"There is no Elbridge now," said the old grandfather.
"I know all," said Oliver, "I had a letter from Margaret, telling me the story and begging me to keep a watch for her boy."
"A wide watch to keep and little to be got by it, I fear," old Sylvester added.
"Not altogether idle, perhaps; we have sharp eyes in the West and see many strange things. Jane is confident she saw our Elbridge, making through Ohio, but two months after he left here; he was riding swiftly, and in her surprise and suddenness she could neither call nor send after him."
"You did not tell us of that," said the old man.
"No, I waited some further discovery."
"Be silent now, you may easily waken hopes to be darkened and dashed to the ground. Which way made the boy?"
"Southward."
During this discourse, as though he distinguished the sound of his young master's name and knew to what it related, Chanticleer walked slowly, and as if by accident or at leisure, up and down the garden-wall, keeping as near to the speakers as was at all seemly. When they stopped speaking he leaped gently to the ground and softly clapped his wings.
A moment after there came hurrying into the garden, in a wild excitement, and all struggling to speak first, little Sam Peabody in the lead, Robert, the flat-featured youth of thirteen, and Peabody Junior, (who, it should be mentioned, having found his way into a pantry a couple of minutes after his arrival with the Captain, and appropriated to his own personal use an entire bottle of cherry brandy, had been straightway put to bed, from which he had now been released not more than a couple of hours), and to announce as clamorously as they respectively could, that Brundage's Bull had just got into "our big meadow."