Three nights out from the cockroaches, and I was sleeping in the open, among pleasant hills. An old ragged fiddler, with hair hanging grizzled to his shoulders, had kept me listening late to all sorts of old-fashioned tunes and dances. He had fiddled his way across our continent, and had taken his lifetime to do so. Here he was, with silvering hair, up in the Cascade Mountains. I spread my blankets a hundred yards from his cabin, where he lived alone. He was perfectly blithe-hearted and perfectly penniless. I don’t know his name; I never saw him but that once; I suppose he is dead; but his discourse and his fiddle gave me an evening of entertainment over which I still sometimes dwell. Had I found no goat, the characters that I met, such as he, would have rewarded my excursion. But all things came to me. After some vain trips, whence I returned empty handed from fairly rough camping, on Wednesday, November 2, the diary reads, “One of my particular long-cherished wishes is accomplished, and I have seen and killed a mountain goat.” On the next day a second head and hide hung in our very snug camp. These first two were males, and they served as a basis for the description that I have attempted to draw earlier in this chapter. It was while we sat, my companionable guide and I, skinning the second goat, that we held a conversation which I must here record.
How we ever fell upon such a subject as the royal family of England, I do not remember; but camping in the wilderness uses up subjects, and leaves you with a steadily narrowing choice each day; and T—, who took an illustrated paper, observed to me that he had always rather liked “that chap Lorne.” This was how he phrased it; his language about some of the others held less of compliment.
Now I had happened, not long before this, to read of a distressing contretemps that had befallen the procession during the Queen’s jubilee, and I reminded T— of this; but it was new to him. So I told him that while the crowned heads were proceeding in state through London streets with the eyes of the civilized world watching them with admiration, the Marquis of Lorne’s horse kicked up. It was a horse that required a better rider than the Prince of Wales had considered the marquis to be, for he had warned him against the animal beforehand. But the marquis preferred to ride him. And so the horse kicked up, and off fell the marquis, right in the middle of the Queen’s jubilee.
T— looked at me and said nothing. I was therefore left uncertain if it came home to the mind of the mountaineer that this royal progress, this historic and panoplied moment, was a bad one for a nobleman to select to tumble off his horse in. I continued:—
“I believe that the Queen, upon seeing the accident, sent somebody.”
“Where?” said T—.
“To the marquis. She probably called the nearest King and said, ‘Frederick, Lorne’s off. Go and see if he’s hurt.’”
“‘And if he ain’t hurt, hurt him,’” added T—, speaking for the Queen. So I perceived that he had given the situation its full value.
After this second day of success, storm and snow beat down upon us, a blinding day, keeping us in camp. More storms followed, and no more goat; and we had to shoot a horse which had “cast” himself, being entangled in his rope, and so frozen as he lay helpless overnight in the heavy snow. We left these mountains and departed to others in search of a herd of goat; I wished a female and kid, and we seemed to have lighted upon a resort of old solitary males. Eight days after the second goat we sighted our herd, and this occasioned an experience more enlightening.