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Belief in the .25 Stevens was something of a genetic trait in the Tedmon family, as this photo of one of Allyn’s sons shows.

The new job in Colorado, however, and its scarcity of the kind of shooting opportunities he had enjoyed in Wyoming, soon led to a cooling of his enthusiasm for his Savage .250 and a resurgence of interest in the guns of his youth, the Stevens single-shots. Cash-strapped as usual, he had sold his .303 to finance the new .250 but evidently never considered parting with his cherished Stevens 44, converted by this time into an even more useful .32-40 after sustaining cleaning-rod damage to its bore. (Stevens made a particular specialty of such reboring.) Although his fondness for “Those Stevens Rifles” had crept into earlier pieces, it was with that nicely researched treatise of 1926 that his initial reputation as a high-velocity advocate waned, and his public identification with the guns of Chicopee Falls began to take shape. (Lest his unsolicited nickname of “the Godfather of Stevens Rifles” be interpreted as somehow self-serving, he felt compelled to conclude the piece with a disclaimer: “Don’t take me for a Stevens salesman, for what I have are not for sale.”)