Most serviceably a check from the _National Magazine_ came, for twenty-five dollars ... I had sold them a prophetic poem on airships. The check ameliorated my condition. I saw my way clear to a few weeks more of regular eating. * * * * * Then, on top of that, one day a telegram came.... "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. Varden was a frail, jolly little chap, absolutely fearless and alert and possessed of a keen sense of humour which he could turn, on occasion, even against himself. I breakfasted with him. He had good table manners, but, from time to time, he forgot himself and smacked his lips keenly. And the egg dripped on his chin as he flashed a humorous incident that had happened to him on one of his lecture trips.... After breakfast he and I took a long walk together ... we began speaking of Penton Baxter ... I spoke in high praise of the great novelist ... reverently and with awe. "Yes, yes," Varden assented, "Penton is all you say, but he has no sense of humour ... and he takes himself and his work as seriously as if the destiny of the human race depended on it ... which is getting in a bad way, for a reformer, you know--gives a chap's enemies and antagonists so many good openings.... "When Penton was writing _The Slaughter House_ and we were running it serially, his protagonist, Jarl--it seemed he didn't know how to dispose of him ... and the book was running on and on interminably.... I wired him 'for God's sake kill Jarl.' ... "Baxter took my telegram much to heart ... was deeply aggrieved I afterward learned ... the dear boy ... he did 'kill Jarl' finally ... and absent-mindedly brought him to life again, later on in his book."