all asunder.

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