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Updated: June 14, 2025
The wolf howls no longer; the swan and the blue crane are silent; the night-hawk has filled his ravenous maw, and perches on the mountain pine; the fire-flies disappear, chased by the colder hours; and the horses, having eaten what grew within their reach, stand in lounging attitudes, asleep. A grey light begins to steal into the valley. It flickers along the white cliffs of the quartz mountain.
Night-Hawk," said he, speaking aloud, "I will leave my game with you that you may feast on it." He then took up his bundle and departed. After walking some time he came to another tree, on which he suspended his bundle as before, and went in search of game.
Occasionally, during the winter, a herring-gull from the harbor swims into this bit of smoky blue; frequently a pigeon, sometimes a flock, sails past; and in the summer dusk, after the swallows quit it, a city-haunting night-hawk climbs out of the forest of chimney-pots, up, up above the smoke for his booming roofward swoop.
The sun, like an orb of fire, is sinking in a vast sea of gold through which a few fleecy clouds of a delicate rose color are slowly drifting. The shadowy forms of the night-hawk are plainly seen as they sweep the heavens for their evening meal of insects.
They read that sort of thing as fast as a night-hawk will whir. 'Tis all learning there nothing but learning, except religion. And that's learning too, for I never could understand it. Yes, 'tis a serious-minded place. Not but there's wenches in the streets o' nights... You know, I suppose, that they raise pa'sons there like radishes in a bed?
I was twenty-five on the night this tale begins twenty-five year old, and a proper night-hawk of a chap, as loved the hours of darkness and gloried in the shedding of blood. Sport was in my veins, so to say, handed down from father to son, for my grandfather had been a gamekeeper, and my father a water-bailiff, and my uncle my father's brother a huntsman.
But the legal phrases in the paper left by Dill and signed by the cook and night-hawk as witnesses gave him a heavy sense of responsibility that everything should be settled exactly right. So now he went over the figures slowly, adding them from the top down and from the bottom up, to make sure he had the totals correct. He wished they were wrong; they might then be not quite so depressing.
At other times a perfect stillness reigned, so that he could distinctly hear the tiny hum of the mosquito; and then, all at once, would fall upon his ear the melancholy wailing of the night-hawk the "alma perdida," or "lost soul" for such is the poetical and fanciful name given by the Spanish Americans to this nocturnal bird. While thus engaged Leon began to feel very drowsy.
In almost every one of the isolated and stunted thorns which grew here and there a night-hawk revealed his presence by whirring like the clack of a mill as long as he could hold his breath, then stopping, flapping his wings, wheeling round the bush, alighting, and after a silent interval of listening beginning to whirr again.
He said: "I was just turning in. Where's the glass" He took it and looked: "Don't appear to be any night-hawk on the jack-staff it's the Amaranth, dead sure!" The captain took a good long look, and only said: "Damnation!" George Davis, the pilot on watch, shouted to the night-watchman on deck: "How's she loaded?" "Two inches by the head, sir." "'T ain't enough!"
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