He awoke at an undesirable hour, convinced that another farmer was getting up.  The world was a mournful gray.  At the end of the corncrib a head was peering in.  Kenny turned his searchlight on it and had a moment of doubt.  The man was facially endowed for anything but virtue.  He was likely getting in—­not up.

“Hum!” said Kenny suspiciously.  “Are you coming in, my good friend, or are you going out?”

“I’m comin’ into my own corncrib, damn you!” shouted the farmer with unexpected malevolence, “and you’re going out!”

Kenny, resistant, knew instantly that he was not.  He sat up.

“The acoustics, Silas,” he said with cold disapproval, “are excellent.  Therefore—­”

It was impossible to finish.  The farmer, finding the name offensively rustic, roared into the corncrib that Kenny was a hobo without future hope of heaven.  He and the corncrib, it seemed, knew the genus well.  Indeed, he looked in the corncrib for hope-lorn hoboes with the same regularity that he looked in the hay for eggs.

He added some infuriated statistics about early rising.

“Come out of that!” he yelled.

Thoroughly out of patience Kenny flung the basket of corncobs at the farmer’s head.  An instant sputter of cobby profanity and the sound of a backward scramble gave him grim delight.

“When I leave any bed at this hour,” he called with terrible composure, “it will be because I haven’t a fist to explain a gentleman’s habits.  It’s of no earthly interest to me if fool farmers are getting up all over the dawn.  So are the roosters.  Let ’em!”

But the basket of cobs had been persuasive.  Kenny saw beyond in the dimness cobs and an empty basket.  The farmer was gone.  He lay down again in deep disgust, merely reaching a pleasant stage of drowsiness when the sound of voices near the corncrib roused him again.

This time he sat up with a jerk.

“Silas,” he thundered, “is that you again?”

It was.  It was moreover a Silas arrogant and cautious who peered in through the bars and stated profanely that he had a marshal with him, a marshal with a badge.

Kenny considered the new complication with a startled frown.  It either spelled retreat in a harrowing dawn with the marshal and Silas at his heels or a temporary sojourn in a village jail.  And Kenny detested any form of humiliation or discomfort.

“Silas,” he said wearily, “this is a rotten corncrib.  It’s sprained and spavined and Lord knows what.  It’s full of bugs and ants and spiders and dust and passe corncobs and it’s architecturally incorrect, but if you and the marshal will hike off somewhere else and brag about his badge, I’ll buy it.  I’ve got to sleep.”

Speechless, Silas stared through the slats and continued to stare until his stupefied face became a source of irritation.  Kenny lost his temper.  He raised his voice.