But I had no need to walk out along Great George Street to find my
bird; for, as I left Wall Street and swung the corner into Broadway,
the husky, impatient whisper of a whippoorwill broke out from the dusk
among the ruins of Trinity, and I started and turned, crossing the
street. Wild birds there were a-plenty in the city, yet the
whippoorwill so seldom came into the streets that the note alone would
have attracted me had Ennis not warned me of the signal.

And so I strolled once more into the churchyard and among the felled
trees which the soldiers had cut down for fire-wood, as they were
scorched past hope of future growth; and presently, prowling through
the dusk among the graves by Lambert Street, I came upon my drover,
seated upon a mound, smoking his clay as innocent as any tavern slug in
the sun.

"Good even, friend," he said, looking up. "I thought I heard a
whippoorwill but now, and being country bred, stole in to listen. Did
you hear it, sir?"

"I thought I did," said I, amused. "I thought it sang, Pro Gloria in
Excelsis----"

"Hush!" whispered the drover, smiling; "sit here beside me and we'll
listen. Perhaps the bird may sing that anthem once again."

I seated myself on the green mound, and the next moment sprang to my
feet as a shape before me seemed to rise out of the very ground; then,
hearing my drover laugh, I resumed my place as the short figure came
toward us.

"Another drover," said my companion, "and a famous one, Mr. Renault,
for he drove certain wild cattle at a headlong gallop from the pastures
at Saratoga--he and I and another drover they call Dan'l Morgan. We
have been strolling here among these graves, a-prying for old
friends--brother drovers. We found one drover's grave--a lad called
Cresap--hard by the arch there to the north."

"Did you know him?" I asked.

"Yes, lad. I was a herder of his at Dunmore's slaughter-house. I saw
him jailed at Fortress Pitt; I saw him freed, too. And one fine day in
'76, a-lolling at my ease in the north, what should I hear but a jolly
conch-horn blowing in the forest, and out of it rolled a torrent of men
in buckskin, Cresap leading, bound for that famous cattle-drive at
Boston town. So I, being by chance in buckskin, and by merest chance
bearing a rifle, fell in and joined the merry ranks--I and my young
friend Cardigan, who is now with certain mounted drovers called, I
think, Colonel Washington's Dragoons, harrying those Carolina cattle
owned