Having, by brisk scratching movements, assuaged the irritation between his shoulder blades, the judge picked up his pen and shoved it across a sheet of legal cap that already was half covered with his fine, close writing. He never dictated his decisions, but always wrote them out by hand. The pen nib travelled along steadily for awhile. Eventually words in a typewritten petition that rested on the desk at his left caught the judge's eye. “Huh!” he grunted, and read the quoted phrase, “'True Believers' Afro-American Church of Zion, sometimes called----'” Without turning his head he again hailed his slumbering servitor: “Jeff, why do yourall call that there little church-house down by the river Possum Trot?” Jeff roused and grunted, shaking his head dear of the lingering dregs of drowsiness. “Suh?” he inquired. “Wuz you speakin' to me, Jedge?” “Yes, I was. Whut's the reason amongst your people fur callin' that little church down on the river front Possum Trot?” Jeff chuckled an evasive chuckle before he made answer. For all the close relations that existed between him and his indulgent employer, Jeff had no intention of revealing any of the secrets of the highly secretive breed of humans to which he belonged. His is a race which, upon the surface of things, seems to invite the ridicule of an outer and a higher world, yet dreads that same ridicule above all things. Show me the white man who claims to know intimately the workings of his black servant's mind, who professes to be able to tell anything of any negro's lodge affiliations or social habits or private affairs, and I will show you a born liar. Mightily well Jeff understood the how and the why and the wherefore of the derisive hate borne by the more orthodox creeds among his people for the strange new sect known as the True Believers. He could have traced out step by step, with circumstantial detail, the progress of the internal feud within the despised congregation that led to the upspringing of rival sets of claimants to the church property, and to the litigation that had thrown the whole tangled business into the courts for final adjudication. But except in company of his own choosing and his own colour, wild horses could not have drawn that knowledge from Jeff, although it would have pained him to think any white person who had a claim upon his friendship suspected him of concealment of any detail whatsoever. “He-he,” chuckled Jeff. “I reckin that's jes' nigger foolishness. Me, I don' know no reason why they sh'd call a church by no sech a name as that. I ain't never had no truck wid 'em ole True Believers, myse'f. I knows some calls 'em the Do-Righters, and some calls 'em the Possum Trotters.” His tone subtly altered to one of innocent bewilderment: “Whut you doin', Jedge, pesterin' yo'se'f wid sech low-down trash as them darkies is?”