When I offered to pay him for the supplies, he refused. "I'm in debt to
you. I don't remember what they cost--got them with some things for
myself; a trifle, a trifle. Glad to do more for you--no trouble at all,
none whatever."
"Didn't you have any trouble in Dubuque?" I asked, thinking of the man
who had threatened to shoot him in front of the post-office, and how the
black-bearded man had called upon the bystanders to bear witness that he
was about to shoot in self-defense. He gave me a sharp look; but it was
too dark to make it worth anything to him.
"No trouble at all," he said. "What d'ye mean?"
Before I could answer there came up a man carrying a shotgun in one
hand, and a wild goose over his shoulder. Following him was a darky with
a goose over each shoulder. 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.
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