At the sight of my person, the captain momentarily suspended his efforts and gave me an acknowledging nod. “Ah, Mr. Poe,” he exclaimed. “I am pleased that you have arrived in time to witness the arrest of this scoundrel”—and here, he administered a vicious poke with the tip of his “billy” to the area of the prisoner’s dorso-lumbar vertebrae. “Without your help, his identity might yet be unknown to us.”

At these words, Neuendorf swivelled his massive head in my direction and fixed me with a baleful stare. It was a look of such pure, such overpowering malice that my entire frame shuddered with dread.

Doing my best to ignore the glowering captive, I addressed the police captain thusly: “It is precisely the question of the killer’s identity that has brought me here, Captain Russell. I have something urgent to impart that may shed vital new light on the case.”

Frowning in perplexity, Russell replied: “Needless to say, I am most curious to hear this information of yours, Mr. Poe. But our conference must be postponed until my prisoner is conveyed safely to jail.”

No sooner had he uttered these words than a gruff, deep-voiced command—“Stand aside, if you please!”—emanated from the midst of the remaining onlookers. An instant later, the crowd split in two and a half-dozen police officers, led by a sturdy fellow with ruddy-hued cheeks, emerged—or rather burst—into view.

“Captain Russell,” he exclaimed somewhat breathlessly as he drew to a halt directly before his superior. “We came hurrying just as soon as we received news of the appalling crime.” He cast a contemptuous look at Neuendorf. “I see that you have already managed to apprehend the perpetrator.”

“Thanks to none other than Colonel Davy Crockett,” replied Captain Russell, indicating the frontiersman, who was holding forth in the most animated fashion to his throng of wide-eyed admirers. Situated several yards away, I could clearly overhear Crockett’s intensely vivid recitation: “… That’s when the murderin’ divvil grabbed hold of my hair,” he declaimed, accompanying his tale with a variety of histrionic gestures. “He yanked me towards him, then give me a butt in the head that near blinded me, for the varmint’s skull is as hard as an iron pot. But I managed to pull loose from his infarnal grip and give him a real sock-dolager straight to the snout. That riled him so bad that he run his fingers right up my nostrils. So we wrassled and jerked and clawed for a while, ’til I made a lunge and caught hold of his ear with my teeth….”