He returned once more to his story of the ten who died for the flag of Springfield--the new flag of the city. “I’ve always felt,” said he, “that there could be found at least ten men among the unlikely fellows who loaf around our town square ready to give their lives for Springfield. If ever there came a time when Springfield was in danger or its flag likely to be dishonoured, I know it is from the tramps and wasters that something would come. At least, from the people we don’t know.” “If only I could write that idea as Edgar Allan Poe wrote ‘King Pest,’” said the poet, “then I’d tell the truth and shame the Devil.” * * * * * “YET Springfield was once disgraced by a most unholy race-riot,” my companion went on. “It was in 1908, the centenary of Lincoln’s birth, and I felt it as a terrible disgrace. The negro victims were entirely innocent. It was a shocking affair.” We had by this time lifted ourselves high out of the gloomy valleys and had attained to a rarer atmosphere and a clearer world, where the forest lay below like a book that has been read and above it rose the eternal hills lifting their mighty granite shoulders to the sky. We saw in retrospect many of the mountains we had climbed. “Going-to-the-Sun” and “Heaven’s Peak” were remote but grandiose on the horizon. We were on a much-exposed ridge of Flat Top Mountain, and we camped in a wintry spot beside a natural table of rock. On the rock we spread our supper; on the ground our blankets. The wind blew the flaps of our blankets, it blew away the flaming embers of the bonfire which we made, and it ignited the grass, and when we had put the fire out on one side it broke out on the other, and yet there was not enough of a fire to warm us. Night came on, and we sought new fuel. Vachel hobbled beside me and discoursed in a preoccupied way about Springfield and its race-riot. “I’m with you all the way about the Negroes, Stephen,” said he, as we struggled to upraise an embedded sapling which the snows had tumbled over in the spring. “If you write about the Negro again, say I’m with you, I subscribe to it. I’ll go the limit with you.” We raised the entangled, difficult, fallen tree up on to the star-radii of its roots, and looked down the wild slope to where our fire was burning and blowing. It was dark up there where we were, and the fire below gleamed in the darkness. We rolled the sapling down to the fire and on to it, and stamped out the flames in the grass, and then returned into the darkness for another sapling. “You know how I felt in Springfield when that riot occurred,” said Vachel. “I visited all the leading Negroes and most of the leading white men. I bombarded the newspapers with letters. And I don’t know that it did any good. You couldn’t be sure that another onslaught on the coloured people wouldn’t occur to-morrow.”