The judge smiled.
"I don't see why not!" he declared. "There isn't any precedent as far as I am aware. But he says he believes in the Deity. Isn't that enough?"
"Not unless he believes that the Deity will punish him if he breaks his oath," answered Mr. Tutt. "Let me try him on that?"
"Ah Fong, do you think God will punish you if you tell a lie?"
Fong looked blank. The interpreter fired a few salvos.
"He says it makes a difference the kind of oath."
"Suppose it is a promise to tell the truth?"
"He says what kind of a promise?"
"A promise on the Bible," answered Mr. Tutt patiently.
"He says what god you mean!" countered the interpreter.
"Oh, any god!" roared Mr. Tutt.
The interpreter, after a long parley, made reply.
"Ah Fong says there is no binding oath except on a chicken's head."
Judge Bender, O'Brien and Mr. Tutt gazed at one another helplessly.
"Well, there you are!" exclaimed the lawyer. "Mr. O'Brien's oath wasn't any oath at all! What kind of a chicken's head?"
"A white rooster."
"Quite so!" nodded Mr. Tutt. "Your Honor, I object to this witness being sworn by any oath or in any form except on the head of a white rooster!"
"Well, I don't happen to have a white rooster about me!" remarked O'Brien, while the jury rocked with glee. "Ask him if something else won't do. A big book for instance?"
The interpreter put the question and then shook his head. According to Ah Fong there was no virtue in books whatever, either large or small. On some occasions an oath could be properly taken on a broken plate—also white—but not in murder cases. It was chicken or nothing.
"Are you not willing to waive the formality of an oath, Mr. Tutt?" asked the judge in slight impatience.
"And wave my client into the chair?" demanded the lawyer. "No, sir!"
"I don't see what we can do except to adjourn court until you can procure the necessary poultry," announced Judge Bender. "Even then we can't slaughter them in court. We'll have to find some suitable place!"
"Why not kill one rooster and swear all the witnesses at once?" suggested Mr. Tutt in a moment of inspiration.
"My God, chief!" exclaimed O'Brien at four o'clock. "There ain't a white rooster to be had anywhere! Hens, yes! By the hundred! But roosters are extinct! Tomorrow will be the twenty-first day of this prosecution and not a witness sworn yet."
However, a poultryman was presently discovered who agreed simply for what advertising there was in it to furnish a crate of white roosters, a hatchet and a headsman's block, and to have them in the basement of the building promptly at ten o'clock.
Accordingly, at that hour Judge Bender convened Part IX of the General Sessions in the court room and then adjourned downstairs, where all the prospective witnesses for the prosecution were lined up in a body and told to raise their right hands.
Meantime Clerk McGuire was handed the hatchet, and approached the coop with obvious misgivings. Ah Fong had already given a dubious approval to the sex and quality of the fowls inside and naught remained but to submit the proper oath and remove the head of the unfortunate victim. A large crowd of policemen, witnesses, reporters, loafers, truckmen and others drawn by the unusual character of the proceedings had assembled and now proceeded without regard for the requirements of judicial dignity to encourage McGuire in his capacity of executioner, by profane shouts and jeers, to do his deadly deed.
But the clerk had had no experience with chickens and in bashfully groping for the selected rooster allowed several other occupants of the crate to escape. Instantly the air was filled with fluttering, squawking fowls while fifty frenzied police officers and Chinamen attempted vainly to reduce them to captivity again. In the midst of the mêlée McGuire caught his rooster, and fearful lest it should escape him managed somehow to decapitate it. The body, however, had been flopping around spasmodically several seconds upon the floor before he realized that the oath had not been administered, and his voice suddenly rose above the pandemonium in an excited brogue.
"Hold up your hands, you! You do solemnly swear that in the case of The People against Mock Hen you will tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God!"
But the interpreter was at that moment engaged in clasping to his bosom a struggling rooster and was totally unable to fulfill his functions. Meantime the jury, highly edified at this illustration of the administration of justice, gazed down upon the spectacle from the stairs.
"This farce has gone far enough!" declared Judge Bender disgustedly. "We will return to the court room. Put those roosters back where they belong!"
Once more the participants ascended to Part IX and Ah Fong took his seat in the witness chair. The interpreter's blouse was covered with pin-feathers and one of his thumbs was bleeding profusely.
"Ask the witness if the oath that he has now taken will bind his conscience?" directed the court.
Again the interpreter and Ah Fong held converse.
"He says," translated that official calmly, "that the chicken oath is all right in China, but that it is no good in United States, and that anyway the proper form of words was not used."
"Good Lord!" ejaculated O'Brien. "Where am I?"
"Me tell truth, all light," suddenly announced Ah Fong in English. "Go ahead! Shoot!" And he smiled an inscrutable age-long Oriental smile.
The jury burst into laughter.
"He's stringing you!" the foreman kindly informed O'Brien, who cursed silently.
"Go on, Mister District Attorney, examine the witness," directed the judge. "I shall permit no further variations upon the established forms of procedure."
Then at last and not until then—on the morning of the twenty-first day—did Ah Fong tell his simple story and the jury for the first time learn what it was all about. But by then they had entirely ceased to care, being engrossed in watching Mr. Tutt at his daily amusement of torturing O'Brien into a state of helpless exasperation.
Ah Fong gave his testimony with a clarity of detail that left nothing to be desired, and he was corroborated in most respects by the Italian woman, who identified Mock Hen as the Chinaman with the iron bar. Their evidence was supplemented by that of Bull Neck Burke and Miss Malone, who also were positive that they had seen Mock running from the scene of the murder at exactly four-one o'clock.
Mr. Tutt hardly cross-examined Fong at all, but with Mr. Burke he pursued very different tactics, speedily rousing the wrestler to such a condition of fury that he was hardly articulate, for the old lawyer gently hinted that Mr. Burke was inventing the whole story for the purpose of assisting his friends in the On Gee Tong.
"But I tell yer I don't know no Chinks!" bellowed Burke, looking more like a bull than ever. "This here Mock Hen run right by me. My goil saw him too. I looked at me ticker to get the time!"
"Ah! Then you expected to be a witness for the On Gee Tong!"
"Naw! I tell yer I was walkin' wit' me goil!"
"What is the lady's name?"
"Miss Malone."
"What is her occupation?"
"She's a gay burlesquer."
"A gay burlesquer?"
"Sure—champagne goil and gay burlesquer."
"A champagne girl!"
"Dat's what I said."
"You mean that she is upon the stage?"
"Sure—dat's it!"
"Oh!"