Brandishing the dishrag like a weapon she started after him.

“They shitfire,” he cried.

He went fulltilt down the hall in a rising crescendo of sound from his tennis shoes on the polished floor. He went out the hall door and through the screened-in porch without moderating his pace. He felt the radio slip from his hands and tumble, he grasped desperately for the cord, felt the radio wedge itself between door and jamb. “Broke my radio,” the woman shrieked and he redoubled his efforts. He went through the hedge without slackening, bent over and his feet pumping madly. Ascending the bank he was running almost parallel with the ground. He crossed the blacktop swearing at a carload of startled faces that almost ran him over and went into the rainglutted bracken toward the hillside where the dark spruce beckoned.

He went into the woods running in silence save the ragged tear of his breathing and the rain in the trees. When at length he ceased he fell to earth and lay gasping for breath. For some time he lay inert and then cautiously rose to a crouch and strained for any noises of pursuit. All there was the sound of raincrows jeering at him from the sanctity of the treetops.

He looked ruefully at his fist, still clutching the plug and four or five feet of electric wire. He threw it disgustedly from him and sat for a time on a stump, still wearing the hat. A dark, inklike stain was seeping down his temples. He just sat listening to the wild hammering of his heart slowly begin to subside.

Monday Winer loaded the manure spreader and listened to the rain beat on the tarpaper roofing, for the rain to slacken so they could unload it, but it did not. In the middle of the morning Weiss came down to the chickenhouse. Herman Weiss was a short, thick little man with crinkly black hair shot through with gray. Winter and summer he wore a pith helmet and clean-pressed khakis and walking boots as if perpetually ready to join a safari should the opportunity arise. Folks said he was impossible to get along with. Hardly anyone would work for him but Winer thought him not a bad employer. Weiss had a clipped, brusque way of talking that folks didn’t take kindly to and no one knew where he had come from. They said he was a rich Jew, a hunky, and Italian. He was a white slaver, or a doperunner, or a retired motion-picture photographer, and his own tales were so convoluted and absurd that perhaps he no longer knew himself.

Winer didn’t care who he was. To Winer he was just a poultry farmer. He had three enormous chickenhouses and each housed six thousand chickens. Winer fed them twice a day, watered them morning and night. When they were nine weeks old Weiss hired a few extra hands and the chickens were caught and crated on a trailer truck and hauled away. The houses were cleaned out, a new crop started.

All Winer knew was that he halfliked Weiss. Weiss had a wry, ironic amiability that amused Winer. He did get excited. He was full of stories about far places and easy women and huge amounts and with the rain drumming on the roof, and Winer a willing audience, he told of them again.

He had a thousand tales to tell and perhaps one or two of them were even true. He was a consort of presidents and kings.