HENCEFORTH I CALL YE NOT SERVANTS BUT FRIENDS
XXIX. LOG-ROLLING
Vachel slipped near Heaven’s Peak and turned a double somersault downward, buffeting his head with his huge pack (crammed with canned goods, loaves, blankets, and what not) and then I picked him up and found he had sprained his ankle.
“Don’t think I’m hurt,” said the poet. “I yelled because I was scared. I’ll be all right in a few minutes.”
He didn’t mind the pain, but he loathed being beaten. Nevertheless he was down and out. “We’ll go on to-morrow,” said he. “We’ll go on next day.”
“Here we are, and here we remain,” said I, “till the ankle has recovered. We can stay a week or two weeks, and I’ll go back for more food. So let’s make up our minds to it.”
So we stayed by a flat-rocked stream on a grand slope in a forest of stately pines and firs. Vachel sat on his blankets like a sultan. And he speedily forgot his ankle and the mountains and Heaven’s Peak, and began to tell me the story of Elbert Hubbard, from the time when he travelled in Larkin’s soap to the time when he wrote “Who Took the Lid off Hell?” and went down in the Lusitania. And then he told me the substance of “A Self-made Businessman’s Letters to his Son,” that unashamed best seller which portrayed the benevolent soul of a Chicago packer before Upton Sinclair dared. Then he told me a fantastic story of how ten ne’er-do-well men of Springfield were found ready to die for the Flag. Then he told to me from memory Edgar Allan Poe’s story of King Pest, and the ghouls of the forest crept close to us to listen. Then he told me of the prairie-schooners which used to have inscribed on them “Pike’s Peak or bust!”
“Heaven’s Peak or bust,” said I, maliciously pointing to his swollen ankle. “Lindsay, essaying to climb Heaven’s Peak, slipped downward,” I went on facetiously, imitating the style of my letters to the Evening Post. He smiled.
“How yer feelin’?” I interjected.