e gave thought to the moral certainty that the most formidable and
fearsome of his rivals, that bloody-minded bravo, Smooth Crumbaugh,
would daunt him never again with threats of articular dismemberment with
a new-honed razor. For Smooth Crumbaugh was gone and gone for good.
First the draft had carried him away and then the pneumonia had carried
him off. War had its compensations after all.

Wearing Ophelia upon one arm and wearing in the crook of the other a
high hat which once had been the property of a young man now bossing an
infantry battalion in the muddiest part of France, Jeff appeared
prominently in the Armistice celebration at the First Ward Colored
Baptist Church. Still so accoutered--Ophelia on his one hand and the
high hat held in proper salute against his breast--he served upon the
official reception committee headed by the Rev. Potiphar Grasty and by
Prof. Rutherford B. H. Champers, principal of the Colored High School,
which greeted the first returning squad of service men of color.

Home-comers who had been clear across the ocean brought back with them
almost unbelievable but none the less fascinating accounts of life and
customs in foreign parts. The tales these traveled ones had to tell were
eagerly listened to and as eagerly passed along, dowered at each time
of retelling with prodigal enlargements and amplifications the most
generous.

A ferment of discontent began to stir under the surface of things; a
sort of inarticulate rebellion against existing conditions, which
presently manifested itself in small irritations at various points of
contact with the white race. It was nothing tangible as yet, nothing
upon which one might put a hand or cap with a word of comprehensive
description. Indeed it had been working for weeks like a yeast in the
minds of sundry black folk before their Caucasian neighbors began to
sense it at all, and for this there was a reason easily understandable
by anyone born and reared in any sizable town in any one of the older
states lying below Mason and Dixon's Line. For in each such community
there are two separate and distinct worlds--a black one and a white
one--interrelated by necessities of civic coordination and in an
economic sense measurably dependent one upon the other, and yet in many
other aspects as far apart as the North Pole is from the South.

Regarding what the white world is feeling and thinking and saying, the
lesser black world that is set down within it is