I' ve seen a hen with a beard, but I never saw one strut. Did you ask them if there was any red on the birds neck? Also, if it was a jake, they should have seen the cut feathers on the outer edges of the tail. Another possibility is that it was a mature tom that had lost it' s beard to mites.

I had a tom fly down and land right in front of me once, but his beard was only a couple of inches long. I let him walk around ten steps in front of me thinking it was a jake. He turned and walked right to me and when he got five feet from my boots, I realized that his beard was truncated and there were some hairs left that were hanging down eight or nine inches. He was a grown gobbler. He started acting spooky, so I tried to whip the gun up on him. Just as I was coming down on the trigger, he ducked right under the blast, darted behind a pine tree and was gone. I' m sure the look on my face was priceless. [&:]