"Well now, you officers are playing a purty considerable spry trick--it's a good lark, I calculate--but you know, as the saying is, enough's as good as a feast. Do tell me, Mr. Grantham," and his discordant voice became more offensive in its effort at a tone of entreaty, "do tell me where you've hid my small bore--you little think," he concluded, with an emphasis then unnoticed by the officers, but subsequently remembered to have been perfectly ferocious, "what reason I have to vally it." "We never descend to larks of the kind," coolly observed Grantham; "but as you say you value your rifle, it shall be restored to you on one condition." "And what may that be?" asked the settler, somewhat startled at the serious manner of the officer. "That you show us what your canoe is freighted with. Here in the bows I mean." "Why," rejoined the Yankee quickly, but as if without design, intercepting the officers' nearer approach, "that bag, I calculate, contains my provisions, and these here blankets that you see, peepin' like from under the sail, are what I makes my bed of while out huntin'." "And are you quite certain there is nothing under those blankets?--nay do not protest--you cannot answer for what may have occurred while your back was turned, on your way to the hut for the rifle." "By hell," exclaimed the settler, blusteringly, "were any man to tell me, Jeremiah Desborough, there was any thin' beside them blankets in the canoe, I would lick him into a jelly, even though he could whip his own weight in wild cats." "So is it? Now then, Jeremiah Desborough, although I have never yet tried to whip my own weight in wild cats, I tell you there is something more than those blankets; and what is more, I insist upon seeing what that something is." The settler stood confounded. His eye rolled rapidly from one to the other of the officers at the boldness and determination of this language. Singly, he could hare crushed Henry Grantham in his gripe, even as one of the bears of the forest, near the outskirt of which they stood; but there were two, and while attacking the one, he was sure of being assailed by the other; nay, what was worse, the neighborhood might be alarmed. Moreover, although they had kept their cloaks carefully wrapped around their persons, there could be little doubt that both officers were armed, not, as they had originally given him to understand, with fowling pieces, but with (at the present close quarters at least) far more efficient weapons--pistols. He was relieved from his embarrassment by Middlemore exclaiming: "Nay, do not press the poor devil, Grantham; I dare say the story of his hunting is all a hum, and that the fact is, he is merely going to earn an honest penny in one of his free commercial speculations--a little contraband," pointing with his finger to the bows, "is it not Desborough?"