One afternoon Dewitt and his wife was sitting on their front porch. Dewitt was trying to get back his strength by sipping something cool and taking in the sun. And up the front lawn, dressed in African clothes of bright colors, with a spear and a shield, comes the African, bearing down on the house like he was a train and it was a tunnel and he was going right through—which he did, on out the back door, across the back lawn to the slave quarters, where he freed every last one of Dewitt’s Negroes and led them off into the dark of the woods before Dewitt could even set down his glass and get up out of his chair.

Well, if that wasn’t enough, the next night almost the same thing happened to a fellow east of New Marsails. He came into town and told everybody about it: “I was sleeping peaceful when I heared this noise outside down by the slave cabins. God damn, when I rushed to the window if I didn’t see all my niggers heading into the woods behind a man who was as big anyways as a black horse on its hind legs. And there was another one too,” the fellow went on, “never more than a few steps behind the big one, waving his arms and telling my niggers what to do and where to go.”

Even though he was still ailing, Dewitt Willson came into town and stood up in front of a big meeting they was holding to try and solve the problem and said: “Now I swear to you, I’m not going home until I can take the African or what’s left of him with me. And let everybody know this: white or black, anybody who can give me news that’ll help me catch the African will be walking around the next day with a thousand of my dollars in his pocket.” And that news spread like the smell of cooking cabbage, spread all up and down the region so that years after, if you’d gone into Tennessee and mentioned you was from down this way, somebody’s ask: “Say, who did get Dewitt Willson’s thousand?”