"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.