CHAPTER XI

THE BUZZARD


Most animals have their human counterparts, and in that room where Jerry
Strann had fallen a whimsical observer might have termed Jerry, with his
tawny head, the lion, and O'Brien behind the bar, a shaggy bear, and the
deputy marshal a wolverine, fat but dangerous, and here stood a man as
ugly and hardened as a desert cayuse, and there was Dan Barry, sleek and
supple as a panther; but among the rest this whimsical observer must
have noticed a fellow of prodigious height and negligible breadth, a
structure of sinews and bones that promised to rattle in the wind, a
long, narrow head, a nose like a beak, tiny eyes set close together and
shining like polished buttons, and a vast Adam's apple that rolled up
and down the scraggy throat. He might have done for the spirit of Famine
in an old play; but every dweller of the mountain-desert would have
found an apter expression by calling him the buzzard of the scene.
Through his prodigious ugliness he was known far and wide as "Haw-Haw"
Langley; for on occasion Langley laughed, and his laughter was an
indescribable sound that lay somewhere between the braying of a mule and
the cawing of a crow. But Haw-Haw Langley was usually silent, and he
would sit for hours without words, twisting his head and making little
pecking motions as his eyes fastened on face after face. All the
bitterness of the mountain-desert was in Haw-Haw Langley; if his body
looked like a buzzard, his soul was the soul of the vulture itself, and
therefore he had followed the courses of Jerry Strann up and down the