blew up," he explained.
"What was that terrible noise we heard if it wasn't the moon bursting
into pieces?"

His mother didn't laugh. Instead she was quite solemn as she answered
Nimble's last question.

"That--" she said--"that was a gun that you heard. And the light that
you saw came from a lantern in a boat."

It was very hard for Nimble to believe what she told him.

"I thought I heard a piece of the moon whistle past my head," he went
on.

"A bullet!" his mother declared. As she spoke she moved a little
distance, to a spot where the trees were not so thick. And she raised
her nose towards the sky. "There!" she said. "There's the moon! It's
still up there where you've always seen it."

Nimble looked; and at last he knew that his mother had made no mistake.
But somehow he was more frightened than ever.

"Then--" he faltered--"then there must have been men in the boat--men
that turned the light upon the shore--and fired the gun!"

"They were men--yes!" said his mother. "And they were lawbreakers, too.
I hope the game warden will catch them at their tricks."

"What is a game warden?" Nimble asked her.

"He's a man," she answered. "He's a man that looks after all of us
forest folk and he's the best friend we've got.... Goodness, child!
Are you never going to stop asking questions?"

IX

A SPIKE HORN

Nimble didn't mind losing his spots, when he grew older. He had
something else that gave him much more pleasure than they ever had. He
had a new toy. Or to be exact, he had two new toys. And everywhere he
went he carried them with him.

He carried them on his head. And he couldn't have left them behind in
the woods even if he had wanted to--at least not until he had enjoyed
them for a whole season.

Of course you have already guessed that he had a pair of horns. They
were not very big. But neither was Nimble, for that matter. So they
suited him well. A little deer like him would have looked queer wearing
great branching horns such as his father owned.

Nimble's horns were merely two spikes which stuck up out of the top of
his head in a pert fashion.

It was a proud day for him when an old deer spoke to him and called him
"young Spike Horn." About that time the forest folk had begun to speak
of him as a "yearling." But there was something about "Spike Horn" that
sounded much more important.

Somehow there was a new crop of Spike Horns that summer--Nimble's second
summer. And every one of the