"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." "Then, I presume," said Grantham, with a smile, "you are well provided with silver bullets, Desborough--for, in the hurry of departure, you seem likely to forget the only medium through which leaden ones can be made available: not a rifle or a shot-gun do I see." The Yankee fixed his eye for a moment, with a penetrating expression, on the youth, as if he would have sought a meaning deeper than the words implied. His reading seemed to satisfy him that all was right. "What," he observed, with a leer, half cunning half insolent, "if I have hid my rifle near the Sandusky swamp, the last time I hunted there." "In that case," observed the laughing Middlemore, to whom the opportunity was irresistible, "you are going out on a WILD GOOSE CHASE, indeed. Your prospects of a good hunt, as you call it, cannot be said to be SURE AS A GUN, for in regard to the latter, you may depend some one has discovered and RIFLED it before this."