“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.