"Yes, Granny, I love it, too!" assented Melindy in a preoccupied tone, "when I ain't too bothered to listen. Just now, I'm thinkin' about old 'Spotty' out there alone in the woods, an' maybe some hungry lynxes watchin' for her to lie down an' go to sleep. You know how hungry the bears will be this spring, too, Granny, after the snow layin' deep so late. I just couldn't sleep, if I thought old 'Spotty' was out there in them queer, grey, empty woods all night. In summer it's different, an' then the woods are like home."
"Well," said her grandmother, seeing that the girl was bent upon her purpose, "if ye're skeered for old 'Spotty,' ye'd better be a little mite skeered for yerself, Child! Take along the gun. Mebbe ye might see a chipmunk a-bitin' the old cow jest awful!"
Heedless of her grandmother's gibe, Melindy, who had a very practical brain under her fluffy light hair, picked up the handy little axe which she used for chopping kindling.
"No guns for me, Granny, you know," she retorted. "This 'ere little axe's good enough for me!" And swinging it over her shoulder she went lightly up the path, her head to one side, her small mouth puckered in a vain effort to learn to whistle.
What Melindy and her grandmother called the "Burnt Lands" was a strip of country running back for miles from the clearing. The fire had gone over it years before, cutting a sharply defined, gradually widening path through the forest, and leaving behind it only a few scattered rampikes, or tall, naked trunks bleached to whiteness by the storms of many winters. Here and there amid these desolate spaces, dense thickets of low growth had sprung up, making a secure hiding-place of every hollow where the soil had not had all the life scorched out of it.
Having crossed the pasture, Melindy presently detected those faint indications of a trail which the uninitiated eye finds it so impossible to see. Slight bendings and bruises of the blueberry and laurel scrub caught her notice. Then she found, in a bare spot, the unmistakable print of a cow's hoof. The trail was now quite clear to her; and it was clearly that of old "Spotty." Intent upon her quest she hurried on, heedless of the tender colours changing in the sky above her head, of the first swallows flitting and twittering across it, of the keen yet delicate fragrance escaping from every sap-swollen bud, and of the sweetly persuasive piping of the frogs from the water meadow. She had no thought at that moment but to find the truant cow and get her safely stabled before dark.