"Well, I guess that settles this case!" announced the foreman.

"Right!" echoed a talesman behind him.

"I object!" wailed O'Brien. "This is entirely improper!"

"Quite so!" ruled Judge Bender sternly. "The jurymen will not make any
remarks!"

"But, Your Honor--we all agreed at recess there was nothing in this
case," announced the foreman. "And now this testimony simply clinches
it. Why go on with it!"

"That's so!" ejaculated another. "Let us go, judge."

Mr. Tutt's weather-beaten face was wreathed in smiles.

"Easy, gentlemen!" he cautioned.

The judge shrugged his shoulders, frowning.

"This is very irregular!" he said.

Then he beckoned to O'Brien, and the two whispered together for several
minutes, while all over the court room on the part of those who had sat
there so patiently for sixty-nine days there was a prolonged and
ecstatic wriggling of arms and legs. Instinctively they all knew that
the farce was over.

The assistant district attorney returned to his table but did not sit
down.

"If the court please," he said rather wearily, "the last witness, Miss
Duryea, by her testimony, which I personally am quite ready to accept as
truthful, has interjected a reasonable doubt of the defendant's guilt
into what otherwise would in my opinion be a case for the jury. If Mock
Hen was at Hudson House, nearly two miles from Pell and Doyers Streets,
at four o'clock on the afternoon of the homicide, manifestly he could
not have been one of the assailants of Quong Lee at one minute past
four. I am satisfied that no jury would convict--"

"Not on your life!" snorted the foreman airily.

"--and I therefore," went on O'Brien, "ask the court to direct an
acquittal."

* * * * *

In the grand banquet hall of the Shanghai and Hongkong American-Chinese
Restaurant, Ephraim Tutt, draped in a blue mandarin coat with a tasseled
pill box rakishly upon his old gray head, sat beside Wong Get and Buddha
at the head of a long table surrounded by three hundred Chinamen in
their richest robes of ceremony. Lanterns of party-colored glass
swaying from gilded rafters shed a strange light upon a silken cloth
marvelously embroidered and laden with the choicest of Oriental dishes,
and upon the pale faces of the Hip Leong Tong--the Mocks, the Wongs, the
Fongs and the rest--both those who had testified and also those who had
merely been ready if duty called to do so, all of whom were now gathered
to