Strange how everything here fitted back into his life, even if he had been away so long. Mynheer, Sir Francis, the valley society, the very smell of the river on his right purling along to the bay past fish weirs and rocks, and ahead the sleepy ribbon of moon drenched road. A mist was walking on the water, white as cotton, but with a blending and merging grace.

Ahead there was a stirring of sudden movement at a crossroads. David reached for the pair of pistols in the saddlebags at his feet. He pulled out one of them and cocked it. A strange wood creature came floating up from a patch of berry bushes. It was a grotesque hen, five or six feet tall. It had the features of a man bewhiskered by clumps of loose feathers. It ran, this apocalyptic beast, on two thin legs, and its wings -- were they feathered arms? - flapped as it ran. Its groin was bloody. Black strips of skin hung from it.

The horse shied at the dreadful thing and flared its nostrils. David took a firm hand with it. The creature in feathers looked around and David saw the mad eyes, glazed with an insane fear. The ungainly bird thing ran away, and to David its croaking sounded like the crowing of a tormented rooster. Then it was gone. He drove on, wary and shaken. The Sons were out tonight.

New York lay bleaching in the summer sun, and the morning fish hawk, flying in the heated air, saw below him the long triangular wedge of Manhattan Island. It was thickly settled by fifteen thousand citizens and laid out into pig infested streets, mostly around the Battery, going bravely north to Wall Street, but giving up and becoming fields and farms in the region of Harlem Heights. From there it looked across at Westchester County and the Hudson River where the manor houses, estates, and big farms of the original (non Indian) landowners began.