Freckles

A one-handed orphan out of a Chicago asylum, not quite twenty, walks up to a lumber-company manager named McLean and asks for the job nobody wants: guarding a timber lease in the Limberlost swamp on foot, a seven-mile perimeter twice a day, against men who steal trees. He has no surname, no family and no reason to be trusted. McLean hires him anyway.

What the job turns into is possession. Freckles walks the same line until he knows every bird and tree on it, and the swamp everyone else finds hostile becomes the one place he belongs. The Duncans, company people, take him in, and Mrs. Duncan mothers him. A girl he calls the Angel, sixteen, turns up with a photographer known as the Bird Woman, working the swamp for specimens. Around that runs a straight melodrama: Black Jack Carter and Wessner after one valuable tree, the swamp itself killing Black Jack, and a falling tree that nearly finishes Freckles.

Then he wakes in a Chicago hospital and is revealed as Terence Maxwell O'More, with Irish nobility behind him, which quietly undoes the argument the preceding pages made, that a boy with one hand and no parents earns his standing. 1904 shows in that ending and in the villains, who are villainous and nothing else. What holds up is the line-walking: one person learning one square of ground until he can read it.