“I don’t quite know yet why I said it.

“He reminds me of Kenny somehow, save that Kenny’s more of a kid.  Both of them have an overdose of temperament and need a guardian with an iron hand.  And both have a way about them.

“Likely, after the wind was so pitifully out of his sails I could have dragged him up the hill home but if he has the notion of escape in his head, he’d go again.

“After a good deal of talk, friendly and otherwise, we took turns at the searchlight and wrote, each of us, a letter to his sister, I in a sense seeking to guarantee a respectability I do not look or feel since I am a truant myself with an indifferent amount of worldly goods.  However, I couldn’t help thinking how she’d worry and I promised to see him through.

“He’s asleep now under my blanket, catching his breath at intervals like a youngster who’s carried heartbreak into his sleep.  Poor kid!  I suppose he has.  I’ve promised him to be on the road before daybreak.

“He’ll have to work his way, but that, of course, will be good for him.  What pennies I have I’m obliged to count with a provident eye.  I’ve added to ’em from time to time along the road.  So far I’ve been intermittently a rotten ploughman, a fair fence-mender and a skillful whitewasher.  My amazing facility there I attribute to an apprenticeship in sunsets.  Once, during a period of rain, I lived in a corncrib for three days at an average of seven cents a day.  I’ve reduced my need of kitchen equipment to a can-opener.  A can of anything, I’ve discovered, provides food as well as a combination saucepan and coffee pot.

“I miss Kenny but I dare not write to him.  Garry, you know how it is.  Unless I brace myself with a lot of temper, he can twist me around his finger.  Even his letters are dangerous.  I can’t—­I won’t go back to sunsets.

“I often think these days of Kenny’s wood-fire tales of the shrine of Black Gartan where St. Columba was born.  Colomcille, old Kenny called him around the wood-fire, didn’t he?  Colomcille, Kenny said, having been in exile, knew the homesick pangs himself and therefore could give the good Irishmen who journeyed to his shrine strength to bear them.  I’m not in exile but there are times when I should be journeyin’ off, as Kenny says when the brogue is on him, to Black Gartan.  The curse of the Celt!  Kenny swears there’s no homesickness in the world like an Irishman’s passionate longing for home and kin.  Not that I long for the studio.  God forbid!  Kenny’s the symbol for it all.

“I’ve had some black minutes of remorse.  After all I had no earthly right to blaze out so about the shotgun.  And you can’t imagine how the statuette upset me.

“Say hello to Kenny for me, won’t you?  Tell him I’m brown and lean already, and that I like the fortunes of the road.”

It hurt of course that the letter was Garry’s.  Nettled at first, Kenny had half a mind not to read it.  Later, why it was Garry’s, gave him a sense of power.  Brian was homesick and repentant.  And with the fire of his temper spent he was always manageable.  Kenny cursed the miles between them.