He thrashed Silas into a mood of craven apology and left him with his head in his hands.  To Kenny’s disgusted glance he was like the Irish Grogach of folk lore, who tumbles around among the hills with a good deal of head and a lax body without much hint of bones.  Well, Brian had thrashed somebody too.  There were times when it couldn’t be helped.  And Brian had lived in a corncrib at seven cents a day.  Kenny whipped out his notebook.

“One day in a corncrib:”  he wrote grimly.  “Twenty-five dollars!”

Brian and he were maintaining their customary scale of contrast.

The highway he abandoned almost at once and struck off through the forest, reflecting with a frown that Silas would doubtless look up the marshal and demand a warrant for his arrest.  Fate was at his heels again obsessed by a mania for disturbing the peace of mind he craved.  He might even be hunted by a village posse.  And bloodhounds!  The adventurous side of this rather pleased him.  It simply narrowed down to this—­it behooved him to loiter no longer in the green world of spring.  Penance or no penance he must now try penitential speed.  How on earth had he ever managed to blunder into a country all trees and no rails?

He found a druid of a brook chanting paganly to trees and moss.  Ordinarily Kenny would have found its music and its shadows infinitely poetic.  Now, wretchedly out of sorts, he plunged his face and hands into a shady pool with a sigh of vast materialistic content, longed to linger and cursed the village posse he fancied at his heels.  The first romance of his flight from justice was waning rapidly.  With a groan he plunged on, horribly full of aches and hunger.  Always now he would understand the Gaelic legend of Far Goila, the gaunt Man of Hunger who goes touring up and down the land in times of famine bringing luck to those who feed him.  Even his taste for cheese was returning.  The holocaust of the morning filled him with bitter regret.  As for his feet, they felt shapeless and huge and fungus-like and full of burning needles.  Oh, for the sandals of power of Fergus Mac Roigh!

At noon in utter desperation he bought a mule.

The mule brayed temptation at him from the fence of a forest shanty.  A negress stood in the doorway.  Kenny, in no mood for haggling, recklessly offered what he thought the mule was worth.  It looked incredibly sturdy.  His voice evoked a ragged husband who came up out of a cellar doorway eating a dwarfed banana.  The sight of the banana made Kenny dizzy with emotion.

He demanded one at any price and bought six, ate them one after the other without the pretense of a halt and moodily shied the last skin at a sparrow, realizing then with a shock that the negro had already untied the mule from the picket fence.  The precipitancy of it all made him slightly uncomfortable.  Either the negro was too lazy to bargain or the offer was out of all proportion to the mule’s repute.  Kenny asked.