Back Home by Irvin S. Cobb

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.