In the popular mind, however, it was not myself but rather the heroic figure of Crockett who loomed most prominently in the drama—an impression that the inveterately self-aggrandizing frontiersman did little to modify. In his statements to the press following our return to the city, he evinced little shyness in attributing the successful termination of the case to his own unshrinking efforts—though he never failed to acknowledge the “splendiferous help” he had received from his “little chum, Eddie Poe”

Under the circumstances, I could not begrudge my friend these outrageous overstatements of his own rôle in the affair. He had, after all, saved my life on several occasions and—following my abduction by Hans Neuendorf and his gang—rescued me from a fate of unspeakable ghastliness. Moreover, the crude acclamation of the mob—so desperately courted by Crockett—was infinitely less consequential to me than the profound respect—if not outright awe—that I had earned from the cognoscenti of the law.

In the end, whatever political benefit Crockett had hoped to accrue from our triumphant resolution of the case failed to materialize. Sadly—and much to my own surprise, in light of the great esteem in which the public clearly held him—he lost his attempt to regain his congressional seat in the 1835 elections and found himself exiled from political life.

By then, my own circumstances had undergone a radical alteration. In August of 1835—slightly more than one year following the extraordinary events recounted in the foregoing pages—I moved back to Richmond, the city of my youth, having been offered a remunerative position as editorial assistant on Mr. Thomas White’s journal, the Southern Literary Messenger. One month later, my deepest prayers were answered when my darling little Sissy and I were joined as husband and bride. By the middle of October, the two of us—along with our dear, all-devoted Muddy—were settled in a handsome brick boarding house on the southeast corner of Bank and Eleventh Streets, belonging to a kindly widow named Mrs. Yarrington.

In addition to these vast improvements in my financial and domestic arrangements, I had also undergone a period of remarkable creative inspiration. Having concluded that there was unsuspected merit in Crockett’s literary advice (to wit, that the surest way to achieve commercial success was for an author to write about his own experiences), I had embarked on a series of tales based upon those incidents and situations to which I myself had been so recently exposed: the savage butchery of the landlady—the masked ball visited by the dread figure of Death—the torture dungeon equipped with a bottomless pit—the mutilated old man concealed beneath the floorboards—and so on. Having altered certain details of the actual events to accord with the rigorous requirements of the short-story form, I had succeeded in producing a handful of tales that were, I devoutly believed, among my finest fictional efforts to date.