This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. W. C. Tuttle's Evidently Not is a fast-talking comic Western built on bad luck, bad timing, and two men who can argue with a fence post. Ike and Magpie Simpkins are wandering through a gold-rumored frontier when their debate about circumstantial evidence is cut short by gunfire, arrest, and a sheriff's mistake that lands them naked in jail for a bank robbery and murder they didn't commit. From there, the story spirals into slapstick disguise and escalating farce. After a midnight escape, the pair blunder into a stranger's house, flee a mistaken-identity scandal, and reinvent themselves as Reverend and Mrs. Meek—one in a dress, bonnet, and stockings, the other in a preacher's coat. Swept into War Bonnet, they must improvise a denomination, endure suspicious hospitality, and keep their act alive in a town where religion, crime, and politics are dangerously entangled. As hidden money, false identities, and a supposed dying man pull them deeper into trouble, the comedy sharpens into a tangle of gunplay, deadpan narration, and frontier absurdity. Through it all, Tuttle keeps the banter brisk and the irony sharp, turning every escape into another argument over proof, guilt, and survival.
