flanks, a well-set up back and massive shoulders. His face was
browny-red all over except where the skin ran white under the hair and
there was a ruddier ring round the upper part of the throat. His nose
was thin between the eyes, broadening lower, high-bridged and with high
cut nostrils, showing the sensitive red when he was enraged--as not
infrequently happened. He had large honest blue eyes, intensely blue,
of the fiery description with a trick of dropping the lids when he was
in doubt or consideration. They were expressive eyes, as a rule keen
and hard, but they could soften unexpectedly under the influence of
emotion. At other times, according to the quality of the emotion, they
glowed literally like blue flames. He was considered queer-tempered,
rather sulky, and his face often took on a very unyielding expression.

He had thick reddish-yellow eyebrows at the base of a slightly receding
forehead--wanting in benevolence, phrenologists would have said, and
with the bump of self-esteem considerably developed. His hair was
yellow, pure and simple--the color of spun silk, only coarser, and it
would have curled at the ends had he not worn it close-cropped. His
moustache and beard were rather deeper yellow, the beard short,
well-shaped--the cut of Colin McKeith's beard was almost his only
vanity--there was one other, the 'millionare strut' in town--and he
had the masculine habit of stroking and clasping his beard with his
large open-fingered hand--spatulate tips to his digits, the practical
hand--fairly well kept, though brown and hairy.

There were lines in his face and a way of setting his features--that a
man gets when he has to front straight some cruel facts of human
existance--to calculate at a glance the chances of death from a
black's spear, a lost trail, an empty water-bag, the horns of a
charging bullock or even worse things than these.