The honor of the Ducks, Longs and Fongs would not be satisfied unless Mr. Tutt received five thousand dollars down, five more if Mock Hen was convicted, three more if he died before the conclusion of the trial, and twenty thousand if he was acquitted.
Mr. Tutt, assuming an equal impassivity, pondered upon the matter for about an inch of stogy and then informed the committee that the terms were eminently satisfactory. Buddha thereupon removed from the folds of his tunic a gigantic roll of soiled bills of all denominations and carefully counting out five thousand dollars placed it upon the table.
"H'm!" remarked Tutt when he learned of the proceeding. "His face is our fortune!"
"Look here," expostulated District Attorney Peckham in his office to Mr. Tutt a month later. "What's the use of our both wasting a couple of weeks trying a Chinaman who is bound to be convicted? Your time's too valuable for that sort of thing, and so is mine. We've got three white witnesses that saw him do it, and a couple of dozen Chinks besides. He doesn't stand a chance; but just because he is a Chink, and to get the case out of the way, I'll let you plead him to murder in the second degree. What do you say?"
He tried to conceal his anxiety by nervously lighting a cigar. He would have given a year's salary to have Mock Hen safely up the river, even on a conviction for manslaughter in the third, for the newspapers were making his life a burden with their constant references to the seeming inability of the police department and district attorney's office to prevent the recurrence of feud killings in the Chinatown districts. What use was it, they demanded, to maintain the expensive machinery of criminal justice if the tongs went gayly on shooting each other up and incidentally taking the lives of innocent bystanders? Wasn't the law intended to cover Chinamen as much as Italians, Poles, Greeks and niggers? And now that one of these murdering Celestials had been caught red-handed it was up to the D.A. to go to it, convict him, and send him to the chair! They did not express themselves precisely that way, but that was the gist of it. But Peckham knew that it was one thing to catch a Chinaman, even red-handed, and another to convict him. And so did Mr. Tutt.
The old lawyer smiled blandly—after the fashion of the Hip Leong Tong. Of course, he admitted, it would be much simpler to dispose of the case as Mr. Peckham suggested, but his client was insistent upon his innocence and seemed to have an excellent alibi. He regretted, therefore, that he had no choice except to go to trial.
"Then," groaned Peckham, "we may as well take the winter for it. After this there's going to be a closed season on Chinamen in New York City!"
Now though it was true that Mock Hen insisted upon his innocence, he had not insisted upon it to Mr. Tutt, for the latter had not seen him. In fact, the old lawyer, recognizing what the law did not, namely that a system devised for the trial and punishment of Occidentals is totally inadequate to cope with the Oriental, calmly went about his affairs, intrusting to Mr. Bonnie Doon of his office the task of interviewing the witnesses furnished by Wong Get. There was but one issue for the jury to pass upon. Quong Lee was dead and his honorable soul was with his illustrious ancestors. He had died from a single blow upon the head, delivered with an iron bar, there present, to be in evidence, marked "Exhibit A." Mock Hen was alleged to have done the deed. Had he? There would be nothing for Mr. Tutt to do but to cross-examine the witnesses and then call such as could testify to Mock's alibi. So he made no preparation at all and dismissed the case from his mind. He had hardly seen a dozen Chinamen in his life—outside of a laundry.
On the morning set for the trial Mr. Tutt, having been delayed by an accident in the Subway, entered the Criminal Courts Building only a moment or two before the call of the calendar. Somewhat preoccupied, he did not notice the numerous Chinamen who dawdled about the entrance or the half dozen who crowded with him into the elevator, but when Pat the elevator man called, "Second floor!—Part One to your right!—Part Two to the left!" and he stepped out into the marble-floored corridor that ran round the inside of the building, he was confronted with an unusual and somewhat ominous spectacle.
The entire hallway on two sides of the building was lined with Chinamen! They sat there motionless as blue-coated images, faces front, their hands in their laps, their legs crossed beneath them. If anyone appeared in the offing a couple of hundred pairs of glinting eyes shifted automatically and followed him until he disappeared, but otherwise no muscle quivered.
"Say," growled Hogan, Judge Bender's private attendant, who was the first to run the gantlet, "those Chinks are enough to give you the Willies! Their eyes scared me to death, sticking me through the back!"
Even dignified Judge Bender himself as he stalked along the hall, preceded by two police officers, was not immune from a slight feeling of uncanniness, and he instinctively drew his robe round his legs that it might not come into contact with those curious slippers with felt soles that protruded across the marble slabs.
"Eyes right!" They had picked him up the instant he stepped out of the private elevator—the four hundred of them. If he turned and looked they were seemingly not watching him, but if he dropped his glance they swung back in a single moment and focused themselves upon him. And every one of them probably had a gun hidden somewhere in his baggy pants! The judge confessed to not liking these foreign homicide cases. You never could tell what might happen or when somebody was going to get the death sign. There was Judge Deasy—he had the whole front of his house blown clean out by a bomb! That had been a close call! And these Chinks—with their secret oaths and rituals—they'd think nothing at all of jabbing a knife into you. He didn't fancy it at all and, as he hurried along, supremely conscious of the deadly cumulative effect of those beady eyes, he fancied it less and less. What was there to prevent one of them from getting right up in court and putting a bullet through you? He shivered, recalling the recent assassination of a judge upon the bench by a Hindu whom he had sentenced. When he reached his robing room he sent for Captain Phelan.
"See here, captain," he directed sharply, "I want you to keep all those Chinamen out in the corridor; understand?"
"I've got to let some of 'em in, judge," urged Phelan. "You've got to have an interpreter—and there's a Chinese lawyer associated with Tutt & Tutt—and of course Mr. O'Brien has to have a couple of 'em so's he'll know what's going on. Y' see, judge, the On Gee Tong is helping the prosecution against the Hip Leongs, so both sides has to be more or less represented."
"Well, make sure none of 'em is armed," ordered Judge Bender. "I don't like these cases."
Now the judge, being recently elected and unfamiliar with the situation, did not realize that nothing could have been farther from the Oriental mind or intention than an attack upon the officers engaged in the administration of local justice, whom they regarded merely as nuisances. What these Chinamen supremely desired was to be allowed to settle their own affairs in their own historic and traditional way—the way of the revolver, the silken cord, the knife and the iron bar. Once enmeshed in Anglo-Saxon juridical procedure, to be sure, they were not averse to letting it run its course on the bare chance that it might automatically accomplish their revenge. But they distrusted it, being brought up according to a much more effective system—one which when it wanted to punish anybody simply reached out, grabbed him by the pigtail, yanked him to his knees and sliced off his head. This so-called American justice was all talk—words, words, words! From their point of view judges, jurymen and prosecutors were useless pawns in life's game of chess. Perhaps they are! Who knows!
When Judge Bender entered the court room it was, in spite of his injunction, full of blue blouses. A special panel of two hundred talesmen filled the first half dozen rows of benches, the others being occupied by witnesses both Chinese and white, policemen and the miscellaneous human flotsam and jetsam that always manages somehow or other to find its way to a murder trial. Inside the rail O'Brien, the assistant district attorney, was busy in conversation with three cueless Chinamen in American clothes. At the bar sat Mock Hen with Mr. Tutt beside him, flanked by Wong Get, Tutt, Bonnie Doon and Buddha.
The judge beckoned Mr. Tutt and O'Brien to the front of the bench.
"Is there any chance of disposing of this case by a plea?" he inquired.