the deepest impression upon the police. Captain Russell in particular was profuse in his praise—as well as in his apologies for those suspicions that had caused him, however briefly, to perceive me as the culprit. The analytical means by which I had disentangled the mystery struck him as little short of miraculous, and—among the emissaries of the law—my inductive abilities quickly assumed the status of legend.