He awoke to a subdued noise of voices in the barn below and wondered disapprovingly if the farmer was just getting home.  It appeared that he was getting up.  Horribly depressed and sorry for him, Kenny went to sleep again.  When he awoke the sun was laughing iridescently from meadow trails of rain.  The fragrance of wet pine came in through the barn window.  The lilac in the garden was ready to flower.  Kenny longed to be off.  Nevertheless he breakfasted at some length in the farm kitchen and paid so handsomely in coin and grace that there was talk of him for days.

Already the sun was warm.  It lay in a blanket of bright gold everywhere.  Cloud shadows deepened a meadow here and there to coolness.  The air was tonic, deliriously wine-sweet and heady.  Kenny thought of honey and bees and clover and tramped and brooded.

The sun he hoped would presently abate its unromantic fervor.  Meantime he must think.  Penance or the tribute of impatience?  Which should it be?

It remained for an abandoned corncrib to plunge him into his original fever of inspiration and remorse.  Brian had lived in a corncrib for seven cents a day.  Brian had ploughed and Brian had mended fences.  He had even dabbled in whitewash.  No, by the powers that be!  It was a thing for penance after all.  Always at the farmhouse the trail would be waiting.  What if he arrived there and the runaway had failed to write?  What would he do then?

Rags and blisters and a bit of corncrib penance for himself!  It was the only way.  It would give his need of Brian invincible weight.

Kenny climbed a fence and entered the corncrib by a flight of rickety steps.  It was something of a wreck and unspeakably dusty.  Sneezing violently he sat down and ate his supper of bread and cheese with profound discontent.  Each tasted monotonously of the other.  Instead of two articles of diet he appeared to have something heterogeneously one in flavor.  The smell of cheese he hoped wouldn’t attract rats and remembered vaguely that a corncrib was architecturally immune from rodents.  Well, no rat with discrimination would select a corncrib abode anyway.  He’d fall through the floor slats.

Oppressed by the general air of slatty insecurity and the sight of a basket of ancient cobs in one corner, Kenny wished passionately that he hadn’t always hated spiders, killed one with a shudder and pensively watched the sunset through the corncrib bars.  It made him think of flamingoes in flight.  One saw that best in India, flocks and flocks of them in the sky like an exquisite flame of clouds.  Ah, India!  No, on second thought he’d rather he in Iceland.

It sounded cooler.

When the moon etched silver bars upon the corncrib floor he went to bed, regretting the preposterous fanlike spread of the corncrib walls.  Nothing walled should be smaller at the floor than it was at the top.  It gave one a hopeless feeling of constriction.  The feeling colored his dreams.  Kenny found himself hazily adrift in an inquisitorial corncrib made of bars of moon-plated silver.  They pressed in upon him ever tighter and tighter until with a mighty sweep of his arms he burst them all asunder.