SO the poet and I fortified ourselves materially and spiritually, and set off again for the North-west. We started on our new rations and had one of the most jovial of meals in a place where evidently people had once camped before. We found the charred circles of old camp-fires in the grass. While we were resting under the trees, and in the gleam of the firelight, Vachel told me the story of how once, in Kansas, he “ate down” his landlord. He had hired himself out with a gang of others to harvest the wheat on the land of a certain German farmer. All the week-days they “piled the golden sheaves,” and it was a red-hot July. The men ate as much as they were able, slept in barns on the hay when the day was done, slept like the dead, rose with the dawn, and certainly did bring in the wheat. For this they got two dollars fifty a day and were proud of their gains. On Sunday, however, work was suspended, and the gang just lazed and dozed and ate. The German was a pious Catholic, and said a longish grace before and after meals. As the gang were rather sheepish regarding religion, they generally let one course pass, just to avoid the grace, and came slouching in as the meal went on. But Vachel started in with the first grace, right level with the farmer himself. Whatever he had Vachel had. He had several helpings of everything on the table, and as each of the ten harvest hands came in Vachel started afresh with him, and as he had hash he had hash. As each man thought he had done, he slunk out so as to avoid the second grace. The farmer kept piously waiting for all the men to get finished, and helping himself with them, too, just for company. At last all seemed to have finished and gone, and the farmer was about to pronounce the final blessing when he had an afterthought and took another piece of pie. So Vachel also took another piece of pie. Then mechanically the last grace was said. “I went over to the barn and lay down and slept,” says Vachel. “By supper time I was ready for another meal, and I sat down again with the farmer before the rest of the gang had arrived and grace was said. The farmer was about to help himself when suddenly he paused, spoon in hand, and sat back in his chair, looking ill.” Then, in a loud, stentorian voice he called to the kitchen: “Wife, give me the pain-killer.” He had a violent fit of indigestion. Wife then brought a large bottle labelled PAIN-KILLER, an astonishing bottle, about a foot long, that looked as if it might be horse liniment, and the farmer took his dose with a large iron spoon. “A terrible stuff,” says Vachel, “a stuff that just eats the inside out of you, one part turpentine, three alcohol, and the rest iron rust. It gives you such a heat you forget about your indigestion.”