ONE or two nights a week my uncle used to take me with him when he went
to spend the evening with old Judge Priest. There were pretty sure to
be a half dozen or more gray heads there; and if it were good out-door
weather, they would sit in a row on the wide low veranda, smoking their
pipes and their cigars; and of these the cigars kept off the mosquitos
even better than the pipes did, our country being notorious, then,
as now, for the excellence of its domestic red liquor and the amazing
potency of its domestic black cigars. Every little while, conceding the
night to be hot, Judge Priest's Jeff would come bringing a tray with
drinks--toddies or else mint juleps, that were as fragrant as the
perfumed fountains of a fairy tale and crowned with bristling sprays of
the gracious herbage. And they would sit and smoke and talk, and I would
perch on the top step of the porch, hugging my bare knees together and
listening.
It was on just such a night as this that I heard the story of Singin'
Sandy Riggs, the Under Dog. I think it must have been in July--or maybe
it was August. To the northward the sheet lightning played back and
forth like a great winking lens, burning the day heat out of the air and
from the dried up bed of the creek, a quarter of a mile away, came the
notes of big bassooning bull frogs, baying at the night. Every now and
then a black bird or a tree martin in the maple over head would have a
bad dream and talk out in its sleep; and hundreds upon hundreds of birds
roosting up there would rouse and utter querulous, drowsy bird-sounds,
and bestir themselves until the whole top of the tree rustled and moved
as though from a sudden breeze. In lulls of the talk, thin-shredded
snatches of winging was borne to us from the little church beyond the
old Enders orchard where the negroes were holding one of their frequent
revivals.
It was worth any boy's while to listen to the company that assembled
on Judge Priest's front porch. For one, Squire Rufus Buckley was pretty
certain to be there. Possibly by reason of his holding a judicial office
and possibly because he was of a conservative habit of mind, Squire
Buckley was never known to give a direct answer to any question. For
their own amusement, people used to try him. Catching him on a flawless
morning, someone would remark in a tone of questioning that it was a
fine day.
“Well now,” the Squire would say, “It tis and it taint. It's clear now
but you can't never tell when it'll cloud up.”
He owned a little grocery store out in the edge of town and had his
magistrate's office in a back room behind it. On a crowded Saturday when
the country rigs were standing three deep outside and the two clerks
were flying about measuring and weighing and counting up and drawing
off, a waiting customer might be moved to say:
“Business pretty good, ain't it Squire?”
“It's good,” the Squire would say, licking off the corn-cob stopper of
a molasses jug and driving it with a sticky _plop_ into its appointed
orifice, “And then agin it's bad. Some things air sellin' off very well
and some things ain't hardly sellin' off a'tall.”
The Squire was no great shakes of a talker, but as a listener he was
magnificent. He would sit silently hour after hour with his hands laced
over his paunch, only occasionally spitting over the banisters with a
strident tearing sound.
Nor was the assemblage complete without Captain Shelby Woodward. Captain
Shelby Woodward's specialty in conversation was the Big War. From him
I first heard the story of how Lieutenant Gracey of the County Battery
floated down the river on a saw log and single handed, captured the
Yankee gunboat and its sleepy-headed crew. From him I learned the why
and wherefore of how our town although located right on the border of
North and South, came in '61 to be called the Little Charleston, and
from him also I got the tale of that lost legion of Illinois men, a full
battalion of them, who crossing out of their own State by stealth were
joyously welcomed into ours, and were mustered into the service and
thereafter for four years fought their own kinspeople and neighbors--the
only organized command, so Captain Shelby Woodward said, that came to
the army from the outside. Frequently he used to tell about Miss Em.
Garrett, who when Grant came up from Cairo on his gunboats, alone
remembered what all the rest of the frightened town forgot--that the
silken flag which the women had made with loving hands, was still
floating from its flag pole in front of the engine house; and she drove
her old rock-away down to the engine house and made her little negro
house boy shin up the pole and bring the flag down to her, he greatly
fearing the shells from the gunboats that whistled past his head, but
fearing much more his mistress, standing down below and looking up at
his bare legs with her buggy whip.
“So then,” Captain Woodward would go on, “she put the flag under her
dress and drove on home. But some Union sympathizer told on her when the
troops landed and a crowd of them broke away and went out to her place
and called on her to give it up. She was all alone except for the
darkeys, but she wasn't scared, that old woman. They sassed her and she
sassed 'em back, and they were swearing they'd burn the house down over
her head, and she was daring 'em to do it, when an officer came up and
drove 'em off. And afterwards when the warehouses and the churches and
the Young Ladies' Seminary were chuck full of sick and wounded, brought
down from Donaldson and Shiloh, she turned in and nursed them all alike,
not caring which side they'd fought on. And so, some of the very men
that had threatened her, used to salute when she passed them on the
street.
“And sir, she wore that flag under her skirts for four years, and
she kept it always and when she died it was her shroud. You remember,
Billy,--you were one of the pall bearers?” he would say, turning to
Judge Priest.
And Judge Priest would say he remembered mighty well and the talk would
go swinging back and forth, but generally back, being concerned mainly
with people that were dead and things that were done years and years
before I was born.
Major J. Q. A. Pickett was apt to be of the company, dapper and as
jaunty as his game leg would let him be, always in black with a white
tube rose in his buttonhole. The Major was a born boulevaidier without a
boulevard, a natural man about town without the right kind of a town
to be about in, and a clubman by instinct, yet with no club except the
awnings under Soule's drug store, and the screening of dishrag vines and
balsam apples on Priest's front porch. Also in a far corner somewhere,
little Mr. Herman Felsburg of Felsburg Brothers, our leading clothiers,
might often be found. Mr. Felsburg's twisted sentences used to tickle
me. I was nearly grown before I learned, by chance, what Mr. Felsburg
himself never mentioned--that he, a newly landed immigrant, enlisted
at the first call and had fought in half a dozen hard battles before
he properly knew the English for the commands of his captain. But my
favorite story-teller of them all, was old Cap'n Jasper Lawson, and he
was old--old even to these other old men, older by a full twenty years
than the oldest of them, a patriarch of the early times, a Forty-niner,
and a veteran of two wars and an Indian Campaign. For me he linked
the faded past to the present and made it glow again in vivid colors.
Wherever he was, was an Arabian Nights Entertainment for me.
He lives as a memory now in the town--his lean shaven jowl, and his high
heeled boots and the crimson blanket that he wore winters, draped over
his shoulders and held at the throat with a pin made of a big crusty
nugget of virgin California gold. Wearing this blanket was no theatrical
affectation of Cap'n Jasper's--it was a part of him; he was raised in
the days when men, white and red both, wore blankets for overcoats. He
could remember when the Chickasaws still held our end of the State and
General Jackson and Governor Shelby came down and bought it away from
them and so gave to it its name of The Purchase. He could remember
plenty of things like that--and what was better, could tell them so that
you could see before your eyes the burnished backs of the naked bucks
sitting in solemn conclave and those two old Indian fighters chaffering
with them for their tribal lands. He was tall and sparse and straight
like one of those old hillside pines, that I have seen since growing on
the red clay slopes of the cotton country south of us; and he stayed
so until he died, which was when he was away up in the nineties. It was
Cap'n Jasper this night who told the story of Singin' Sandy Biggs.
Somehow or other, the talk had flowed and eddied by winding ways to the
subject of cowardice, and Judge Priest had said that every brave man was
a coward and every coward was a brave man--it all depended on the time
and the place--and this had moved Captain Shelby Woodward to repeat one
of his staple chronicles--when the occasion suited he always told it.
It concerned that epic last year of the Orphan Brigade--his brigade he
always called it, as though he'd owned it.
“More than five thousand of us in that brigade of mine, when we went
out in '61,” he said, “and not quite twelve hundred of us left on that
morning in May of '64 when we marched out of Dalton--Joe Johnston's rear
guard, holding Sherman back. Holding him back? Hah, feeding ourselves to
him; that was it, sir--just feeding ourselves to him a bite at a time,
so as to give the rest of the army a chance for its life. And what does
that man Shaler say--what does he say and prove it by the figures?
One hundred and twenty solid days of fighting and marching and
retreating--one hundred and forty days that were like a hot red slice
carved out of hell--fighting every day and mighty near every hour,
hanging on Sherman's flanks and stinging at him like gadflies and being
wiped out and swallowed in mouthfuls. A total, sir, of more than 1800
deadly, or disabling wounds for us in those hundred and twenty days, or
more than a wound apiece if every man had been wounded, and there
were less than fifty of the boys that weren't wounded at that. And in
September, at the end of those hundred and twenty days, just 240 of us
left out of what had been five thousand three years before--240 out of
what had been nearly twelve hundred in May--240 out of a whole brigade,
infantry, and artillery--but still fighting and still ready to keep
right on fighting. Those are Shaler's figures, and he was a Federal
officer himself, and a most gallant gentleman. And it is true,
sir--every word of it is true.
“Now was that bravery? Or was it just pure doggedness? And when you come
right down to it, what is the difference between the two? This one thing
I do know, though--if it was bravery we were no braver than the men who
fought us and chased us and killed us off on that campaign to Atlanta
and then on down to the Sea and if it was doggedness, they'd have been
just as dogged as we were with the conditions reversed--them losing and
us winning. When you're the underdog you just naturally have to
fight--there's nothing else for you to do--isn't that true in your
experience, Billy?”
“Yes,” said Judge Priest, “that's true as Gospel Writ. After all, boys,”
he added, “I reckin the bravest man that lives is the coward that wants
to run and yit don't do it. And anyway, when all's said and done, the
bravest fighters in every war have always been the women and not the
men. I know 'twas so in that war of ours--the men could go and git what
joy there was out of the fightin'; it was the women that stayed behind
and suffered and waited and prayed. Boys, if you've all got a taste of
your toddies left, s'posen we drink to our women before Jeff brings you
your fresh glasses.”
They drank with those little clucking sipping sounds that old men make
when they drink, and for a bit there was a silence. The shifting shuttle
play of the lightning made stage effects in yellow and black against the
back-drop of the sky. From the shadows of the dishrag vine where he sat
in a hickory arm chair, his pipe bowl making a glowing red smudge in the
darkness, old Cap'n Jasper Lawson spoke.
“Speaking of under dogs and things, I reckon none of you young
fellows”--he chuckled a little down in his throat--“can remember when
this wasn't a gun-toting country down here? But I do.
“It was before your day, but I remember it. First off, there was the
time when my daddy and the granddaddies of some of you gentlemen came
out over the Wilderness trail with a squirrel rifle in one hand and an
ax in the other, swapping shots with the Indians every step of the way.
And that was the beginning of everything here. Then, years later on, the
feuds started, up in the mountains--although I'm not denying but we had
our share of them down here too--and some broken down aristocrats moved
out from Virginia and Maryland and brought the Code and a few pairs
of those old long barreled dueling pistols along with them, which was
really the only baggage some of them had; and awhile after that the Big
War came on; and so what with one thing and another, men took to toting
guns regularly--a mighty bad habit too, and one which we've never been
entirely cured of yet, as Billy's next court docket will show, eh,
Billy?”
Judge Priest made an inarticulate sound of regretful assent and Squire
Buckley spat out into the darkness with a long-drawn syrupy swish.
“But in between, back in the twenties and the thirties, there was a
period when gun toting wasn't so highly popular. Maybe it was because
pistols hadn't got common yet and squirrel rifles were too heavy to tote
around, and maybe it was because people were just tired of trouble.
I won't pretend to say exactly what the cause of it was, but so it
was--men settled their differences with their fists and their feet--with
their teeth too, sometimes. And if there were more gouged eyes and
more teeth knocked out, there were fewer widows and not so many orphans
either.
“I notice some of you younger fellows have taken here lately to
calling this town a city, but when I first came here, it wasn't even
a town--just an overgrown wood landing, in the river bottom, with the
shacks and houses stuck up on piles to keep 'em out of the river mud.
There were still Indians a plenty too---Chickasaws and Creeks and some
Shawnees---and some white folks who were mighty near as ignorant as the
Indians. Why it hadn't been but a few years before--three or four at
most, I reckon--since they'd tried to burn the widow woman Simmons as
a witch. As boys, some of you must have heard tell of old Marm Simmons.
Well, I can remember her and that's better. She lived alone with an
old black cat for company, and she was poor and friendless and sort
of peculiar in her ways and that started it. And one spring, when the
high-water went down, the children got sickly and begun dying off of
this here spotted fever. And somebody started the tale that old Marm
Simmons was witching 'em to make 'em die--that she'd look at a child
and then the child would take down sick and die. It was Salem,
Massachusetts, moved up a couple of hundred years, but they believed
it--some of them did. And one night a dozen men went to her cabin and
dragged her out along with her cat--both of them spitting and yowling
and scratching like blood sisters--and they had her flung up onto a
burning brush pile and her apron strings had burnt in two when three or
four men who were still sane came running up and broke in and kicked the
fire apart and saved her. But her old cat went tearing off through the
woods like a Jack-mer-lantern with his fur all afire.”
He paused a moment to suck deliberately at his pipe, and I sat and
thought about old Marm Simmons and her blazing tom cat, and was glad
clear down to my wriggling toes that I didn't have to go home alone. In
a minute or so Cap'n Jasper was droning on again:
“So you can tell by that, that this here city of yours was a pretty
tolerable rough place In its infancy, and full of rough people as
most all new settlements are. You've got to remember that this was the
frontier in those days. But the roughest of them all, as I recollect,
rougher even than the keel-boaters and the trappers and even the Indian
traders--was Harve Allen. He set himself up to be the bully of this
river country.
“Well, he was. He was more than six feet tall and built like a
catamount, and all the whiskey he'd drunk--you could get a gallon then
for what a dram'll cost you now--hadn't burnt him out yet. He fought
seemingly just for the pure love of fighting. Come a muster or a barn
raising or an election or anything, Harve Allen fought somebody--and
licked him. Before he had been here a year he had beat up half the men
in this settlement, and the other half were pretty careful to leave him
alone, even those that weren't afraid of him. He never used anything
though except his fists, and his feet and his teeth--he never needed
anything else. So far as was known, he'd never been licked in his whole
life.
“You see, there was nobody to stop him. The sheriff lived away down at
the other end of the county, and the county was five times as big as
it is now. There were some town trustees--three of them--and they'd
appointed a long, gangling, jimpy-jawed fellow named Catlett to be the
first town constable, but even half grown boys laughed at Catlett,
let alone Harve Allen. Harve would just look at Catlett sort of
contemptously and Catlett would slide off backwards like a crawfish.
And when Harve got a few drams aboard and began churning up his war
medicine, Catlett would hurry right straight home, and be taken down
sick in bed and stay there until Harve had eased himself, beating up
people.
“So Harve Allen ran a wood yard for the river people and had things
pretty much his own way. Mainly people gave him the whole road. There
was a story out that he'd belonged to the Ford's Ferry gang before they
broke up the gang. That's a yarn I'll have to tell this boy here some
of these days when I get the time--how they caught the gang hiding in
Cave-In-Rock and shot some of them and drowned the rest, all but the two
head devils--Big Harp and Little Harp who were brothers--and how they
got back across the river in a dug out and were run down with dogs and
killed too; and the men that killed them cut off their heads and salted
them and packed them in a piggin of brine and sent the piggin by a man
on horseback up to Frankfort to collect the reward. Yes, that's what
they did, and it makes a tale that ought to be written out some time.”
That was old Cap'n Jasper's way. His mind was laden like Aladdin's
sumter-mule, with treasures uncountable, and often he would drop some
such glittering jewel as this and leave it and go on. I mind now how
many times he started to tell me the full story of the two dissolute
Virginians, nephews of one of the first Presidents, who in a fit of
drunken temper killed their slave boy George, on the very night that the
great Earthquake of 1811 came--and taking the agues and the crackings
of the earth for a judgment of God upon their heads, went half mad with
terror and ran to give themselves up. But I never did find out, and I
don't know yet what happened to them after that. Nor was I ever to hear
from Cap'n Jasper the fuller and gory details of the timely taking-off
of Big Harp and little Harp. He just gave me this one taste of the
delightful horror of it and went on.
“Some of them said that Harve Allen had belonged to the Ford's Ferry
gang and that he'd got away when the others were trapped. For a fact he
did come down the river right after the massacre at the cave, and maybe
that was how the story started. But as for myself, I never believed
that part of it at all. Spite of his meanness, Harve Allen wasn't the
murdering kind and it must have taken a mighty seasoned murderer to keep
steady company with Big Harp and Little Harp.
“But he looked mean enough for anything--just the way he would look at a
man won half his fights for him. It's rising of sixty years since I
saw him, but I can shut my eyes and the picture of him comes back to me
plain as a painted portrait on a wall. I can see him now, rising of six
feet-three, as I told you, and long-legged and raw-boned. He didn't have
any beard on his face--he'd pulled it out the same as the Indian bucks
used to do, only they'd use mussel shells, and he used tweezers, but
there were a few hairs left in his chin that were black and stiff and
stood out like the bristles on a hog's jowl. And his under lip lolled
down as though it'd been sagged out of plumb by the weight of all the
cuss-words that Harve had sworn in his time, and his eyes were as cold
and mean as a catfish's eyes. He used to wear an old deer skin hunting
vest, and it was gormed and smeared with grease until it was as slick as
an otter-slide; and most of the time he went bare foot. The bottoms of
his feet were like horn.
“That was the way he looked the day he licked Singin' Sandy the first
time--and likewise the way he looked all the other times too, for the
matter of that. But the first time was the day they hanged Tallow Dave,
the hall breed, for killing the little Cartright girl. It was the first
hanging we ever had in this country--the first legal hanging I mean--and
from all over the county, up and down the river, and from away back
in the oak barrens, the people came to see it. They came afoot and
ahorseback, the men bringing their rifles and even old swords and old
war hatchets with them, with the women and children riding on behind
them. It made the biggest crowd that'd ever been here up to then. Away
down by the willows stood the old white house that washed away in the
rise of '54, where old Madame La Farge, the old French woman, used to
gamble with the steamboat captains, and up where the Market Square is
now, was the jail, which was built of logs; and in between stretched
a row of houses and cabins, mainly of logs too, all facing the river.
There was a road in front, running along the top of the bank, and in
summer it was knee deep in dust, fit to choke a horse, and in winter it
was just one slough of mud that caked and balled on your feet until it
would pull your shoes off. I've seen teams mired down many a time there,
right where the Richland House is now. But on this day the mud was no
more than shoe-throat deep, which nobody minded; and the whole river
front was just crawling with people and horses.
“They brought Tallow Dave out of the jail with his arms tied back, and
put him in a wagon, him sitting on his coffin, and drove him under a
tree and noosed him round the neck, and then the wagon pulled out and
left him swinging and kicking there with the people scrooging up so
close to him they almost touched his legs. I was there where I could see
it all, and that's another thing in my life I'm never going to forget.
It was pretty soon after they'd cut him down that Harve Allen ran across
Singin' Sandy. This Sandy Biggs was a little stumpy man with sandy hair
and big gray eyes that would put you in mind of a couple of these here
mossy agates, and he was as freckled as a turkey egg, in the face. He
hadn't been here very long and people had just begun calling him Singin'
Sandy on account of him going along always humming a little tune without
any words to it and really not much tune, more like a big blue bottle
fly droning than anything else. He lived in a little clearing that he'd
made about three miles out, back of the Grundy Hill, where that new
summer park, as they call it, stands now. But then it was all deep
timber--oak barrens in the high ground and cypress slashes in the
low--with a trail where the gravel road runs, and the timber was full of
razor back hogs stropping themselves against the tree boles and up above
there were squirrels as thick as these English sparrows are today. He
had a cub of a boy that looked just like him, freckles and sandy head
and all; and this boy--he was about fourteen, I reckon--had come in with
him on this day of the Tallow Dave hanging.
“Well, some way or other, Singin' Sandy gave offense to Harve
Allen--which as I have told you, was no hard thing to do--bumped into
him by accident maybe or didn't get out of the road brisk enough to suit
Harve. And Harve without a word, up and hauled off and smacked him down
as flat as a flinder. He laid there on the ground a minute, sort of
stunned, and then up he got and surprised everybody by making a rush for
Harve. He mixed it with him but it was too onesided to be much fun, even
for those who'd had the same dose themselves and so enjoyed seeing Harve
taking it out of somebody else's hide. In a second Harve had him tripped
and thrown and was down on him bashing in his face for him. At that,
Singin' Sandy's cub of a boy ran in and tried to pull Harve off his dad,
and Harve stopped pounding Sandy just long enough to rear up and fetch
the cub a back handed lick with the broad of his hand that landed the
chap ten feet away. The cub bounced right up and made as if to come back
and try it again, but some men grabbed him and held him, not wanting
to see such a little shaver hurt. The boy was sniveling too, but I took
notice it wasn't a scared snivel--it was a mad snivel, if you all know
what I mean. They held him, a couple of them, until it was over.
“That wasn't long--it was over in a minute or two. Harve Allen got
up and stood off grinning, just as he always grinned when he'd mauled
somebody to his own satisfaction, and two or three went up to Singin'
Sandy and upended him on his feet. Somebody fetched a gourd of water
from the public well and sluiced it over his head and face. He was all
blood where he wasn't mud--streaked and sopped with it, and mud was
caked in his hair thick, like yellow mortar, with the water dripping
down off of it. He didn't say a word at first. He got his breath back
and wiped some of the blood out of his eyes and off his face onto his
sleeve, and I handed him his old skin cap where it had fallen off his
head. The cub broke loose and came running to him and he shook himself
together and straightened up and looked round him. He looked at Harve
Allen standing ten feet away grinning, and he said slow, just as slow
and quiet:
“'I'll be back agin Mister, one month frum today. Wait fur me.
“That was all--just that 'I'll be back in a month' and 'wait fur me.'
And then as he turned around and went away, staggering a little on his
pins, with his cub trotting alongside him, I'm blessed if he didn't
start up that little humming song of his; only it sounded pretty thick
coming through a pair of lips that were battered up and one of them, the
upper one, was split open on his front teeth.
“We didn't then know what he'd meant, but we knew in a month. For that
day month, on the hour pretty nigh, here came Singin' Sandy tramping in
by himself. Harve Allen was standing in front of a doggery that a man
named Whitis ran--he died of the cholera I remember years and years
after--and Singin' Sandy walked right up to him and said: 'Well, here I
am' and hit out at Harve with his fist. He hit out quick, like a cat
striking, but he was short armed and under sized. He didn't much more
than come up to Harve's shoulder and even if the lick had landed, it
wouldn't have dented Harve hardly. His intentions were good though, and
he swung out quick and fast. But Harve was quicker still. Singin' Sandy
hit like a cat, but Harve could strike like a moccasin snake biting you.
It was all over again almost before it started.
“Harve Allen bellowed once, like a bull, and downed him and jumped on
him and stomped him in the chest with his knees and pounded and clouted
him in the face until the little man stretched out on the ground still
and quiet. Then, Harve climbed off of him and swaggered off. Even now,
looking back on it all, it seems like a shameful thing to admit, but
nobody dared touch a hand to Singin' Sandy until Harve was plumb gone.
As soon, though, as Harve was out of sight behind a cabin, some of them
went to the little man and picked him up and worked over him until he
came to. If his face had been dog's meat before, it was calf's liver
now--just pounded out of shape. He couldn't get but one eye open.
I still remember how it looked. It looked like a piece of cold gray
quartz--like the tip of one these here gray flint Indian darts. He held
one hand to his side--two of his ribs were caved in, it turned out--and
he braced himself against the wall of the doggery and looked around him.
He was looking for Harve Allen.
“'Tell him for me,' he said slow and thick, 'that I'll be back agin in a
month, the same as usual.'
“And then he went back out the road into the oak barrens, falling down
and getting up and falling some more, but keeping right on. And by
everything that's holy, he was trying to sing as he went and making a
bubbling noise through the blood that was in his throat.
“They all stood staring at him until he was away off amongst the trees,
and then they recalled that that was what he had said before--that he'd
be back in a month; and two or three of them went and hunted up Harve
Allen and gave him the message. He swore and laughed that laugh of his,
and looked hard at them and said:
“'The runty varmint must love a beatin' a sight better than some other
folks I could name,' and at that they sidled off, scenting trouble for
themselves if Harve should happen to take it into his head that they'd
sided with Singin' Sandy.”
Cap'n Jasper stopped to taste of his toddy, and the other older men
stirred slightly, impatient for him to go on. Sitting there on the top
step of the porch, I hugged my knees in my arms and waited breathless,
and Singin' Sandy and Harve Allen visualized themselves for me there
before my eyes. In the still I could hear the darkies singing their
Sweet Chariot hymn at their little white church beyond the orchard. That
was the fourth time that night they had sung that same song, and when
they switched to “Old Ark A'Movin'” we would know that the mourners
were beginning to “come through” and seek the mourners' bench.
Cap'n Jasper cleared his throat briskly, as a man might rap with a gavel
for attention and talked on:
“Well, so it went. So it went for five enduring months and each one of
these fights was so much like the fight before it, that it's not worth
my while trying to describe 'em for you boys. Every month, on the day,
here would come Singin' Sandy Riggs, humming to himself. Once he came
through the slush of a thaw, squattering along in the cold mud up to his
knees, and once 'twas in a driving snow storm, but no matter what the
weather was or how bad the road was, he came and was properly beaten,
and went back home again still a-humming or trying to. Once Harve cut
loose and crippled him up so he laid in a shack under the bank for two
days before he could travel back to his little clearing on the Grundy
Fork. It came mighty near being Kittie, Bar the Door with the little man
that time. But he was tough as swamp hickory, and presently he was up
and going, and the last thing he said as he limped away was fur somebody
to give the word to Harve Allen that he'd be back that day month. I
never have been able to decide yet in my own mind, whether he always
made his trips a month apart because he had one of those orderly minds
and believed in doing things regularly, or because he figured it would
take him a month to get cured up from the last beating Harve gave him.
But anyhow, so it was. He never hurt Harve to speak of, and he never
failed to get pretty badly hurt himself. There was another thing--whilst
they were fighting, he never made a sound, except to grunt and pant, but
Harve would be cursing and swearing all the time.
“People took to waiting and watching for the day--Singin' Sandy's day,
they began calling it. The word spread all up and down the river and
into the back settlements, and folks would come from out of the barrens
to see it. But nobody felt the call to interfere. Some were afraid of
Harve Allen and some thought Singin' Sandy would get his belly-full
of beatings after awhile and quit. But on the morning of the day when
Singin' Sandy was due for the eighth time--if he kept his promise, which
as I'm telling you he always had--Captain Braxton Montjoy, the militia
captain, who'd fought in the war of 1812 and afterwards came to be the
first mayor of this town, walked up to Harve Allen where he was lounging
in front of one of the doggeries. I still remember his swallowfork coat
and his white neckerchief and the little walking stick he was carrying.
It was one of these little shiny black walking sticks made out of some
kind of a limber wood, and it had a white handle on it, of ivory, carved
like a woman's leg. His pants were strapped down tight under his boots,
just so. Captain Braxton Mont-joy was fine old stock and he was the best
dressed man between the mouth of the Cumberland and the Mississippi. And
he wasn't afraid of anything that wore hair or hide.
“'Harvey Allen,' he says, picking out his words, 'Harvey Allen, I am of
the opinion that you have been maltreating this man Riggs long enough.'
“Harve Allen was big enough to eat Captain Braxton Montjoy up in two
bites, but he didn't start biting. He twitched back his lips like a fice
dog and blustered up.
“'What is it to you?' says Harve.
“'It is a good deal to me and to every other man who believes in
fair play,' says Captain Braxton Montjoy. 'I tell you that I want it
stopped.'
“'The man don't walk in leather that kin dictate to me what I shall and
shall not do,' says Harve, trying to work himself up, 'I'm a leetle the
best two handed man that lives in these here settlemints, and the man
that tries to walk my log had better be heeled for bear. I'm half hoss
and half alligator and,--'
“Captain Braxton Montjoy stepped up right close to him and began tapping
Harve on the breast of his old deer skin vest with the handle of his
little walking stick. At every word he tapped him.
“'I do not care to hear the intimate details of your ancestry,' he says.
'Your family secrets do not concern me, Harvey Allen. What does concern
me,' he says, 'is that you shall hereafter desist from maltreating a
man half your size. Do I make my meaning sufficiently plain to your
understanding, Harvey Allen?'
“At that Harve changed his tune. Actually it seemed like a whine came
into his voice. It did, actually.
“'Well, why don't he keep away from me then?' he says. 'Why don't he
leave me be and not come round here every month pesterin' fur a fresh
beatin'? Why don't he take his quittances and quit? There's plenty other
men I'd rather chaw up and spit out than this here Riggs--and some of
'em ain't so fur away now,' he says, scowling round him.
“Captain Braxton Montjoy started to say something more but just then
somebody spoke behind him and he swung round and there was Singin'
Sandy, wet to the flanks where he'd waded through a spring branch.
“'Excuse me, Esquire,' he says to Captain Montjoy, 'and I'm much obliged
to you, but this here is a private matter that's got to be settled
between me and that man yonder--and it can't be settled only jist one
way.'
“'Well sir, how long do you expect to keep this up, may I inquire?'
says Captain Braxton Montjoy, who never forgot his manners and never let
anybody else forget them either.
“'Ontil I lick him,' says Singin' Sandy, 'ontil I lick him good and
proper and make him yell 'nuff!'
“'Why you little spindley, runty strippit, you ain't never goin' to
be able to lick me,' snorts out Harve over Captain Braxton Montjoy's
shoulder, and he cursed at Sandy. But I noticed he hadn't rushed him
as he usually did. Maybe, though, that was because of Captain Montjoy
standing in the way.
“'You ain't never goin' to be big enough or strong enough or man enough
to lick me,' says Harve.
“'I 'low to keep on tryin', says Singin' Sandy. 'And ef I don't make
out to do it, there's my buddy growin' up and comin' along. And some day
he'll do it,' he says, not boasting and not arguing, but cheerfully and
confidently as though he was telling of a thing that was already the
same as settled.
“Captain Braxton Montjoy reared away back on his high heels--he wore
high heels to make him look taller, I reckon--and he looked straight at
Singin' Sandy standing there so little and insignificant and raggedy,
and all gormed over with mud and wet with branch water, and smelling of
the woods and the new ground. There was a purple mark still under one of
Sandy's eyes and a scabbed place on top of one of his ears where Harve
Allen had pretty nigh torn it off the side of his head.
“'By Godfrey,' says Captain Braxton Montjoy, 'by Godfrey, sir,' and
he began pulling off his glove which was dainty and elegant, like
everything else about him. 'Sir,' he says to Singin' Sandy, 'I desire to
shake your hand.'
“So they shook hands and Captain Braxton Montjoy stepped one side and
bowed with ceremony to Singin' Sandy, and Singin' Sandy stepped in
toward Harve Allen humming to himself.
“For this once, anyhow, Harve wasn't for charging right into the mix-up
at the first go-off. It almost seemed like he wanted to back away. But
Singin' Sandy lunged out and hit him in the face and stung him, and then
Harve's brute fighting instinct must have come back into his body, and
he flailed out with both fists and staggered Singin' Sandy back. Harve
ran in on him and they locked and there was a whirl of bodies and
down they went, in the dirt, with Harve on top as per usual. He licked
Singin' Sandy, but he didn't lick him nigh as hard as he'd always done
it up till then. When he got through, Singin' Sandy could get up off the
ground by himself and that was the first time he had been able to do
so. He stood there a minute swaying a little on his legs and wiping the
blood out of his eyes where it ran down from a little cut right in the
edge of his hair. He spit and we saw that two of his front teeth were
gone, broken short off up in the gums; and Singin' Sandy felt with the
tip of his tongue at the place where they'd been. 'In a month,' he says,
and away he goes, singing his tuneless song.
“Well, I watched Harve Allen close that next month--and I think nearly
all the other people did too. It was a strange thing too, but he went
through the whole month without beating up anybody. Before that he'd
never let a month pass without one fight anyhow. Yet he drank more
whiskey than was common even with him. Once I ran up on him sitting on
a drift log down in the willows by himself, seemingly studying over
something in his mind.
“When the month was past and Singin' Sandy's day rolled round again for
the ninth time, it was spring time, and the river was bankfull from the
spring rise and yellow as paint with mud and full of drift and brush.
Out from shore a piece, in the current, floating snags were going down,
thick as harrow teeth, all pointing the same way like big black fish
going to spawn. Early that morning, the river had bitten out a chunk
of crumbly clay bank and took a cabin in along with it, and there was a
hard job saving a couple of women and a whole shoal of young ones. For
the time being that made everybody forget about Singin' Sandy being due,
and so nobody, I think, saw him coming. I know I didn't see him at all
until he stood on the river bank humming to himself.
“He stood there on the bank swelling himself out and humming his little
song louder and clearer than ever he had before--and fifty yards out
from shore in a dugout that belonged to somebody else, was Bully Harve
Allen, fighting the current and dodging the drift logs as he paddled
straight for the other side that was two miles and better away. He never
looked back once; but Singin' Sandy stood and watched him until he was
no more than a moving spot on the face of those angry, roily waters.
Singin' Sandy lived out his life and died here--he's got grandchildren
scattered all over this county now, but from that day forth Harve Allen
never showed his face in this country.”
Cap'n Jasper got up slowly, and shook himself, as a sign that his story
was finished, and the others rose, shuffling stiffly. It was getting
late--time to be getting home. The services in the darky church had
ended and we could hear the unseen worshippers trooping by, still
chanting snatches of their revival tunes.
“Well, boys, that's all there is to tell of that tale,” said Cap'n
Jasper, “all that I now remember anyhow. And now what would you say
it was that made Harve Allen run away from the man he'd already licked
eight times hand running. Would you call it cowardice?”
It was Squire Buckley, the non committal, who made answer.
“Well,” said Squire Buckley slowly, “p'raps I would--and then agin, on
the other hand, p'raps I wouldn't.”