when he left, guy vanton had in his pocket the sum of $350. with part of this he bought a railway ticket to san francisco. he boarded the train, and as it was evening, dined, retreated to the club car, smoked and read for a couple of hours, and then went to his compartment.

the main thing was plainly to hit upon something to do that would make a little money, enough for his necessities, while he made acquaintance with the world, the real world, the world outside himself, outside blue port, outside his peculiar past.

it had taken him a long time to realize that what he needed, what he must have if life were to become worth living, was a touchstone in the shape of some direct[249] experience, real and rough—something that would not be eaten away by the acid of his thoughts nor carven into gargoyles and grotesques, the chisellings of memory.

guy vanton was a poet. it was natural that he should recall the lives and adventures of other poets, and in the performance of vachel lindsay he found an example of what he sought. lindsay had gone about the country with scrip and wallet preaching a gospel, the gospel of beauty, exchanging his poems, printed on slips of paper, for food and lodging. in the colorado ranges, along southern roads to the doors of mountaineers’ cabins, by kansas wheatfields, and over stretches of prairie, from farmhouse to farmhouse lindsay had travelled—chanting, reading, conversing, discoursing—and these adventures he had afterward chronicled. guy had no armful of poems to read in exchange for food and a bed; he was certainly not the possessor of a gospel that people would stop to hear. he could not emulate lindsay and the idea of doing it, to give him credit, never entered his head. what struck him was the fact that in america, at any rate, there was still room for a pioneer. americans find something zestful and admirable in the spectacle of a man breaking a new path.