“Keep back!  Keep back!” to the people, gangs of curious boys mostly, who followed close on his heels.  And he poked backwards with the sharp metallic point of the stick....

“People follow close on me, stupid, like donkeys.  If I didn’t keep that point swinging back, when I slacked my pace or stopped they would walk right up on me....”

* * * * *

Dr. Percival Hammond, managing editor of the New York Independent. the first magazine to print my poems, came to town ... to lecture on his favourite topic of international peace.

It occurred to me strongly that I ought to afford him some witness of my gratitude for what his magazine had done for me.

Though broke, I borrowed ten dollars from the owner of a lunch counter where I ate.

“I want to give a dinner to Dr. Hammond ... his magazine has helped me as a poet ... it is obvious that I can’t give the dinner at your lunch counter.”

Ten dollars was all the lunchcounter man would lend me.

But Walsh Summers of the Bellman House said I could give a luncheon in honour of Hammond at fifty cents a plate ... he would allot me two tables ... and a separate room ... and I could invite nineteen professors ... and he would throw in two extras for Jack Travers and myself.

I gave the lunch, inviting the professors I liked best.

After dessert and a few speeches I told them how I had borrowed the money.  Hammond privately tried to pay me back out of his own pocket, but I wouldn’t let him.

* * * * *

I asked Hammond if he knew Penton Baxter.

“Yes; we printed his first article, you know ... just as we gave you your start....

“Baxter is the most remarkable combination of genius and jackass I have ever run into.  But don’t ever tell him that I said that.  He has no sense of humour ... everything is of equal import to him ... his toothache is as tragic as all the abuses of the capitalist system.”

* * * * *

On the way to the Great Lakes there are several people I must stop and see, and show myself to.

I stop at Topeka and visit Dad Rother ... a columnist on a newspaper there, of more than local fame ... an obviously honest-to-God bachelor ... he is afflicted with dandruff and his hair is almost gone.  He shows me photographs of Mackworth and of Uncle Bill Struthers, each autographed with accompanying homely sentiment.

I catch myself pretending an interest in Rother’s column, but really actuated by a desire to plant myself in his mind, and to have a notice in his paper about me ... anything that Dad Rother has in his column is copied in all the Kansas papers.

* * * * *

I drop in at a Leavenworth newspaper office, ostensibly to borrow the use of a typewriter.

But the stick or so put in the paper about my passing through Leavenworth pleases me.