They were now near the house, and walked on for a moment in silence. Suddenly Rowan, catching up the last words at some distance, turned short around and said:
"Townsend, I am going to change something besides scene—life! I am going back into the army again, not for a frolic this time, but as a profession. Officers are gentlemen, are they not, even in fashionable society?—and would not a pair of shoulder-straps make somebody even out of a railroad conductor?"
His tone was half badinage, but oh, what a sad earnest lay at the bottom of it! His companion understood him too well to reply, and the conversation was not renewed. They parted at the piazza a moment after. Two or three hours later, after a long grasp of the hand which went far to prove that strong friendship between men has not become altogether a myth since the days of David and Jonathan, of Damon and Pythias, they parted at the same piazza once more and for a period that no human calculation could measure. Horace Townsend and Halstead Rowan were almost as certain never to meet again after that parting moment, as if one of the two had been already done with life and ticketed away with the dead Guelphs and Bourbons!
CHAPTER XIX.
A Strange Character at Breakfast—"The Rambler" and his Antecedents—What Horace Townsend heard about Fate—Going up to Pic-nic on Mount Willard—The Plateau, the Rope and the Swing—Spreading the Banquet—The Dinner-call and a Cry which answered it—A Fearful Situation.
At breakfast, the next morning after the departure of the Illinoisan, a somewhat strange character was called to the attention of the guests at the Crawford; and a few of them, sitting near him, entered into conversation with him when they discovered the peculiar habits of life and mind which had for years made him an object of interest to visitors among the mountains. He had been absent southward of the range, in Pinkham Notch, at Glen Ellis Falls and other wild localities lying north of Conway, for the preceding two or three weeks, only arriving the night before; and very few of the persons then present at the Crawford had seen him except in half-forgotten meetings in previous years. He called himself and was called by others who knew him (very few of whom, probably, knew him by any other name) "The Rambler," and his habits of life were said to justify the appellation most completely, as his appearance certainly accorded with the preconceived opinions of an itinerant hermit.
He was a man evidently past fifty, with a face much wrinkled by time and roughened by exposure—with a high forehead bald nearly to the apex of the head, long grizzled hair, rapidly approaching to white, tumbled about in careless profusion, beard straggling and ungraceful and graying as fast as the hair, and something melancholy and unsettled in the eye which indicated that his wandering habits might have had an origin, many years before, in some loss or misfortune that made quiet a torture. In figure he was rather below than above the middle height, with a certain wiriness in the limbs and a hard look in the bones and tendons of the hand, suggestive of unusual activity and an iron grip.
But when they came to know more of him from the explanations of the servants and a little listening to his own conversation, those who on that occasion first met him had reason to confess that the Rambler needed all the iron nerve and hard endurance indicated by his physique. They believed him to be a man of means, and he certainly spent money with freedom if not with lavishness, the supply seeming to be as slight and yet as inexhaustible as that of the widow's cruse. He spent very little of it upon his own person, however: such a suit of coarse gray woollen as he wore that morning, with a slouched hat and strong brogan shoes, usually completing his outer equipment. Sometimes he carried a heavy cane, but much oftener went armed with a stout staff of his own length, cut with ready hawks-bill jack-knife from a convenient oaken or hickory sapling and trimmed from its superabundance of knots by the same easily-managed substitute for a whole "kit" of carpenters'-tools.