And he was not Andrew Miller, but somebody else. Who? He obviously thought the Ranger knew. Until he himself gave some clew to his identity the thing must be handled with tact. “Why?” Carmichael asked. “Why?” the man repeated. “Why? Great heavens! After all these years, to have it come out right now---- You’ve got a family yourself, haven’t you? You used to have, anyway. If you were in my place----” “What did you buy that gun for?” “I saw the game was up. You were closing in. When I saw you there in that Pullman I wondered if you’d recognize me--and I thought sure you didn’t. I’ve changed more than you have. My hair, last time you saw me, was thick, and its natural color. And this”--he touched the long ragged scar on his upper lip--“you never saw that. Nobody in Texas did. Nobody in Texas ever saw me without a mustache; I had it all raised when I came here. Not a living soul in the State knew I had this mark under it except my wife--and she never saw it. I got it falling off a shed onto a harrow back there in Kentucky when I wasn’t twelve years old. Just as soon as I was able to raise hair over it, I hid it. Then I raised whiskers, too. I was twenty when I came to Texas, you know.” “So you thought I didn’t recognize you there on the train?” “If I’d believed you did, I’d have left it the other side of the border. But when it seemed I’d got by you, I thought I could get by anybody, so I came on. Then there you were in the lobby last night but you didn’t seem to notice me much. So I still thought I was all right until your man followed me to-day.” “How did you know him?” “I didn’t, of course. He doesn’t date back to my time. But I ran into him three or four times this afternoon, and finally I asked a man, while he was in sight, who he was. And the man didn’t remember his name but said he was a Ranger.” The man spread his hands. “So then I knew it was all up,” he said, “and that I’d been a fool to come back into this country. And there was no getting away--so I decided to take the only way out. I got the gun. If you hadn’t come in here about when you did----” Who _was_ the man? Even with a mustache and beard imagined on his face, Carmichael could not reconstruct a face he knew. He said, groping for a clew: “Twenty-two years. Time goes, doesn’t it?” “Twenty-two years. And in all that time I have never asked a question about Texas that would show any knowledge of it, never admitted I ever was in Texas, never more than three or four times seen a Texas paper. I went to England on a cattle boat right after my escape--with the whiskers and mustache shaved off, of course, so they never spotted me--and then, after a while, to the Argentine. I’ve been there ever since.” “Prospered some, I take it.”