“Ah-hah!” said the judge, sipping reflectively. Jeff fidgeted and drew nearer a halfopen window, listening out into the maple-lined street. Two blocks down the street he could hear the colored brass band playing in front of the Colored Odd Fellows Hall for a “festibul.” “Jeff,” said Judge Priest musingly, “violence or a show of violence is always to be deplored.” Jeff had only a hazy idea of what the old judge meant by that, but in all his professional life Jeff had never intentionally disagreed in conversation with any white adult--let alone a generous employer. So: “Yas, suh,” assented Jeff promptly; “it suttinly is.” “But there are times and places,” went on the old judge, “when it is necessary.” “Yas, suh,” said Jeff, catching the drift--“lak at a racetrack!” “Ah-hah! Quite so,” said Judge Priest, nodding. “And, Jeff, did it ever occur to you that there are better ways of killin' a cat than by chokin' him with butter?” “Indeed yas, suh,” said Jeff. “Sometimes you kin do it best with one of these yere ole rusty Confedrit guns!” At that precise moment, in a little house on the next street, Sergeant Jimmy Bagby's family, having prevailed upon him to remove his shoes and his cartridge-belt before retiring, were severally engaged in an attempt to dissuade him from a firmly expressed purpose of taking his Springfield musket to bed with him. III. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS REWARD We had a feud once down in our country, not one of those sanguinary feuds of the mountains involving a whole district and forcing constant enlargements of hillside burying grounds, nor yet a feud handed down as a deadly legacy from one generation to another until its origin is forgotten and its legatees only know how they hate without knowing why, but a shabby, small neighborhood vendetta affecting but two families only, and those in a far corner of the county--the Flemings and the Faxons. Nevertheless, this feud, such as it was, persisted in a sluggish intermittent kind of a way for twenty years or so. It started in a dispute over a line boundary away back in War Times when a Faxon shot a Fleming and was in turn shot by another Fleming; and it lasted until the Faxons tired of fence-corner, briar-patch warfare and moved down into Tennessee, all but one branch of them, who came into town and settled there, leaving the Flemings dominant in the Gum Spring precinct. So the feud ceased to be an institution after that and became a memory, living only in certain smouldering animosities which manifested themselves at local elections and the like, until it flared up momentarily in the taking-off of old Ranee Fleming at the hands of young Jim Faxon; and then it died, and died for good.