“Mr. Armitage,” people often ask me. “You spent more time hunting this outlaw than any other lawman. Why did they call him ‘Veils’ McGaff?”

Surely you’ve heard all the regular theories. The most popular is that he killed so many men that the market for mourning veils for their wives exploded in every town he visited. That’s not true, since Veils McGaff tended to kill men like him–hardened desperadoes without wives and for whom no tears would ever be shed–or men like me–whose hollow marriages, maintained for the sake of propriety only, would result in nothing resembling mourning should either partner take the long dirt-nap.

Another is that McGaff came from the small town of Veil Falls. That much is true, as he was born in an apartment above a whorehouse and below another whorehouse in that very town. But in those days Veil Falls was known as Whore’s Crossing, and it did not assume its less salacious monicker until Veils McGaff had already begun his reign of rampaging terror.

Some have even claimed that Veils was McGaff’s actual given name. I’ve heard that it was short for the name Veilorious in honor of Veilorious the Reprobate, a Roman senator written about by Cato and Cicero. The fanciful combination of given and middle names Vernon and Illinois into Veils has even been proposed by men who are no doubt staggering home from a long saloon night. But I know for a fact that McGaff’s actual given name was Aloysius, after his grandfather, and his middle name Mergatroyd, after the man his mother imagined had the best odds of being his father.

In fact, Veils McGaff was called that because of an incident in which he improvised a kerchief out of a piece of mourning veil during a bold daylight robbery of a haberdashery in Prosperity Falls. To his dying day at the end of two nooses from two equidistant gallows, he hated the appellation and for a time shot anyone who used it. He eventually settled on savage beatings instead, after realizing that it would be hard to recruit confederates if they were bulleted every time they used his most famous nickname.

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