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Updated: June 14, 2025
This single note, the only call he has besides a few squeaks, is far from a song; farther still is the empty-barrel-bung-hole sound made by the air in the rushing wings as the bird swoops in his fall. The night-hawk, alias "bull-bat," does not sing. What a name bull-bat would be for a singing bird! But a "voice" was never intended for the creature.
Adam Gaudylock emerged from the shadow of the locust trees and crossed the moonlit lawn below the terrace. "I've shot that night-hawk. He'll maraud no more," he said, and passed on toward his quarter for the night. Rand made a motion as if to follow, then checked himself. It was late, and it had been a day of strife, but his iron frame felt no fatigue and his mood was one of sombre exaltation.
Oblivious of these facts, it never occurred to Pierce to wonder why these men did not ask him to their cabins or why he did not meet their families. He had long since become a night-hawk, mainly through a growing fondness for gambling, and he had arrived at the point where daylight impressed him as an artificial and unsatisfactory method of illumination.
His family was great in the county, and his kinsmen held favor with the King, so that his neighbors feared to push things too far against him. Such was the man, malignant and ravenous, who had stooped like some foul night-hawk and borne away to his evil nest the golden beauty of Cosford.
The birches breathed fragrance on them; the night-hawk churred softly round their path; the stately mountains smiled above them in the moonlight, and seemed to keep watch and ward over their love, and to shut out the noisy world, and the harsh babble and vain fashions of the town.
"Draw bolt, shut gate, come of the Mitylenian what will," said the centurion; "we are lost men if we own him. Here comes the chief of the Varangian axes, the Follower himself." "Well, Hereward," said the officer who came last upon the scene, in a sort of lingua Franca, generally used by the barbarians of the guard, "hast thou caught a night-hawk?"
For, though a confirmed night-hawk, he needed a short nap to prepare for some business that lay before him. "Babe," a direct contrast to his brother, being thick-necked, stumpy and dark, had not failed to garner his share of the rich harvest.
She felt a strong suspicion that "the Sachem," as the boat-crews used to call him, "the Recluse," "the Night-Hawk," "the Sphinx," as others named him, must be the author of it. It appeared to her the production of a young person of a reflective, poetical turn of mind. It was not a woman's way of writing; at least, so thought the Secretary.
Occasionally we listened for a reply; but not a sound could we hear, save the snarling yelp of some prairie-dog, disturbed by the unusual noises, or the sharp, shrill cry of the night-hawk, that rapidly swooped over our heads. In a state of great anxiety, we passed a wretched night; and, at daylight, commenced a thorough search for traces of the missing boys.
Then, as they passed beneath some umbrageous oak, which stretched its ponderous and gnarled arms across the road, a night-hawk swooped from where it had been resting upon its parrot toes, its beak toward the bole of the tree, and skimmed round and round for a time to capture a great moth or two in its widespread, bristly-edged gape, before swiftly darting back to its perch, where it commenced its loud, continuous purring noise, which died softly away as the party rode on.
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