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The boy's eyes occasionally caught sight of a red fox or of a deer; and the call of the dove, the drum of the pheasant, the welcome "whip-poor-will" and the "to-whit, to-whit, to-who" of the owl were familiar sounds. He ranged the prairie and the woods; he climbed trees for nuts and for distant views, and knew every hill, valley, and stream for miles and miles around.
Now and then he heard the cry of some animal from the forest; or the hooting of the owl; or the notes of the whip-poor-will, which seemed to abound among these solitudes; or the splash of a sturgeon, leaping out of the river, and falling back full length on its placid surface.
Oh, Uncle Dave, tell me that story about thy hiding a negro in the haystack, and choking the bloodhounds with thine own hands." "I have told thee a hundred times." "But I want to hear it again." "Use thy memory and thy imagination." "Oh, no, please tell me. I like to hear some one tell something." "Thee does? Then listen to the whip-poor-will, the cricket or the brook."
Late in the afternoon they reached familiar ground, or at least it was so to the sharp eyes of these three, although they had seen it but once. Here they had left Paul and Jim Hart, and they knew that they must be somewhere near. Henry gave forth the whip-poor-will cry the long, wailing note, inexpressibly plaintive and echoing far through the autumn woods.
Lost indeed to all perception of the natural must he have been, who could have listened, without a feeling of voluptuous melancholy, to the plaintive notes of the whip-poor-will, breaking on the silence of night, and harmonising with the general stillness of the scene.
As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt-sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whip-poor-will is borne on the rippling wind from over the water.
Less'n an hour, I'd say. Who dropped it, I wonder? There ain't anybody in this yer camp smokes cigarettes." He searched for footprints, but could discover none; a newly-broken twig was all the sign that he could see. He glanced around among the trees, but there was no visible movement, and a whip-poor-will was singing undisturbed from a high bough of a balsam tree close at hand.
Then one of the men took from the floor the sheet of manuscript and stepped to the window, for already the evening shadows were glooming the forest. The song of the whip-poor-will was heard in the distance and a monstrous beetle sped by the window on roaring wings and thundered away out of hearing.
He heard confusedly the droning of insects, and the distant mournful call of a whip-poor-will. The roar of the car was strangely missing. What had become of it? And where was Arima? These were the first questions he asked himself as he became able to think without confusion. He now became aware that his head hurt, and raising his hand, he found a large bump under the hair above his right temple.
O the witchery of moonlight nights, when tree, shrub, and meadow are bathed in a sheen of silver; when lovers walk arm in arm, and in soft whisperings build air castles for the days to come, when the honeysuckle shall twine around their doorway, and the moonlight rest like a benediction on their own home nest; when you sit on the porch with day's work done, and the fireflies dance over the lawn, and the voice of the whip-poor-will floats up from the meadow, and you dream dreams, and weave strange fancies, under the witching spell of the silver moonlight!
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