A thick, shaggy beard fell in a silvery sheen over his breast.

His hair, gray as the underwing of the owl whose note he forged, straggled in uncut disarray from under the drooping rim of a battered and weatherworn hat.

His coat was of buckskin, and it was short at the sleeves--four inches too short; and the legs of his trousers were cut off between the knees and the ankles, giving him a still greater appearance of height.
In the crook of his arm MacDonald held a rifle, a strange-looking, long-barrelled rifle of a type a quarter of a century old.

And Donald MacDonald, in the picture he made, was like his gun, old and gray and ghostly, as if he had risen out of some graveyard of the past to warm himself in the yellow splendour of the moon.

But in the grayness and gauntness of him there was something that was mightier than the strength of youth.