So we made our way to the palatial hotel which is situated on the north-eastern corner of Lake McDermot. Bedraggled, hanging in new tatters and with water streaming into little pools on the floor when we stood still, we were no people for the hotel. And we read on the front door, “No one in hobnails or bradded shoes allowed to enter here.” The many lights shone on our red faces for a minute, and then we passed on--to the log-cabins of the campers and the hob-nailed brethren. And there we got a room, and we opened our last can of pork and beans and ate it to the bottom, and we rung out our streaming clothes and hung them to dry, and we put Roosevelt and Bryan to sleep, and the poet and the Guardsman were hushed. [Illustration] _The joke was on us and Nature laughed at us, She laughed at us, she would not help us. She sent more rain and laughed again, Swish, swish! Ha, Ha! She laughed at us, she would not help us, She sent more rain and laughed again._ [Illustration: SO FOR US HE MADE GREAT MEDICINE] XXVIII. JOHNNY APPLESEED I BUILT a fire by the roadside opposite the palatial hotel and made our coffee. “It’s like lighting a fire and making yourself a personal cup of coffee on Broadway,” said Lindsay, “but it’s fine.” It’s a dramatic act and startles the imagination. The coffee-pot could be made the emblem of revolt--“Go West, young man, with a coffee-pot. You can live on nothing a year with a coffee-pot. Figure it out, how little money you need to live in the wilds!” Vachel is all for giving the business man and clerk and industrial worker a three-months’ vacation. “They don’t work in these summer months anyway,” says he. “But they are afraid of being reproached if they take long holidays. Every man here, be he a millionaire or a poor man, works. He has an office, he has a factory. If he hasn’t these, he invents them. He believes it is effeminate to take more than two weeks’ holiday. For a month’s holiday he must have the recommendation of his physician. Otherwise he loses caste and may be called a ‘lounge lizard,’ which is one of the terms of abuse which sting most. On the other hand, modern work becomes every-day more sedentary, more mechanical. In accountancy figures become more exclusive, in the workshop automatic machinery becomes more and more perfect. It dulls and enthralls the mind.” “Yet how easy it is to get out and do what we are doing!” I urged in agreement. “Go, give them a message,” cried the poet. “Intelligentsia of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. Young men and women, get free, get your coffee-pots, take up the national parks and the free lands of the West!”