As Barefoot one day, in the early spring, met him returning from the forest, he said, taking the axe from his shoulder,—
“Where do you think this is going?”
“Into the wood,” answered his sister; “but it cannot go alone—you must send it there.”
“You are right. But it is going to its brother; one will strike above, and the other beneath, and then there will be a crashing of trees like the sound of a loaded cannon; you will not hear it—unless you choose it. But none in this place will hear it.”
“I do not understand one word,” said Barefoot. “I am too old to guess riddles; speak plainly.”
“Yes, I am going to our uncle in America.”
“What—to-day?” said Barefoot, jokingly. “Do you know what Martin, the mason’s son, called to his mother? ‘Mother, throw me a clean shirt out of the window, for I am going to walk to America.’ Those who would fly away so easily, stay where they are.”
“We shall see how long I stay here,” said Dami, and turned without another word into the coal-burner’s house.
Barefoot at first would have made herself merry over Dami’s strange plan, but it would not succeed. She felt that there was something serious in it. At night, when all in the house were in bed, she hastened to her brother in the forest, and declared to him, once for all, “that she could not go with him.”
She thought thus to turn him from his plan, but he answered shortly,—