riest, ef ever I looked on the
spittin'-image of a natchel-born marryin' nigger, dat ver' same Duvall
is de one."

Judge Priest seemed not to have heard this last. He sat for a bit
apparently studying the tips of his square-toed, low-quarter shoes.

"Jeff," he said when he had given his feet a long half minute of seeming
consideration, "I would like to know some facts about the previous life
and general history of the individual we've been discussin'--I really
would. In fact my curiosity is sech that I might even be willin' to
spend a little money out of my own pocket, ef needs be, in order to find
out. So I was jest wonderin' whether you wouldn't like to take a little
trip, with all expenses paid, and tour round through some of our sister
states and make a few private inquiries. It occurs to me that everything
considered you might make a better job of it as an amateur investigator
than a regular professional detective of a different color might. Do you
know where by any chance you could git hold of a good photograph of this
here individual--I mean without lettin' him know anything about it?"

"Yas, suh, dat I does," stated Jeff briskly.

The conference between master and man lasted perhaps fifteen minutes
longer before Jeff was dismissed for the night. Mainly it dealt with
ways, means and purposes. Upon the heels of it, within forty-eight hours
two events--seemingly nowise related or bearing one upon the
other--occurred. An ornately framed photograph lately bestowed as a gift
and treasured as a trophy of sentimental value mysteriously vanished
from the mantelpiece of the front room of Ophelia Stubblefield's pa's
house; and Jefferson Poindexter, carrying a new and very shiny suitcase,
unostentatiously left town late at night on a southbound train.

Darktown in Nashville knew him for a brief space as a visiting nobleman
with money in all his pockets and apparently nothing of importance to do
except to spend it in divertisements suitable to the social instincts of
a capitalist of leisure. In Mobile at the Elite Colored Beauty Parlors
for the first time in his life he tendered his finger nails for
ministrations at the hands of a dashing chocolate-ice-cream-colored
manicurist and spent the remainder of that same afternoon in a sunny
spot, glistening pleasantly.

If in both these cities and likewise in Little Rock, which next he
favored with his presence, he made himself known to brothers of his
particular lodge--the A