“Where did it come from?  What is it?  Oh, how I wish I knew!” he kept repeating as he turned and studied the feather, with almost unseeing eyes, so intently was he thinking.

Before him spread a large, green pool, filled with rotting logs and leaves, bordered with delicate ferns and grasses among which lifted the creamy spikes of the arrow-head, the blue of water-hyacinth, and the delicate yellow of the jewel-flower.  As Freckles leaned, handling the feather and staring at it, then into the depths of the pool, he once more gave voice to his old query:  “I wonder what it is!”

Straight across from him, couched in the mosses of a soggy old log, a big green bullfrog, with palpitant throat and batting eyes, lifted his head and bellowed in answer.  “Fin’ DOUT!  Fin’ DOUT!”

“Wha—­what’s that?” stammered Freckles, almost too much bewildered to speak.  “I—­I know you are only a bullfrog, but, be jabbers, that sounded mightily like speech.  Wouldn’t you please to be saying it over?”

The bullfrog cuddled contentedly in the ooze.  Then suddenly he lifted his voice, and, as an imperative drumbeat, rolled it again:  “Fin’ DOUT!  Fin’ DOUT!  Fin DOUT!”

Freckles had the answer.  Something seemed to snap in his brain.  There was a wavering flame before his eyes.  Then his mind cleared.  His head lifted in a new poise, his shoulders squared, while his spine straightened.  The agony was over.  His soul floated free.  Freckles came into his birthright.

“Before God, I will!” He uttered the oath so impressively that the recording angel never winced as he posted it in the prayer column.

Freckles set his hat over the top of one of the locust posts used between trees to hold up the wire while he fastened the feather securely in the band.  Then he started down the line, talking to himself as men who have worked long alone always fall into the habit of doing.

“What a fool I have been!” he muttered.  “Of course that’s what I have to do!  There wouldn’t likely anybody be doing it for me.  Of course I can!  What am I a man for?  If I was a four-footed thing of the swamp, maybe I couldn’t; but a man can do anything if he’s the grit to work hard enough and stick at it, Mr. McLean is always saying, and here’s the way I am to do it.  He said, too, that there were people that knew everything in the swamp.  Of course they have written books!  The thing for me to be doing is to quit moping and be buying some.  Never bought a book in me life, or anything else of much account, for that matter.  Oh, ain’t I glad I didn’t waste me money!  I’ll surely be having enough to get a few.  Let me see.”

Freckles sat on a log, took his pencil and account-book, and figured on a back page.  He had walked the timber-line ten months.  His pay was thirty dollars a month, and his board cost him eight.  That left twenty-two dollars a month, and his clothing had cost him very little.  At the least he had two hundred dollars in the bank.  He drew a deep breath and smiled at the sky with satisfaction.