"Hello, can you give me a drink?"

This time Mark heard and wheeled on the stool. A tramp was leaning
against the fence looking at him.

Tramps are too familiar in California for curiosity or interest, also
they are unpopular. They have done dreadful things--lonely women in
outlying farms have guns and dogs, the one loaded, the other cultivated
in savagery against the visits of the hobo.

Mark rose unwelcoming, but the fellow did look miserable. He was gaunt
and dirty, long ragged locks of hair falling below the brim of his torn
straw hat, an unkempt straggle of beard growing up his cheeks. His
clothes hung loose on his lean frame, and he looked all the same color,
dust-brown, his hair, his shirt, his coat, even his face, the tan lying
dark over a skin that was sallow. Only his eyes struck a different note.
They were gray, very clear in the sun-burned face, the lids long and
heavy. Their expression interested Mark; it was not the stone-hard, evil
look of the outcast man, but one of an unashamed, smoldering resentment.

The same quality was in his manner. The request for water was neither
fawningly nor piteously made. It was surly, a right churlishly
demanded. Mark moved to the pump and filled the glass standing there.
The tramp leaning on the pickets looked at him, his glance traveling
morose over the muscular back and fine shoulders, the straight nape,
the dark head with its crown of thick, coarse hair. As Mark advanced
with the glass he continued his scrutiny, when, suddenly meeting the
young man's eyes, his own shifted and he said in that husky voice,
hoarse from a parched throat: