There were some scout officials lunching at the Inn; I suppose they had come up from the city. They wore khaki and ate chicken salad and talked about some Council or other; that and a new store-house. Not many others were lunching; it was too early in the season.
On my way out I stopped and asked these gentlemen if they could tell me anything about the history of that region. They expressed regret that they could not, but were able to advise me about the road I should take in continuing my journey northward. I learned that I would pass through West Point and so on over the scenic Storm King Highway up through Cornwall and on to Newburgh.
I was just pondering on how long it would take me to reach Kingston by this unpremeditated route when I noticed standing near my car the strangest looking man I have ever seen in my whole life. He looked queer enough where he stood, amid rural surroundings; how he would have impressed one if met with in the city it was amusing to contemplate.
He was, I think, the tallest man I have ever seen; tall and spare and rawboned. Yet, somehow, tall was not the word for him. Long would be a better word. And I later learned that this word long was commonly prefixed to his already romantic title. Long Buck Sanderson was the name he went by. He was quite old; I would have said seventy years at the least. He wore a fur cap very much the worse for age, and his face was as brown and wrinkled and leathery as an old dried-up cocoanut. Probably his height (though, as I have said, it was an impression rather of length than of height) was not less than six feet seven inches, and even so some of his original stature was lost by age.
He wore a corduroy jacket which might have done duty in pre-revolutionary days. I suppose it was once yellow; it was a sort of drab when I first saw it. I do not know what his dirt-colored trousers were made of, but it was not khaki; he and all that pertained to him were of the pre-khaki era.
He had a pointed nose and even this was deeply wrinkled. Somehow it gave me the impression of a fox, though I do not mean that there was anything suggestive of slyness in his expression. His old eyes were gray and of a shrewdness which only the wilderness can breed. He wore hanging about his neck a discolored old cartridge shell of a considerable size; why I do not know. But I later learned that with the aid of this ancient trophy he could reproduce the voices of birds and beasts at will and fool them with his mimicry.
I could not repress the temptation to inspect rather frankly so strange a figure, and he, on his part, watched me with a kind of easy observation as I felt one of the front tires of my car to make sure that it was hard.
“She’s a-leakin’,” he said.
“No, she isn’t,” I said, “but she needs a little air.”
“She’s a-leakin’,” he repeated, unperturbed by my superior knowledge.