KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ The tale so teased David Disney’s imagination that he thumb-tacked it right next to his computer. It was a newspaper story about a World War I painting, the size of a garage door, that simply vanished from Kansas City. ”It reminded me to keep looking for it,” he said. Nearly every day, he’d type ”Blashfield, The Call of Missouri.” Disney is a patient man. Six years and hundreds of searches passed. But Disney learned a lot about the artist and the painting commissioned by local women and given to the Kansas City Public Library. Then in March, while waiting for a conference call, he again cast the words into Google. And got a bite.

”I found it!” Disney yelled to his wife and then into a blizzard of phone calls to others in Kansas City. ”I found the Blashfield!”

The image was unmistakable. A sprawling work full of classical symbolism and grandiose metaphors, featuring a giant of a woman, helmeted and holding sheathed sword. A billowing U.S. flag waves above her head. She stares across the Missouri River at a distant World War I doughboy playing a trumpet.

Over her shoulder are four more soldiers, including a Confederate, from previous conflicts, all blowing trumpets and carrying flags from their wars.

The painting was hanging in a Dallas art gallery. Its price: $650,000.

But the library says it owns the Blashfield, and the library wants it back.

Within hours, Disney called Bob Malenfant, the owner of the Southwest Art Gallery in Dallas. He’s selling the painting for a client.

”A friend who wants to stay anonymous,” Malenfant told The Kansas City Star.

”He’s an attorney friend of mine who came across the painting at an antique shop in California and fell in love with it,” Malenfant said.

The owner’s art collections filled his two homes, ”but he’s downsizing now and moving to Florida.”

The painting is in excellent condition, he said. ”The owner was very worried about sunlight affecting it.”

So he placed the painting under ultraviolet glass as a shield, surrounded with a frame that is gold-leafed and ornate.

”A masterpiece for a masterpiece,” Malenfant said.

He’s had two other serious inquiries about buying it. Still, he said, ”I hope it does go back to Kansas City. I really do. But this is the business.”

Six art experts, from Los Angeles to New York City, expressed incredulity at the asking price, one laughing and suggesting that the dealer had added one too many zeros.

”What is he smoking? Sorry, but that painting isn’t very good either,” said Marc Wilson, retired director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, who had once searched the museum’s storage with his staff years ago for the missing painting.

The price was determined, according to documents, by an accredited fine art estimator, C. Van Northrup, who was hired by the anonymous owner to ensure its replacement value. Northrup died in March.

”Pricing for this is apples and oranges, and there’s no other apples to compare it with,” Malenfant responded. ”There has never been a Blashfield mural go on auction as far as I know because they’re always painted on walls. Except for this one.”

A Blashfield painting, much smaller, sold for $150,000, he said.

”And if you extrapolate it and multiply it out, that’s how Van Northrup came up with the price. I think it’s worth it. The painting is beautiful.”

Mina Rieur Weiner, a Blashfield scholar and author of ”Edwin Howland Blashfield: Master American Muralist,” clapped her hands with joy when she heard the missing Blashfield had been found. For years, she’s been looking for ”Blashfield’s lost children,” as she calls them. She found one mural in 2006 just by calling a courthouse in Pennsylvania.

”No one there knew it was lost because they’d been looking at it for decades,” she said. ”This is good news for the people of Kansas City.”

But not with a $650,000 price tag.

Still, Disney is an optimist. He called Crosby Kemper III, executive director of the Kansas City Public Library, who was so thrilled the painting was found that he even picked out a spot for it in the Central Library. But his zeal fizzled when he learned the price.

The library consulted a law firm to consider taking on, pro bono, the case of ownership. Coco Soodek, who is co-leader of the art law team at the Bryan Cave law office in Chicago, said her firm has agreed to take the case. Soodek said the Blashfield’s provenance, the history of its chain of possession, shows a date of 1918, Kansas City Public Library, commissioned by the Kansas City chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Public documents show the DAR asked to hang the painting in the Kansas City Public Library. And if it was ever removed, they were to be notified. But members of the local chapter of DAR can’t remember ever being asked.

Zelia Bell, corresponding secretary for the Kansas City chapter of the DAR, said her group would love to see the painting returned to Kansas City.

”If there’s a way to bring it back, it should go on public display and the library was right before (as a location). It sounds like it would be right again.”

DAR members are watching with interest to see what happens.

The painting’s provenance should tell how the painting left Kansas City, or whether it was abandoned or sold.

Soodek believes there is a strong case that it belongs here.

”We’re going to discover whether the Kansas City Public Library system is the proper owner of the painting. If the private owner can’t produce a record of sale, this painting may return to the people of Kansas City,” she said. ”It’s not only property but a cultural artifact. There was a grassroots effort and crowd-sourcing by the Daughters of the American Revolution to raise the $10,000 to create the painting and gift it to the Kansas City Public Library.”

On May 17, Bryan Cave sent a letter to the Southwest Art Gallery demanding that the Blashfield be returned.

The 2007 newspaper article is still next to Disney’s computer. It tells how the Blashfield disappeared some 30 years ago from its home at the old library at 500 E. Ninth St.

The piece was commissioned in 1918 by the DAR to remember Missouri’s contribution to World War I. They chose Edwin H. Blashfield, an artist once hailed as the dean of American muralists.

To this day, his paintings and murals still grace many state capitols, including those in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa, as well as the dome of the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress titled ”The Evolution of Civilization.” One painting, ”Spirit of the West” _ seen today by many as insulting to Native Americans _ has been shrouded since 1971 by order of the South Dakota governor.

In July 1918, ”The Call of Missouri” arrived from New York City. Its journey was documented by The Kansas City Star and The New York Times, which photographed Blashfield standing proudly before his finished piece in his Carnegie Hall studio.

It was installed in the library, which also housed the Board of Education, the Western Gallery of Art and the Dyer Collection of Native American artifacts. The painting was a focal point. (And maybe it hinted the state loved trumpet players, too.)

Years passed. The DAR members who had commissioned the painting died, a new world war consumed America, and the giant canvas seemed less patriotic and more caricature, a white elephant reflecting a bygone era, quaint and outdated.

In 1960, the library moved to a new building on 12th Street. Movers left behind myriad things, like furniture, dusty artworks and boxes of handwritten records. Copies of masterpieces, donated by newspaper publisher William Rock-hill Nelson, were reminders that the old Western Gallery of Art was once on the second floor. There were two life-size marble sculptures _ just cheap copies, it was assumed _ of the work of expatriate American sculptor Randolph Rogers.

And hanging on the east wall rotunda, on the mantel above the fireplace, was Blashfield’s mural.

The building’s new owners, the U.S. Trade School Inc., were delighted with the castoffs. A feature writer from The Star walked through the school with president Illeane Littrell. Art was strewn about, left in piles. Grainy black-and-white newspaper photos showed at least one of the Rogers’ sculptures and several paintings leaning against a wall.

Littrell smiles in one photo, her hands clasped in glee. It all now belonged to her, she said. Growing up in Kansas, she had dreamed of being an art teacher. She vowed to employ this artwork for the edification of the students who signed on with her trade school, even as they worked repairing engines. The art, Littrell hoped, would add a note of culture and cheer.

In 1974, in a report by the Kansas City Landmarks Commission, an inspector took note that ”The Call of Missouri” was hanging in the second-floor auditorium. In the summer of 1979, a librarian from the Kansas City Public Library, Jean Bowen, was given a tour of the trade school. She saw the painting and mentioned it in a handwritten note: ”I saw the mural the DAR chapter gave the library … on the second floor of the old building.”

Six months later, with the death of Littrell, Melvin M. Ponick, her longtime fiance and executive vice president of the school, took over and became the major stockholder.

But student enrollment kept declining and the school laid off instructors, then lost its accreditation. A Star article in 1982 told about angry parents who said the school wasn’t heating its space, apparently to save money.

In September 1983, instead of classes, the school held an auction. Ponick was

quoted in The Star, saying the school was trying to pay off its debts. In May 1984, another article announced the building would be sold on the courthouse steps. At the last minute, Ozark National Life stepped in and bought it. Their records show that construction workers found only an empty building, ready for renovation.

The Blashfield was gone.

Two former students of the U.S. Trade School (class of 1983) remembered seeing the ”lady in white.” But there’s no mention of it from the auction.

Disney, who loves history and mysteries, is searching for any auction records, receipts, taxes paid, anything that might document the painting’s removal from the building.

”You can’t just lift it off the wall and ship it. It’s too big and heavy,” he reasoned.

The painting might have been in a mass sell-off of contents to an antique dealer. Or it might have been given to someone. Or it might have been sold by itself, without any record, but that could possibly be illegal.

”If the records of the painting’s sale are out there, I’ll find them,” Disney said.

Disney (no relation to Walt Disney) is communications director for J.E. Dunn Construction Co. He sits on at least five civic boards in Kansas City and is on an executive committee for the Boy Scouts. It was Disney’s diligent searching that found an old steeple bell in Ohio, circa 1880, which was the perfect touch to grace the top of a Dunn reconstruction project for Webster House.

A few months ago he also found the architectural drawings of the former YM-CA on the Paseo, a document with pencil drawings and measurements, instructions to add authenticity to its current reconstruction.

The Blashfield does not appear to have been passed on to family members of the school’s owners. Allan Dye, a nephew of Illeane Littrell who lives in northeast Oklahoma, recalled getting a memento after the building was sold.

”A few pieces of marble taken out of a bathroom,” he said. ”But no art.”

There’s a growing file on artworks missing from the library, kept in its Missouri Valley Special Collections. Eli Paul, the manager, shook his head when asked about other losses. He’s proud of the handwritten note by the librarian in 1979 documenting that she saw the Blashfield, but he blames past librarians for failing to document others. Many things disappeared in the library’s moves, he said.

”Many people are looking for the William Merritt Chase,” Paul said of an original painting by the American impressionist and portraitist that was said to have hung in the former Western Gallery of Art.

Today no one even knows for sure what it looked like. He’s also heard the rumors that one of the Rogers sculptures was not a copy, but an original. An art historian and researcher whose thesis was on lost artwork believed she had tracked down one of them, now in an East Coast art museum.

The search for the Blashfield took on life in 1992 when a graduate art scholar named Derrick Cartwright wrote letters to Ozark National Life, the library and the Nelson asking them to look in their storage for the Blashfield. Cartwright, who later became the director of the San Diego Museum of Art, then the Seattle Art Museum, now teaches at the University of San Diego.

It was Cartwright’s letter that first alerted everyone that a big piece of local history had walked off. He’s thrilled that Blashfield’s ”The Call of Missouri” has made an appearance.

”Blashfield’s connection with Kansas City is through the painting,” he said. ”It needs to come home. … But how did it land in Dallas?”