the Red Flower had been but he could not discover it. At last he found a little gleam of a dying coal in the ashes and he poked it with his paw. Wow! He had to grit his teeth tight to keep from yelping and disclosing his whereabouts. Then as he began gingerly backing away he stepped on another coal. This time he could not smother his yelp. He had had enough of the Red Flower for that night, so he went limping to the spring to cool his throbbing paws in the cold water. So this was where the Red Flower went when it finally disappeared. It hid in the ground and it could bite a fox's paw as badly as a thistle or a thorn.
The Spring that Redcoat was three years old was long remembered by the farmers who tilled the broad meadows and the uplands adjacent to Redcoat's mountain. It was called the year of the great drouth.
The fall rains had been very light. There had been little snow in the winter, and almost no rain in the Spring. The grass sprang up in the pasture only to die down of great thirst. Leaves that should have been bright
