Freckles counted the days.  This first one he could do little but test his wires, sing broken snatches, and dream; but before the week would bring her again he could do many things.  He would carry all his books to the swamp to show to her.  He would complete his flower bed, arrange every detail he had planned for his room, and make of it a bower fairies might envy.  He must devise a way to keep water cool.  He would ask Mrs. Duncan for a double lunch and an especially nice one the day of her next coming, so that if the Bird Woman happened to be late, the Angel might not suffer from thirst and hunger.  He would tell her to bring heavy leather leggings, so that he might take her on a trip around the trail.  She should make friends with all of his chickens and see their nests.

On the line he talked of her incessantly.

“You needn’t be thinking,” he said to the goldfinch, “that because I’m coming down this line alone day after day, it’s always to be so.  Some of these times you’ll be swinging on this wire, and you’ll see me coming, and you’ll swing, skip, and flirt yourself around, and chip up right spunky:  ‘See me?’ I’ll be saying ‘See you?  Oh, Lord!  See her!’ You’ll look, and there she’ll stand.  The sunshine won’t look gold any more, or the roses pink, or the sky blue, because she’ll be the pinkest, bluest, goldest thing of all.  You’ll be yelling yourself hoarse with the jealousy of her.  The sawbird will stretch his neck out of joint, and she’ll turn the heads of all the flowers.  Wherever she goes, I can go back afterward and see the things she’s seen, walk the path she’s walked, hear the grasses whispering over all she’s said; and if there’s a place too swampy for her bits of feet; Holy Mother!  Maybe—­maybe she’d be putting the beautiful arms of her around me neck and letting me carry her over!”

Freckles shivered as with a chill.  He sent the cudgel whirling skyward, dexterously caught it, and set it spinning.

“You damned presumptuous fool!” he cried.  “The thing for you to be thinking of would be to stretch in the muck for the feet of her to be walking over, and then you could hold yourself holy to be even of that service to her.

“Maybe she’ll be wanting the cup me blue-and-brown chickens raised their babies in.  Perhaps she’d like to stop at the pool and see me bullfrog that had the goodness to take on human speech to show me the way out of me trouble.  If there’s any feathers falling that day, why, it’s from the wings of me chickens—­it’s sure to be, for the only Angel outside the gates will be walking this timberline, and every step of the way I’ll be holding me breath and praying that she don’t unfold wings and sail away before the hungry eyes of me.”