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Of Cephus it might be said, paraphrasing the lines about little dog Rover, that when he was saved he was saved all over. Being redeemed, he straightway disbanded his orchestra. He tore up his calling-card reading,

 

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 | PROFESSOR CEPHUS FRINGE ESQUIRE |
 

 | THE ANGLO-SAXOPHONE KING |
 

 | Address: Care Champey's Barber-Shop |
 

 |SOLE PROPRIETOR FRINGE'S ALL-STAR TROUPE |
 

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He enlisted under the militant banners and on the personal staff of the Sin Killer. Amply then was the prior design of his new commander justified. For if it was the eloquence, the magnetism, the compelling force of the revivalist which brought the penitents shouting down the tan-bark trail to the mourner’s bench, it was the harmonious croonings of Prof. Fringe as he conducted the introductory program–now rendering as a solo his celebrated original composition, “The Satan Blues,” now leading the special choir–which psychologically paved the way for the greater scene to follow after. There was distress in the devil’s glebe-lands when this pair struck their proper stride–first the Fringian outpourings harmoniously exalting the spirits of the assemblage and then the exhorters tying his hands to the Gospel plow and driving down into the populous valleys of sin, there to furrow and harrow, to sow and tend, to garner and glean.

The team had struck its stride early at the protracted meeting so competently fostered by the resident pastor of Emmanuel Chapel, the Rev. A. Risen Shine. To himself, as already stated, the latter took prideful credit for results achieved and results promised. Well he might. Already hundreds of converts had come halleluiahing through; hundreds more teetered and swayed, back and forth, between doubt and conviction, ready at a touch to fall like the ripe and sickled grain in the lap of the husbandman. Wavering brethren had been fortified and were made stalwart again. Confirmed backsliders rubbed their wayward feet in the resin of faith and were boosted up the treacherous skids of their temptation and over the citadel walls to bask among the chosen in a Jericho City of repentance. Proselytes from other and hostile creeds trooped over with hosannas and loud outcries of rejoicing. Even the place where, each evening, the triumph of the preceding evening was repeated and amplified seemed appropriate for such scenes. For the Twelfth Ward tabernacle had not always been a tabernacle; it had been a tobacco-warehouse–but it was converted. And its present chief ornament, next only to the Sin Killer himself–indeed, its chiefest ornament of all in the estimation of impressionable younger unmarried female members–was Prof. Cephus Fringe.

At thought of him and of this, Jeff Poindexter, reperched on his wabbly piggin, wove his furrowed brow into a closer and more intricate pattern of cordial dislike. For if the main reason of his unhappiness was Ophelia Stubblefield, the secondary reason and principal contributory cause was this same Cephus Fringe. Ophelia’s favorite letter may not have been F, but it should have been. She was fair, fickle, fawn-toned, flirty, flighty, and frequently false. Jeff cast back in his mind. He certainly had had his troubles since he became permanently engaged to Ophelia. For instance, there had been her affair with that ferocious razor-wielder Smooth Crumbaugh. In this matter the fortuitous return from the dead of Red Hoss Shackleford, as skilfully engineered by Jeff, had broken up Red Hoss’s own memorial services, had also operated to scare Smooth Crumbaugh clean out of Colored Odd Fellows’ Hall and leave the fainting Ophelia in the rescuing arms of Jeff. But there had been half a dozen other affairs, each of such intensity as temporarily to undermine Jeff’s peace of mind. Between spells of infatuations for attractive strangers, she accepted Jeff’s devotions. The trouble was, though, that life, with Ophelia, seemed to be just one infatuation after another. And now, to cap all, she had suffered herself, nay, offered herself, to fall thrall to the dashing personality and the varied accomplishments of this Fringe person. It was this entanglement which for two weeks past had made Jeff, her official ‘tween-times fiance, a prey to carking cares and dark forebodings.