midnight
`` All right , '' Jasper replied ; `` but thar ai n't no hurry ; the dog 's dead . '' Men with guns came down the road , shouting `` mad dog . '' The cry was taken up and it echoed among the hills . In barbaric Europe , when every village was a principality unto itself , the cry at midnight , summoning men from their beds to butcher or be butchered , could not have been more startling than the noon-tide cry of `` mad dog '' in rural Tennessee . Mothers seized their children , fathers caught up guns and axes . The cross-roads merchant slammed his door and locked it . Oxen , catching the alarm , bellowed in the fields .