The night was sultry for square dancing. The Florida summer hesitated sullenly between continued heat and the equinoctial need of change. The dancers in the Jacklin cabin sweat as they shuffled and wheeled. Tie-tongued Pinny called the figures in a high minor wail intelligible only to experienced dancers.

“ ’hoo’ a coo’!”

There were grumblings.

“Dogged if it ain’t too hot to shoot the ’coon.”

Alternating couples shot the neighboring girl through to her partner, languidly. The figure was usually danced violently, so that the lighter girls often sprawled on the rough pine floor, and it was all a man could do to brace himself to catch his partner if she were buxom.

The tune was plaintive, “Comin’ ’Round the Mountain,” and lent itself to the suffocated daze in which the dancers moved. Feet “sluf-sluf”-ed flatly. The bellow of a bullbat sounded outside the window, a hoarse bass to the squeak of the fiddle and the whine of the harmonica. Marsh frogs tinkled intermittently like the jangle of a jew’s-harp.

“Bir’ i’ a ca’!”

Bird-in-the-cage was always popular. Dull eyes brightened. The tempo of the dance quickened. The middle-aged men held themselves rigidly, shoulders back, chests expanded, moving only their feet and their long arms. The young bloods danced with their heads lowered, reaching belligerently far ahead of their slight bodies, their heels flicking up behind them. In the night’s wet heat they sent forth the odor of their own pointer dogs, overlaid with the acridity of plug tobacco, the musk of mules and of the soil, with here and there the sharp sweetness of corn liquor.

Old Jo Leddy was the only man drunk. He claimed that “he couldn’t no more go thu a set than a barbecue ’possum, lessen he was good and likkered.” His partner tonight was his newest girl, the widow Boone. With the adjacent couple that formed his square, he made a cage about her. She shuffled rhythmically as the other three whirled around her. The cage broke to let her out. Old Jo moved in to take her place. The circling three chanted briskly.

“Bird out—buzzard in!

Purty good bird for the shape he’s in!”

They tittered. The figure was amusing when the “buzzard” was drunk.

“Ha-hey!”

The dancers sashayed. The individual couples concentrated on each other, shoulders pressed together like wrestlers. The whole dance was violent, earnest, without levity.

“Sluf-sluf! Shuffle-shuffle! Sluf-sluf!”

The music stopped as abruptly as though the instrument had been struck from the fiddler’s hands. The dancers fell away from one another wherever the end of the set found them. Some of the couples loitered out into the sultry moonlight, fanning their hot faces with handkerchiefs and slapping at the mosquitoes. The older women dropped down on the sides of the white iron bed in a far corner of the room, where old lady Jacklin sat sewing pieces for her interminable quilts.