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. “I’m feelin’ fine,” said he. “Shall we get to Canada?” “I’ll be all right to-morrow.” “We ought to have gone further whilst the goin’ was good, eh?” “I’m sorry, Stephen,” said he apologetically. “But this is good?” “It’s good enough for me.” “All right.” * * * * * BRINGING in wood for a big fire is rather a tedious job, but I hit on a sporting way of doing it all by myself, and doing it better. We were at seven thousand feet, and the avalanches and spring floods and storms had wrought havoc among the trees. Fine dead trunks lay in scores on the mighty slope of the mountain. Our fire was at the foot of a slippery granite slide. So I took a stout young pine-tree, and began to lever the great dead trees and set them rolling downward. Vachel was perched on a rock above the fire, and the logs arrived at the embers below like colliding locomotives, with a great bump and showers of sparks. It was possible to lever and roll downwards logs that were thirty or forty feet long, and we pulled the great lumps of their sprawling resinous roots on to the fire. We slept that night among the granite shelves, and the pine-roots roared as they burned, and the great rocks beside the fire cracked under the heat with a sort of earthquake thud which registered a buffet on our bodies ten yards away.