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.

The trail led directly to a rocky hollow about a hundred yards from
the edge of the pasture--perhaps a hundred and fifty yards from the
doorway wherein Mrs. Griffis sat intently watching Melindy's progress.
The hollow was thick with young spruce and white birch, clustered
about a single tall