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