By the time McLean came again, leading Nelie and holding Freckles on her back, Mrs. Duncan was ready for business.  She and the Boss laid Freckles in the trough and poured on hot water until he squirmed.  They soaked and massaged him.  Then they drew off the hot water and closed his pores with cold.  Lastly they stretched him on the floor and chafed, rubbed, and kneaded him until he cried out for mercy.  As they rolled him into bed, his eyes dropped shut, but a little later they flared open.

“Mr. McLean,” he cried, “the tree!  Oh, do be looking after the tree!”

McLean bent over him.  “Which tree, Freckles?”

“I don’t know exact sir; but it’s on the east line, and the wire is fastened to it.  He bragged that you nailed it yourself, sir.  You’ll know it by the bark having been laid open to the grain somewhere low down.  Five hundred dollars he offered me—­to be—­selling you out—­sir!”

Freckles’ head rolled over and his eyes dropped shut.  McLean towered above the lad.  His bright hair waved on the pillow.  His face was swollen, and purple with bruises.  His left arm, with the hand battered almost out of shape, stretched beside him, and the right, with no hand at all, lay across a chest that was a mass of purple welts.  McLean’s mind traveled to the night, almost a year before, when he had engaged Freckles, a stranger.

The Boss bent, covering the hurt arm with one hand and laying the other with a caress on the boy’s forehead.  Freckles stirred at his touch, and whispered as softly as the swallows under the eaves:  “If you’re coming this way—­tomorrow—­be pleased to step over—­and we’ll repate—­the chorus softly!”

“Bless the gritty devil,” muttered McLean.

Then he went out and told Mrs. Duncan to keep close watch on Freckles, also to send Duncan to him at the swamp the minute he came home.  Following the trail to the line and back to the scent of the fight, the Boss entered Freckles’ study quietly, as if his spirit, keeping there, might be roused, and gazed around with astonished eyes.

How had the boy conceived it?  What a picture he had wrought in living colors!  He had the heart of a painter.  He had the soul of a poet.  The Boss stepped carefully over the velvet carpet to touch the walls of crisp verdure with gentle fingers.  He stood long beside the flower bed, and gazed at the banked wall of bright bloom as if he doubted its reality.

Where had Freckles ever found, and how had he transplanted such ferns?  As McLean turned from them he stopped suddenly.

He had reached the door of the cathedral.  That which Freckles had attempted would have been patent to anyone.  What had been in the heart of the shy, silent boy when he had found that long, dim stretch of forest, decorated its entrance, cleared and smoothed its aisle, and carpeted its altar?  What veriest work of God was in these mighty living pillars and the arched dome of green!  How similar to stained