Six foot high at least, he stood lightly on his feet with the careless grace of one used to a heaving deck.
A peculiar look of devil-may-care good nature stamped his clean-cut, deeply tanned features, yet there was a keen glint of shrewdness in his blue eyes, decision in his firm chin and resolute lips, with just a touch of martial fierceness in the twirl of his small moustache.
No tenderfoot this man, though there was no mistaking his nationality. "A d——d Britisher" was written large all over him. Bare-footed though he was, in well-worn dungarees, with leather belt and sheath-knife, his birth was plain as his nationality.
In England they would use one word to describe him—the one word "rolling-stone"; but in the world not one but a dozen words would be required—frontiersman, sailor, soldier, gold-miner, cowboy, hunter, scout, prospector, explorer, and many more, all marked "dangerous" in the catalogue of professions, for the "rolling-stone" takes to dangers and hardships just as a city man does to dollars and comforts. And who shall lay the blame? It's all in the blood, whether you take your strain from Francis Drake the buccaneer or Shylock the Jew.
Such was the man who faced Broncho—just a British rolling-stone, a modern freelance, a sea rover.
As he spoke, Bucking Broncho gave him a keen look, and then cried out:
"I'm a coyote if it ain't Derringer Jack. Shake, old pard, you-alls ain't shorely forget Bucking Broncho?"
"Think I'd forget an old pal like that; no, Broncho, so sure as you remember me."
"Which I shorely does. I makes a bet I tells them brands o' yours on the skyline."
As they gripped hands Jack Derringer remarked: