Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue in the Big Woods Part 4

The two children started down the road toward the camp, and as they did so they heard a crackling in the bushes on the side of a hill that led up from the road.

"Oh, here comes that milk dog back again!" cried Sue, and she snuggled up close against her brother, though the sinking sun was still s.h.i.+ning across the highway.

"I won't let him hurt you," said Bunny. "Wait until I get a stone or a stick."

"Oh, you mustn't do anything to strange dogs!" cried the little girl.

"If you do they might jump at you and bite you. Just don't notice him or speak to him, and he'll think we're--we're stylish, and he'll pa.s.s right by."

"Oh well, if you want me to do _that_ way," said Bunny, looking up toward the place the sound came from, "why I will, only----"

He stopped speaking suddenly, and pointed up the hill. Sue looked in the same direction. They saw coming toward them, not a dog, but an old man, dressed in rather ragged clothes. He looked like what the children called a tramp, though since they had arrived at the camp they had come to know that not all persons who wore ragged clothes were tramps. Some of the farmers and their helpers wore their raggedest garments to work in the dirt of the fields.

This man might be a farmer. He had long white hair that hung down under the brim of his black hat, and though he did not have such a nice face as did the children's father, or their Uncle Tad, still they were not afraid of him.

"Going after milk, little ones?" asked the old man, and his voice was not unpleasant.

"No, sir; we've just been," said Bunny.

"Well, I'm afraid you'll spill your milk if you swing your pail that way," went on the old man, for Bunny was moving the pail to and fro, with wide swings of his arms.

"It would spill, if there was any in the pail," said Sue.

"But there isn't," added Bunny.

"It's spilled already and we don't know where to get any more,"

explained Sue.

"It wasn't _'zactly_ spilled," Bunny added, for he and Sue always tried to speak the exact truth. "A dog drank it up."

"While we were chasin' a squirrel," added his sister.

"But I would have driven him away if I'd seen him in time," Bunny declared positively. "He put his nose right in the pail and licked up all the milk, and what he didn't eat he spilled and then he ran away."

"And the lady at the farmhouse hasn't any more milk," Sue explained.

"And there isn't any at the camp and----"

"Mother can't make the pudding," finished Bunny.

"Oh dear!" wailed Sue.

"My, you have a lot of troubles!" said the ragged man. "But if you'll come with me maybe I can help you."

"Where do you want us to come?" asked Bunny, remembering that his mother had told him never to go anywhere with strangers, and never to let Sue go, either.

"If you'll come up to my little cabin in the woods I can let you have some milk," said the ragged man. "I keep a cow, and I have more milk than I can use or sell. It isn't far. Come with me," and he held out his hands to the children.

CHAPTER IV

A NOISE AT NIGHT

Bunny Brown and his sister Sue were not sure whether or not they should go with the old man. They remembered what their mother had said to them about walking off with strangers, and they hung back.

But when Bunny looked at the empty milk pail and remembered that there was no milk in camp for supper, and none with which his mother could make the pudding he and his sister liked so much, he made up his mind it would be all right to go to the little cabin in the woods.

"Come on," urged the old man.

"Do you sell milk?" asked Sue.

"Oh, yes, little girl. Though my cow with the crumpled horn does not give such a lot of milk, there is more than I use. I sell what I can, but even then I have some left over. I have plenty to sell to you."

"We only want a quart," said Bunny. "That's all we have money for.

Mother gave us some extra pennies when we went for milk to the farmhouse, but we have only six cents left. Will that buy a quart of milk?"

"It will here in the woods and the country," answered the old man, "but it wouldn't in the city. However, my crumpled-horn cow's milk is only six cents a quart."

"Has your cow really got a crumpled horn?" asked Sue eagerly, for she loved queer things.

"Yes, she has a crumpled horn, but she isn't the one that jumped over the moon," said the old man with a smile.

The children liked him better after that, though when Bunny found a chance to whisper to his sister as they walked through the woods, along the path and behind the old man, the little boy said:

"I guess he means to be kind, but he's kind of _funny_, isn't he?"

"A little bit," answered Sue.

The old man walked on ahead, the children, hand in hand, following, and the bushes clinked against the empty tin pail that Bunny carried.

"Here you are," said the old man, as he turned on the path, and before them Bunny and his sister saw a log cabin. Near it was a shed, and as the children stopped and looked, from the shed came a long, low "Moo!"

"Oh, is that the crumpled-horn cow?" asked Sue.

"Yes," answered the old man. "I'll get some of her milk for you. I keep it in a pail down in the spring, so it will be cool. Let me take your pail and I'll fill it for you while you go to see the cow. She is gentle and won't hurt you."

Letting the old man take the pail, Bunny and Sue went to look at the cow. The door of the shed was in two parts, and the children opened the upper half.

"Moo!" called the cow as she stuck out her head.

"Oh, see, one of her horns _is_ crumpled!" cried Bunny.

"Let's wait, and _maybe_ she'll jump over the moon," suggested Sue, who remembered the nursery rhyme of "Hey-diddle-diddle."

But though the children remained standing near the cow shed for two or three minutes, the cow, one of whose horns was twisted, or crumpled, made no effort to jump out of her stable and leap over the moon.

Bunny and Sue were not afraid of cows, especially when they were kept in a stable, so they were soon rubbing the head of the ragged man's bossy.