Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/28

 His face was long and morose, its mournful cast heightened by the length of his nose, which hung club-ended over a wild red mustache. His upstanding eyebrows were huge and coarse as the bristles of an old boar, the small eyes under them combative and red, like the eyes of a man who had watched at campfires through long and windy nights.

He stood with thumbs hooked in his belt, a chafed and worn scabbard carrying a long pistol dangling against his thigh. His coat was tight across his narrow back, the sleeves of it far up his hairy wrists. He was not a friendly-looking man to meet on the trail, not the kind of a man one would stop in the road and ask for a match. He was that type of frontiersman to whom whisky was as necessary as fire to a stove. Without it he was a dead lump of encumbering material; with it one must touch him carefully. He was such a familiar type to Dan Gustin as to call for no consideration. Dan's eyes were centered on the sailor, whose strange garb and easy carriage began to move in the cowboy a certain admiration.

This sailor, who had wandered like a storm-blown gull so far from his sea, stood a little taller than Dan Gustin, who was no puny specimen himself. He was straight-backed and well-balanced; a compact man about the chest, which was uncommonly broad and deep. His brown face was clear and frank, rather boyish in its glad freshness, inviting confidence by its easy smile. There was a look of high courage in his blue eyes, a promise of good sense in the rather small head that carried so confidently on the short, muscular