I threw some dry sticks on my fire, and it flamed up showing me the faces of the group.

Buckner Gowdy, or as everybody in Monterey County always called him, Buck Gowdy, stood before us smiling, powerful, six feet high, but so big of shoulder that he seemed a little stooped, perfectly at ease, behaving as if he had always known all of us.

He wore a little black mustache which curled up at the corners of his mouth like the tail feathers of a drake.

His clothes were soaked and gaumed up with mud from his tramping and crawling through the marshes; but otherwise he looked as fresh as if he had just risen from his bed, while the negro seemed ready to drop.
When Buck Gowdy spoke, it was always with a little laugh, and that slight stoop toward you as if there was something between him and you that was a sort of secret--the kind of laugh a man gives who has had many a joke with you and depends on your knowing what it is that pleases him.

His eyes were brown, and a little close together; and his head was covered with a mass of wavy dark hair.