Pretty soon I hears him say:
“I kind o’ wish you had stuck, Yallerstone. She didn’t play square with
me, but--well, you’d ’a’ made her a honest husband, and you wouldn’t ’a’
had to work no more. Why didn’t you stick a while?”
“Well,” says I, sticking my head down close to his curtain, “just after
you left, Taos, somebody--a officer, I reckon, called my wife on the
telephone and asked her if I was the original Jack Wardner from Montana.
She said I was, and he told her to keep it under her hat ’cause he was
coming up to surprize me.”
“Shucks, Yallerstone! You could ’a’ stuck for all that. You could easy
prove you ain’t.”
“Not if they took me back to Mescal County,” says I.
“Mescal County!” he snorts, clawing at the curtains. “What do you mean,
Yallerstone?”
“I’m Jack Wardner,” says I.
[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the August 18, 1920 issue of
Adventure magazine.]