Mr. Holman, on trading bent, had taken his scow to Belpre, while his wife watched the flatboat and Doby went hunting for fresh meat in the safety of the Haunted Isle. It was secure from the ordinary dangers of the river, for Indians and renegades alike avoided this place. They feared the ghost of a beautiful scarlet-cloaked lady, the ghost of a magnificent velvet-clad gentleman, and the ghosts of liveried servants wandering there. Once upon a time the common people of Belpre and the soldiery of her army post would scull across the river to catch envious glimpses of the island's house of brick and stone, so different from their own wooden cabins, and to stare open-mouthed at fine folk arrayed in satins and laces, living so elegantly just beyond the frontier's workaday world. Then on an evil day the gallant family on the island had been arrested and marched away and exiled as criminals. The house had been burned to warn other offenders against the Republic. And ever since, on chill and foggy days, when the mists hung over the river, ghosts walked in the ruins of the splendid mansion hidden among the flowering trees of the Fairy Isle. They drifted through the desolation where once sweet gardens bloomed. They danced with the wind in weird couples on the forsaken lawns. And when the broken moonlight came it showed them huddled in gray, fantastic groups along the shore. The shuddering boatmen hugged the opposite bank and turned away their faces that they might not see too plainly the beckoning fingers of vapor, the foggy hair, and the trailing robes of cloud, so unreal, so full of romance, and so disquieting to all who knew the story of this place. Doby was not to be startled by ghosts; at least he said he wasn't. Though ghosts and goblins were merely names to him, he liked the idea of a Fairy Isle. Few boys could carry the heavy guns of that day for any distance. Doby did not try to do so. His plan was to get what game he could with snare and knife. He was bidden to keep within running distance of the boat, and he set rabbit-traps in the brier patches. From the briers he had sighted the buck. It was all aquiver, snorting and twitching its ears. Doby hid behind a buckeye and softly shinned into the first crotch lest the restless beast should turn and charge in his direction. "I'd like to know what is the matter with the buck," thought Doby. "It is watching something that makes it half curious and half afraid." The boy stared into the glen before him until his eyes became accustomed to the shadows--until he saw what the buck saw. When he did see he almost fell out of the tree with astonishment. He looked again. He shut his eyes; he opened them; stared some more; he blinked; then he gazed fixedly. "No wonder the buck is nervous," gasped Doby. "I'm s'prised myself," and still he looked and could not believe that he saw what he really did see. For there on a log, in the shade of an elm, sat a gnome--a big gnome.