Vernon Tull

While a minor character in the novel, Vernon Tull is an important artery in the network of gossip, storytelling and information in the county. He is a "gaunt" and "gentle" farmer, whose "adolescent freshness" is probably "the result of a lifelong abstinence from tobacco - the face of the breathing archetype and protagonist of all men who marry young and father only daughters and are themselves but the eldest daughter of their own wives" (10). After one of the Texan horses injures him, he alters his appearance so that his "sedate and innocent blue eyes [lie] above the month-old cornsilk beard which concealed most of his abraded face and which have him an air of incredible and paradoxical dissoluteness, not as though at last and without warning he had appeared in the sight of his fellowmen in his true character, but as if an old Italian portrait of a child saint had been defaced by a vicious and idle boy" (357).