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Updated: May 25, 2025
The whip-poor-wills were still calling, but at the flanks and rear of the regiment. None of them called in front. "It's full o' rebels over there; that's the reason," said Si to himself, as he noted this. "Yes, they're all at home, and goin' to shoot," he added in a loud whisper. "Lay down, everybody." He was none too soon.
The moon had disappeared and the glimmer of the stars did not penetrate the canopy of foliage overhead. Even the goatsuckers, queer birds that looked like giant whip-poor-wills, had ceased their wails and in the jungle reigned the darkest hours of night. Oomah awoke with a start, as if in response to the prod of a rude hand, and shivered.
A multitude of whip-poor-wills in the woods around us began their usual dismal cry, which had never seemed so unearthly and full of dreadful presages as now. It was, now quite dark, and we stole noiselessly down to the Creek and reconnoitered. We listened. The guard was not pacing his beat, as we could not hear his footsteps.
Something large as a small bird was fluttering around. Mrs. Comstock began to perspire, while her hand shook wildly. Closer she crept and just as she reached for it, something similar swept past and both flew away together. Mrs. Comstock set her teeth and stood shivering. For a long time the locusts rasped, the whip-poor-wills cried and a steady hum of night life throbbed in her ears.
In the night Celia dreamed of home and the blue-grass hills and the whip-poor-wills and the mocking birds that sang through the moonlight from twilight till dawn. Sobbing in her sleep, she waked to hear the demoniacal shriek of the tireless wind and the howl of a coyote, and wept, refusing to be comforted. The next day she said to Seth firmly and conclusively: "I am goin' home."
The first day he was away was dreadful sultry; the sun went down away over the woods in a kind of a red-hot fog, and it seemed as though the stars were dull and coppery at night; even the whip-poor-wills was too hot to sing; nothin' but a doleful screech-owl quavered away, a half a mile off, a good hour, steady.
The whip-poor-wills began to fill the evening air with their mournful calls, which accentuated and intensified the weird loneliness of the scene, where but a little while before there had been no thought but of deadly hatred and bitter strife.
Rap was about to answer when the Doctor signed to him and he stopped. "Whip-poor-wills call their own name after dark, and I think you will hear them when we pass the miller's woods in a few minutes; for some reason they seldom come about the Farm." "I believe I am growing sleepy," murmured Dodo, trying to be polite and swallow a little yawn, but not wholly succeeding.
I want a yard with a fence around it that you can go out and set on after supper and listen to whip-poor-wills, says Luke. "That's the kind of a man he was. He was home-like, although he'd had bad luck in such investments. But he never talked about them times on the ranch. It seemed like he'd forgotten about it.
It was quite dark by this time, and as there was no moon our one lantern did not go far toward lighting the path. We stumbled along over plowed ground and through swampy pastures to the music of croaking frogs and whip-poor-wills.
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