"Am on my way West. Will stop off visit you at Laurel—Penton."
Travers rushed the story to the Kansas City Star.
"KANSAS POET HONOURED
AUTHOR OF 'SLAUGHTER HOUSE' TO VISIT HIM"
I waited in a fever of eagerness and impatience for the arrival of this man whom I idealised and looked on as a great man ... the man who had written the Les Miserables of the American workingman.
Harry Varden, editor of the Cry for Right, had been to Laurel a week previously, to address a socialist local, and I had looked him up, at the house of the "comrade" where he was passing the night. The comrade sent me up to Varden's room, where I found the latter just getting out of bed. I shall always think of him in his proletarian grey woollen underdrawers and undershirt. In which he had evidently slept. He had the bed-habits of the masses. And the room was stale with bad air; like the masses, he, too, slept with windows shut.
Varden's monthly magazine The World to Be, had occasionally printed a poem of mine ... and I was paid five dollars for each poem.