He stood fall six feet high, in a pair of tall boots, fabricated out of tanned alligator skin; into the ample tops of which were thrust the bottoms of his pantaloons—the latter being of woollen homespun, that had been dyed with “dog-wood ooze,” but was now of a simple dirt colour. A deerskin under shirt, without any other, covered his breast and shoulders; over which was a “blanket coat,” that had once been green, long since gone to a greenish yellow, with most of the wool worn off.
There was no other garment to be seen: a slouch felt hat, of greyish colour, badly battered, completing the simple, and somewhat scant, collection of his wardrobe.
He was equipped in the style of a backwoods hunter, of the true Daniel Boone breed: bullet-pouch, and large crescent-shaped powder-horn, both suspended by shoulder-straps, hanging under the right arm; a waist-belt of thick leather keeping his coat closed and sustaining a skin sheath, from which protruded the rough stag-horn handle of a long-bladed knife.
He did not affect either mocassins, leggings, nor the caped and fringed tunic shirt of dressed deerskin worn by most Texan hunters. There was no embroidery upon his coarse clothing, no carving upon his accoutrements or weapons, nothing in his tout ensemble intended as ornamental. Everything was plain almost to rudeness: as if dictated by a spirit that despised “fanfaron.”
Even the rifle, his reliable weapon—the chief tool of his trade—looked like a rounded bar of iron, with a piece of brown unpolished wood at the end, forming its stock; stock and barrel, when the butt rested on the ground, reaching up to the level of his shoulder.
The individual thus clothed and equipped was apparently about fifty years of age, with a complexion inclining to dark, and features that, at first sight, exhibited a grave aspect.
On close scrutiny, however, could be detected an underlying stratum of quiet humour; and in the twinkle of a small greyish eye there was evidence that its owner could keenly relish a joke, or, at times, perpetrate one.
The Irishman had pronounced his name: it was Zebulon Stump, or “Old Zeb Stump,” as he was better known to the very limited circle of his acquaintances.
“Kaintuck, by birth an raisin’,”—as he would have described himself, if asked the country of his nativity—he had passed the early part of his life among the primeval forests of the Lower Mississippi—his sole calling that of a hunter; and now, at a later period, he was performing the same métier in the wilds of south-western Texas.
The behaviour of the staghound, as it bounded before him, exhibiting a series of canine welcomes, told of a friendly acquaintance between Zeb Stump and Maurice the mustanger.