“Drat that fly!” exclaimed Jan, flicking with his whip. “Her’s at it again.”
CHAPTER XL
A GREAT FEAR
Kate was among the felled timber at Brimpts, skipping about the logs, stooping, then rising again, and withal singing merrily, when Jan and Rose, having put up the horse at Dart-meet, came up the valley to join her.
The peeled trunks lay white as bones on the surface of the moor, and a fresh and stimulating odour was exhaled from them. The bark was piled up in stacks at intervals. The whortleberry was flowering in the spring sun. The heather was still dead. Horns of ferns, brown, and curled like pastoral staves, stood up between the trunks.
After the first greetings had been exchanged, Rose asked Kitty, “What in the world are you doing here’bobbing about? In search of long cripples (vipers)?”
“No; I do not want them. I have started some basking in the hot sun, but they slip away at once and do no harm. I am counting the rings on the trees.”
“What for?”
“To learn their age.”
“Who cares how old the trees are?”
“I do; and thus one can find out in what years the trees grew fast, and which summers were wet and cold.”