Keen, alert, intensely delighted, Adam began to thrive. Chuckling he slipped back to his normal state of debility. Finding in the stress of his victim's tempestuous surrender that he forgot the megaphone, he perversely began again to have trouble with his ears.
Kenny and his megaphone returned to the fray.
Thus September came, warm and golden. Haze, soft and indistinct lay in the valley and on the hills. Summer lingered in the garden but on the ridge the nights were cool and in the swamplands, Hughie said, already the maples were coloring with a hint of colder weather. Here and there on birch and poplar fluttered a yellowing leaf.
And Donald had not written.
Kenny, as the days slipped by, faced a new and tragic problem. October was at hand. Work beckoned with urgent hand. If he did not go soon somebody would have to balance up his check book for him and tell him how long he could live without working. Brian, dear lad, had been a jewel at figures.
But how could he work with the thought of the winter wind and Joan tormenting him? And the snow-bound cabin in the pines? And the ferry and the ladder of icy vine? And Adam Craig?
He could not, would not go! And where in the name of all lunatics was Brian? Life in the studio without him would be impossible. What did he intend to do? Could he, Kenny, settle down to work with the problem of his penitential quest for his son still unsettled?
And why in the name of the Sacred Question-mark, was his life a string of questions!
In the end he fled from Adam's tongue. So he told himself. In reality panic plunged him into action. His summer was ending. His madness was not. And for that alarming fact he blamed Brian.
"I was worried," he remembered irritably, "and just in the mood to make a colossal fool of myself. And I have!"