With the United States at War with Germany, Samuel Jacks decides he can best serve his country by rooting out German spies. He has all the tools needed for such detective work: a gun and a Sherlockian calabash pipe. When the first spy he captures turns out to be a Schwartz who is a Black man, he is undaunted... and locates what he thinks is another nest of German spies in a Black fraternity that loves vicious practical jokes.
It's one of the all-Black comedies (except for the Irish cops in one scene) issued by the short-lived Ebony Film Corporation. The structure, of an extended practical joke, is fairly old-fashioned for 1918, but given that this was meant for the Black film houses, that would likely not have been considered a drawback at the time; the performance by Mr. Jacks, although it relied on the comic stereotypes of the period, would have likely been considered no more outrageous than all the White comics doing Chaplin imitations.