We had by this time lifted ourselves high out of the gloomy valleys and had attained to a rarer atmosphere and a clearer world, where the forest lay below like a book that has been read and above it rose the eternal hills lifting their mighty granite shoulders to the sky. We saw in retrospect many of the mountains we had climbed. “Going-to-the-Sun” and “Heaven’s Peak” were remote but grandiose on the horizon. We were on a much-exposed ridge of Flat Top Mountain, and we camped in a wintry spot beside a natural table of rock. On the rock we spread our supper; on the ground our blankets. The wind blew the flaps of our blankets, it blew away the flaming embers of the bonfire which we made, and it ignited the grass, and when we had put the fire out on one side it broke out on the other, and yet there was not enough of a fire to warm us. Night came on, and we sought new fuel. Vachel hobbled beside me and discoursed in a preoccupied way about Springfield and its race-riot.
“I’m with you all the way about the Negroes, Stephen,” said he, as we struggled to upraise an embedded sapling which the snows had tumbled over in the spring. “If you write about the Negro again, say I’m with you, I subscribe to it. I’ll go the limit with you.”
We raised the entangled, difficult, fallen tree up on to the star-radii of its roots, and looked down the wild slope to where our fire was burning and blowing. It was dark up there where we were, and the fire below gleamed in the darkness. We rolled the sapling down to the fire and on to it, and stamped out the flames in the grass, and then returned into the darkness for another sapling.
“You know how I felt in Springfield when that riot occurred,” said Vachel. “I visited all the leading Negroes and most of the leading white men. I bombarded the newspapers with letters. And I don’t know that it did any good. You couldn’t be sure that another onslaught on the coloured people wouldn’t occur to-morrow.”
As we talked we sought and collected withered branches, wind-riven arms of the pines. Some we had to pull out of the earth, others we could not pull out.
“I believe the only way to stop lynching would be to break into a lynching crowd and make them either lynch you instead of the Negro or lynch you for interfering. When they realised what they had done their hearts would be touched, their consciences would be shocked,” said Vachel.
We had unwieldy faggots in our arms and so walked closely together down the hill, supporting one another’s wood.
“It is expedient that one man should die for the people once more,” said the poet.
We made up a good fire; we boiled a pot of coffee and fried a heap of beans and stewed a cup of apricots and cut the bread and untied the sugar-bag and exposed the dried raisins, of which we had a capacious little sack-full and wrapped ourselves round and sat by the fire and fed and talked—
“Springfield was just about to attract the attention of the world in a special way, as the shrine of Lincoln, when that riot broke out,” said Vachel. “Large schemes had been approved for the improvement of the city. All promised well. Then suddenly this race-riot broke out, and Springfield was the subject of cartoons all over the United States. The finger of scorn was pointed at Lincoln’s city. Springfield is still trying to live it down.”