“Why, my father made his cut-down square. There were just five acres.”
“What is a cut-down?” asked Rollo.
“The piece where he cut down the trees,” said Dorothy, “to make a clearing. First they fall the trees, and then it is called a cut-down. They let the trees lie all summer, until they get perfectly dry, and then they set them on fire, and burn them. When my father had got his five-acre piece cleared, he built a log-house upon it, and there we lived. The opening was full of stumps, and the woods were all around it, the stems of the trees standing up thick and close together, like a wall. We could not see out of the opening any where, except a little way down the road.”
“And did you live there all alone?” asked Rollo.
“O, no,” said Dorothy; “there were my father and mother, and my brother; only my father and brother used to be away almost all the time, at work.”
“Well,” said Rollo, “tell me about the fire.”
“Why, the first that we knew of it, was, that I saw one day a great white smoke rolling up over the tops of the trees, to the north of our house. I asked my mother to come and look at it, and she did. She said she guessed that John Williams was burning off his piece.”
“Who was John Williams?” asked Rollo.
“Why, he was one of our neighbors. He lived about two miles off, and had been falling a piece of woods that spring, for a crop of wheat.
“I watched the smoke for some time,” continued Dorothy, “and at length it grew smaller and smaller, and finally I could see nothing but a haze. But, that night, I went out, about nine o’clock, to see if my chickens were all safe,—for there were some foxes about at that time,—and I saw that the sky looked red in that direction; so I knew that the fire had not all gone out.”