“Well,” said Crockett, slapping his thighs and pushing himself to his feet, “why don’t you ’n’ me have a look-see around while we got us the chance.” Pointing his chin at a three-branched candelabrum that stood on a small, marble-topped table at my elbow, he added: “Grab that candlestick, Poe, and let’s have us some light.”

I rose from my seat. Sitting on the tabletop beside the candelabrum was a tarnished silver cup holding several wooden matches. Employing one of these to light the three half-consumed tapers that protruded from the candelabrum, I lifted the latter by its stem and carried it over to Crockett, who had stepped near the fireplace and was staring in deep perplexity at a large, gold-framed canvas that hung above the mantel.

“What in blue blazes do you make o’ this?” exclaimed the frontiersman as I came up beside him.

I raised the candelabrum so as to shed additional illumination on the canvas. It was indeed a most shocking, a most lurid composition. The painting depicted a turbanned emperor languidly reclining in his boudoir, while, all about him, a bevy of voluptuous (and entirely unclothed!) young women—evidently the members of his private seraglio—were being savagely slaughtered by a crew of knife-wielding assassins. Besides the state of shameless undress in which the women were depicted, what endowed this work with its singularly dismaying—if not obscene—quality was the expression of serene satisfaction on the face of the potentate as he watched the ghastly bloodshed taking place around him.

“Unless I am mistaken,” I observed, “I believe this to be a copy—and one which has been executed with a fair degree of technical proficiency—of the well-known painting The Death of Sardanapalus, by the famed French artist Eugène Delacroix.”

“French artist, eh? I should’ve knowed some danged foreigner was behind it! I declare, Poe—if this ain’t the undecentest thing I ever clapped eyes on, then I wish I may be fried in bear grease. Why, it ain’t hardly fit to be hung in a sportin’ house!”

We continued to circulate about the chamber, scrutinizing Asher’s imposing collection of oils, whose subjects—brazen odalisques, Saturnalian revels, pagan rituals of the most shocking and unbridled nature—provoked a continuous stream of outraged protests from the indignant frontiersman.

“Dad fetch it,” he declared at last, “but these-here pictures are the beatenest thing I ever seen! What kind o’ folks would want such wickedness hangin’ in their parlor? You mark me, Poe—this Asher feller may put on his high-tone airs, but he ain’t nothin’ but a dad-blamed rapscallion!”