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At four in the morning night-hawks are abed, and even the convicts had ceased working on the Gloriette. The moon had gone, and it was dark now the darkness that precedes the dawn. We met not a soul as we stumbled along, and coming out at length to the Vallée de Misère we passed the Gloriette, and kept to our right along the river face, until almost opposite the Church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois.
"Nonsense," I cried, nettled. "Your wine is too well watered for that, let me tell you, Maître Jacques." "Then you dreamed it," he said huffily. "The proof is that no one has lived in that house these twenty years." Now, I had plenty to trouble about without troubling my head over night-hawks, but I was vexed with him for putting me off.
Well, Old-man took some of the fine powdered stone and shook it on the Night-hawk's wings in spots and stripes made the great white stripes you have seen on his wings, and told him that no other bird could have such marks on his clothes. "All the Night-hawk's children dress the same way now; and they always will as long as there are Night-hawks.
If, in a common way, it be shut by the circumstance of the buildings above to the riff-raff and night-hawks who would frequent it, there are seasons, nevertheless, when the laying of new foundations, the building of hotels and the demolition of ancient streets in the name of "improvement" fling its gates open to the more cunning of the "destitutes," and they flock there as rooks to a field newly sown.
I could see the lower fringes of the clouds working and writhing in the wind, but not a sound or a breath was in the air about me. Around me over my roof flew the night-hawks. They were crying peevishly and skimming close to the chimneys, not rising, as usual, to any height. Suddenly the storm broke. The rain fell as if something had given way overhead.
The soft, warm dusk of a July evening crept over the land and a few stars winked at them facetiously. Over by the reedy creek, frogs cr-ek-ek-ekked in a tuneless medley and night-hawks flapped silently through the still air, swooping suddenly with a queer, whooing rush like wind blowing through a cavern.
He says, 'All's well, same as I said, or something equivalent to it. I've been up here quite a bit, Barnes, making a study of night-hawks, their habits and their language." "By gad, you are a wonder!" "Wait till to-morrow before you say that," replied Sprouse, sententiously. "Come along now. Stick to the trail. We've got to land the other one." For five or six minutes they moved forward.
Here there was a rough enclosure, or corral, with some tumble-down sheds which afforded shelter, on the night of Joseph Louden's disgrace, for a number of shaggy teams attached to those decrepit and musty vehicles known picturesquely and accurately as Night-Hawks.
A cuckoo would be cooing, perhaps; or a quail, with cheerful ambiguity, such as belongs to weather predictions in general, would be prophesying "more wet" and "no more wet" in alternate breaths; or two or three night-hawks would be sweeping back and forth high above the valley; or a marsh hawk would be quartering over the big oatfield.
The bull bats flew down one after another against the rock, and every time one of them hit it he chipped off a piece, and at last one hit it fair in the middle and broke it into two pieces. Then Old Man was glad. He went to where there was a nest of night-hawks and pulled their mouths out wide and pinched off their bills, to make them pretty and queer looking.
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