Lassie came home.

But TV’s canine star, unlike Molly, wasn’t an addled, geriatric spaniel who tried to eat rocks to survive.

Nonetheless, there is a happy ending to the story of Molly, a 13-year-old deaf cocker spaniel who wandered away from home in west Lawrence and nearly died before finding new owners months later.

The dog’s adventure began in February, when she strayed from her home on Stratford Road after a repairman left the door open. Her owners, Jeff Tryon and his family, searched for her but gave up after several weeks of fruitless effort.

No one really knows what happened to Molly or how she got by for the next four months. But then the dog was discovered by Laura Swan, a 22-year-old Kansas University student who also lives on Stratford Road. She found Molly walking at the road’s intersection with Crestline Road. The cocker spaniel was 10 pounds lighter and too weak to bark, said Swan’s father, Bob, who nicknamed the dog “Bones.”

The dog had no ID collar, and the Lawrence Humane Society had no recent report of such a dog missing. So, the Swans decided to take in the dog and nurse her back to health.

They had no idea the dog’s owners were living about 200 feet away.

A member of the Tryon family even spotted Laura walking the dog one day but didn’t think anything of it, Bob Swan said, apparently because of Molly’s altered appearance.

In early August, after the dog’s health had improved, Bob Swan took her to the Humane Society and found she had an identifying chip implanted below her skin. He learned the dog’s name was Molly and that she belonged to the Tryons. But by then, the Tryons had moved to North Carolina.

When he reached them by phone, they were thrilled to hear Molly was alive, Swan said.

Molly, a 13-year-old cocker spaniel, was missing for four months this year before ending up at the Lawrence Humane Society. Today she lives with Pam Mayfield, Lawrence, and is still recovering from injuries suffered during her disappearance. Molly is pictured Friday in Mayfield's back yard.

But they couldn’t take her back. They had bought a new puppy for their 7-year-old daughter, and they lived in a development that didn’t allow them to have any more pets.

Soon, Swan and his daughter had a change in circumstances that meant they couldn’t look after “Bones” anymore, either. They gave her to the Humane Society, and in an effort to help find a family for the dog, Bob Swan wrote and distributed a flier around town with the title “Good Golly, It’s Molly! The Amazing Saga of an Aging Cocker Spaniel.”

Stefanie Stuever, a 12-year-old who volunteers at the Humane Society, saw the flier and brought it to her next-door neighbor, Pam Mayfield, whose 16-year-old cocker spaniel, Lucy, had died a year and a half ago.

“Stefanie came back about 10 minutes later to make sure I wasn’t crying, and I said, ‘I’ll take her,'” said Mayfield, also a volunteer for the Humane Society, who lives on Wimbledon Circle in west Lawrence.

On Thursday, the dog moved in with Mayfield and her husband, Larry. One of the first things they plan to do is repair Molly’s cracked teeth, which Pam Mayfield thinks the dog broke by eating rocks in an effort to survive on the street.

Today, Molly has a foam bed and two quilts to sleep on, as well as a beaded collar that Pam Mayfield originally made for Lucy.

“This is a little blond cocker just like Lucy was, and I knew I could take care of her in the last years of her life,” she said. “I just knew that with what she’d been through, she deserved all the love she could possibly get.”