"I was hoping you wouldn't be," eagerly said the little man, "for I don't want you to hit the breeze just now. I know you are not Will Bransford because I know Bransford intimately. I was his chum for several years. He could drink as much as I. He was lazy and shiftless, but I liked him. We were together in Tucson—and in other places in Arizona. Texas, too. We never amounted to much. Do you need to know any more? I can tell you."
"Tell me what?"
"More," grinned the other man, "about yourself. You are Sanderson—Deal Sanderson—nicknamed Square Deal Sanderson. I saw you one day in Tombstone; you were pointed out to me, and the minute I laid my eyes on you the day Dale tried to hang Nyland, I knew you."
Sanderson smiled. "Why didn't you tell Mary?"
The little man's face grew grave. "Because I didn't want to queer your game. You saved Nyland—an innocent man. Knowing your reputation for fairness, I was convinced that you didn't come here to deceive anybody."
"But I did deceive somebody," said Sanderson. "Not you, accordin' to what you've been tellin' me, but Mary Bransford. She thinks I am her brother, an' I've let her go on thinkin' it."
"Why?" asked the little man.
Sanderson gravely appraised the other. "There ain't no use of holdin' out anything on you," he said. His lips straightened and his eyes bored into the little man's. There was a light in his own that made the little man stiffen. And Sanderson's voice was cold and earnest.
"I'm puttin' you wise to why I've not told her," he went on. "But if you ever open your yap far enough to whisper a word of it to her I'm wringin' your neck, pronto! That goes!"
He told Owen the story from the beginning—about the Drifter, his letter to the elder Bransford, how he had killed the two men who had murdered Will Bransford, and how, on the impulse of the moment, he had impersonated Mary's brother.