The other
horse, a sorrel, had only a day or two before slid five hundred feet
down a snow-bank. He was still stiff from his previous accident, and if
ever I saw a horse whose nerve was gone, I saw one there--a poor,
tragic, shaken creature, trembling at a word.
That night, while we lay wrapped in blankets round the fire while the
cooks prepared supper at another fire near by, the Optimist produced a
bottle of claret. We drank it out of tin cups, the only wine of the
journey, and not until long afterward did we know its history--that a
very great man to whose faith the Northwest owes so much of its
development had purchased it, twenty-five years before, for the visit to
this country of Albert, King of the Belgians.
That claret, taken so casually from tin cups near the summit of the
Cascades, had been a part of the store of that great dreamer and most
abstemious of men, James J. Hill, laid in for the use of that other
great dreamer and idealist, Albert, when he was his guest. While we ate,
Weaver said suddenly,--
"Listen!"
His keen ears had caught the sound of a bell.
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