younger than the other--under thirty probably. He was a big-boned,
powerful animal, his thick, reddish hair growing low on his forehead, his
face, with its wide nose and prominent jaw, like the study of a face left
in the rough. In his stolid look there was something childlike, his eyes
following the flight of a bird in the air, then dropping to see its
reflection in the water.

Garland was older, fully fifty, burly, thickset, strong as an ox. His hat
lay in the bottom of the boat and his head, covered with curly, grizzled
hair, was broad and well-shaped. A corresponding grizzle of beard clothed
his chin and fringed a straight line of lip. The rest of his face showed
the skin sun-dried and lined less from age than a life in the open.
Wrinkles radiated from the corners of his eyes, and one, like a fold in
the flesh, crossed his forehead in a deep-cut crease. His clothes were of
the roughest, a dirty collarless shirt with a rag of red bandanna round
the neck, a coat shapeless and dusty, and overalls grease and
mud-smeared with the rubbing of his hands. His boots were the iron-hard
clouts of the rancher, his hat a broken black felt, sweat-stained and
torn. Passing him on the road, you would have set him down as a farm hand
out of a job.

The boat had passed beyond the shelter of the hills to where the tules
widened. Pausing, he glanced about. Far to the right he could see a small
white square--the lodge of a sportsman's club which in the duck shooting
season would disgorge men and dogs into the marsh. It was closed now, but
on the plain beyond there were ranches. He dropped to his knees, shipped
the pole, and drew from the bottom of the boat a piece of wood roughly
shaped into a paddle. Here in the heart of the tules, where a head moving
over the bulrush floor might be discerned, sound would not carry far. He
dipped in the paddle, the long spray of drops hitting the water with a