This man, as it appeared, had never missed coming to the mountains for a single summer of the preceding fifteen years. Whence he came, no one knew; and whither he went when his season was over (his season had very little to do with the fashionable one, in commencement or duration), was known quite as little. He might be looked for, they said, at the Profile, the Crawford, the Glen, the Alpine, the White Mountain or down in Pinkham Notch, at any time after they began to paint up and repair the houses for the reception of visitors, in early June; and he might be expected to make his appearance at any or all of those places, any day or no day, during the fall season and even up to the time when the last coach-load rolled away in September and the first snows began to sprinkle themselves on the brows of Washington and Lafayette. He never remained at any one of the houses more than a few hours at a time, carrying away from each a few sandwiches, a little dried tongue, some cheese and crackers in a small haversack, and sleeping nine nights out of ten in the open air, with no pillow but a stone or a log of wood, and his slouched hat. Most of the time he was alone on the tops of the most difficult peaks or at the bottom of gorges where no foot but his own would be likely to tread; or he was to be seen dodging across a path, staff in hand and haversack on side, as a party was making some one of the ascents,—rather shunning any company then seeking it, and yet evidently neither misanthropic nor embarrassed when thrown into society and forced into conversation. Wherever he wished to go he went on foot, even when thirty or forty miles of rough mountain roads and paths were to be measured; and no man, they averred, had ever seen him set foot over the side of a vehicle or recognize the right of the animal man to be drawn about from place to place by his brother animal the horse.
So far the Rambler, according to the accounts given of him, was merely a harmless monomaniac—harmless even to himself, as all monomaniacs are not. But beyond that point, the servants and some of the old habitues averred, came positive madness. He had been mad, since the first day of his coming to the mountains and perhaps long before, on the idea of climbing. Many had seen him go up to those peaks and down into those ravines before mentioned, and found as little disposition as ability to follow him. He seemed to climb without purpose, except his purpose might be the mere reckless exposure of himself to danger at which every one except himself would draw back with a shudder. And that he did this without any motive outside of himself for the action—that he had no thought of awakening admiration by such exhibitions,—was evident from the fact that he was just as likely to make some ascent or descent of the most reckless fool-hardiness, when he did not know of the presence of any other person within possible sight, as when he had groups of horrified spectators; and that loneliness was not a condition precedent to such an attempt, was just as evident from the fact that he never seemed to desist because one person or fifty came suddenly upon him and "caught him in the act." He seemed to live in a climbing world of his own, in which he was the only resident and all the others merely chance visitors who might or might not be in the way when he found it necessary to hang himself like a fly on the crags between heaven and earth.
We are making no attempt whatever at analyzing the mentality of this singular man, whom many will remember as having met him during some period of the last dozen years, at one or more of the Notches of the White Mountains. As well might the attempt be made to survey one of his own mountain tops or discover the superfices of one of the mighty masses of perpendicular rock that so often afforded him a footing at which the chamois would have given up in despair and Hervio Nano (that human "fly on the ceiling") writhed his boneless limbs in a shudder! We are only roughly daguerreotyping the man as he appeared, preparatory to one terrible incident which made him an important character in this narration. Were any effort to be made at explaining his strange and apparently purposeless predilection, perhaps one word would come as near to furnishing the explanation as five hundred others—excitement. One man drinks liquors until he goes beyond himself; another invites to his brain the tempting demons of opium, hasheesh or nicotine; another perils his prosperity and the very bread of his family at play; still another plunges into pleasure so deeply that the draught is all the while maddening agony; and yet another claps spur on heel and takes sword in hand and rides into the thick of the deadliest fight, without one motive of patriotism or one thought of duty: and all these are seeking that which will temporarily lift them above and beyond themselves (alas!—that which will just as assuredly plunge them below themselves, in reaction!)—excitement. Who knows that the poor Rambler, bankrupt in heart, hope and memory, had not tasted all the other maddening bowls and found them too weak to wean him from his hour of suffering, so that when the frequent paroxysm came he had no alternative but to place himself in some position where the hand and the foot could become masters of every thought and feeling, that the rude minstrelsy of deadly danger might thus charm away the black moment from his soul!
All this is mere speculation—the man may have been nothing more nor less than a maniac; and yet his conversation, which was coherent and marked by entire propriety, did not create any such impression.
No one who has made any study of the scenery of our Northern Mountains fails to know that many of them (and almost all the White Mountains that have full descent on either side to either of the Notches) in addition to the bald scarred brows of cliff that on one side or another seem like faces lifting themselves in stern defiance to the storm,—have chased down them, from brow to foot, channels or "schutes" from which the torrent or the lightning has originally shorn away trees, herbage and at last earth, every year wearing them deeper and making more startling the contrast of the almost direct line of bluish gray cliff, seeming the very mockery of a path that no man can walk, with the green of the living grass and foliage and the white skeletons of the dead birches, that border them on either side. Perhaps no feature of the mountain scenery is more certain to awake a shudder, than such "schutes," as looked up to from below or down upon from above; as the thought of a passage-way is inevitable, followed by the remembrance of the headlong fall of any man who should attempt a progress so nearly perpendicular, and that followed by the imagination that the gazer has really attempted it and is falling. Mount Webster and Mount Willard, at the White Mountain Notch, are more marked than almost any of the others, by such features; and certain terrible adventures along those "schutes" make part of the repertoires of guides and the boasting stories of old habitues. With one of those descending Mount Willard, and the points of scenery immediately surrounding it, we shall have painful occasion to make more intimate acquaintance in this immediate connection.
These "schutes" and their topography were the subject of conversation at the breakfast-table that morning, not alone on account of the presence of the Rambler, which might have provoked it, but from the fact that a pic-nic on the top of Mount Willard, in the near vicinity of one of those tempting horrors, had been for some days in contemplation and the wagons were being prepared for going up and the cold food packing away in baskets and hampers at the very moment of that discussion.
"You must know the mountains remarkably well," one of the gentlemen at the table was saying to the Rambler.
"I ought to do so," was the reply. "There is scarcely a spot from Littleton to Winnipiseogee that my foot has not touched; and I may almost say that there is not a spot where I have not eaten or slept." He said this in a manner as far removed from any desire to make a display of himself as from any thing like modesty—merely as the fact, and therefore a matter of course.
"I heard you speaking of climbing the schutes a moment ago, but I did not quite catch what you said," spoke another. "You certainly cannot hold on to the rocks alone, when they are so nearly perpendicular, can you?"
"Oh, no," answered the Rambler, "of course that would be impossible. I suppose I have a sure foot and a steady hand, and those schutes always have trees and shrubbery beside them, all the way down. It is no trouble to hold on to them—at least it is not so to me."