Horrified Johnny felt that death was coming in that brutal downward cut of hoof. Instantly, desperately, he flung his spade at the deer. The metal clanged on its antlers. The deer turned aside. Doby vaulted to the top of the boat's barricade, yelling for Johnny to follow him. Johnny had seized the other spade and had thrown it in his own defense. It hit the deer on the flank. Doby and his mother shrieked like mad. Startled and confused by the attack and the noise, the buck took flight. Whirling about wildly, it chose the one dangerous direction--straight away, over the sunny open space where the digging had been done. Its forelegs went down in one hole, its head seemed to light in another, and the flying brute turned a complete somersault. Leaves and grass and dirt filled the air. Doby's screams redoubled. Johnny gained the boat's wall. He knew they were out of danger's reach, should the buck turn back to rend them, for the baggage stockade would protect them. But he was shaken by their peril. While getting his breath and calming Doby and his mother, he watched uneasily for the next movement of the irate beast. After many minutes of waiting he knew that it would never move again. Its neck was broken. Then Johnny Appleseed leaned his bark-colored form back against the woodsy setting of the leaf-covered boat wall, crossed his feet, set his arms akimbo--the kindest gnome who ever lived, the good spirit of the Fairy Isle, the best-known and most-beloved character on the frontier--and murmured to Doby: "Now that the deer has done the killing himself, you might as well have some fresh venison to eat before we go on with our work." III GOBBLE! GOBBLE! _Hard Times on the French Grant_ "IT is, 'Doby, do this,' and, 'Doby, do that,' from morning to night. I've worked and worked and wor-r-rked," groaned Obadiah Holman, "'til both of my heels are stone-bruised and I have a rag on every toe." The expression of his face showed that he held strong feelings on the subject of child labor and that those feelings were all against it. Chore-boys did not get together and organize themselves in the olden days. Protests against overtime jobs received so little attention that Doby grumbled: "No use to sputter. S'pose I'll have to keep right on quarryin'." He had dropped his task to glance about the town of Gallipolis. It was a lean and wizened, yet quaint and romantic settlement of Old World Frenchmen. The log cabins were the same cubes of houses that pioneers were everywhere building. But the town had a different air from bustling Pittsburg or dignified Marietta. He examined one home after another. In the tiny holes of windows hung beribboned curtains of white. Never before had he seen frilled curtains; never before a curtain in a cabin window where there was neither sash nor glass.