“We have alarmed you, Desborough,” said the younger, as they both advanced leisurely to the beach.  “Do you apprehend danger from our presence?”

A keen searching glance flashed from the ferocious eye of the Yankee.  It was but momentary.  Quitting his firm grasp of the knife, he suffered his limbs to relax their tension, and aiming at carelessness, observed, with a smile, that was tenfold more hideous from its being forced: 

“Well now, I guess, who would have expected to see two officers so fur away from the fort at this early hour of the mornin’.”

“Ah,” said the taller of the two, availing himself of the first opening to a pun which had been afforded, “we are merely out on a shooting excursion.”

Desborough gazed doubtingly on the speaker—­“Strange sort of a dress that for shootin’ I guess—­them cloaks most be a great tanglement in the bushes.”

“They serve to keep our arms warm,” continued Middlemore, perpetrating another of his execrables.

“To keep your arms warm! well sure-Ly, if that arn’t droll.  It may be some use to keep the primins dry, I reckon; but I can’t see the good of keepin’ the fowlin’ pieces warm.  Have you met any game yet, officers.  I expect as how I can pint you out a purty spry place for pattridges and sich like.”

“Thank you, my good fellow; but we have appointed to meet our game here.”

The dry manner in which this was observed had a visible effect on the settler.  He glanced an eye of suspicion around, to see if others than the two officers were in view, and it was not without effort that he assumed an air of unconcern, as he replied: 

“Well I expect I have been many a long year a hunter, as well as other things, and yet, dang me if I ever calculated the game would come to me.  It always costs me a purty good chase in the woods.”

“How the fellow beats about the bush, to find what game we are driving at,” observed Middlemore, in an under tone, to his companion.

“Let the Yankee alone for that,” returned he, whom our readers have doubtless recognized for Henry Grantham; “I will match his cunning against your punning any day.”

“The truth is, he is fishing to discover our motive for being here, and to find out if we are in any way connected with the disappearance of his rifles.”

During this conversation apart, the Yankee had carelessly approached his canoe, and was affecting to make some alteration in the disposition of the sail.  The officers, the younger especially, keeping a sharp look out upon his movements, followed at some little distance, until they, at length, stood on the extreme verge of the sands.  Their near approach seemed to render Desborough impatient: 

“I expect, officers,” he said, with a hastiness that, at any other moment, would have called down immediate reproof, if not chastisement, “you will only be losin’ time here for nothin’—­About a mile beyond Hartley’s there’ll be plenty of pattridges at this hour, and I am jist goin’ to start myself for a little shootin’ in the Sandusky river.”