Except when engaged in transacting legal or oilier business with the municipal, sociologic or religious world—­at which times his vocabulary consisted only of the most rudimentary pidgin—­Mock spoke a fluent and even vernacular English learned at night school.  Incidentally he was the head of the syndicate which controlled and dispensed the loo, faro, fan-tan and other gambling privileges of Chinatown.

* * * * *

Detective Mooney, of the Second, detailed to make good District Attorney Peckham’s boast that there had never been so little trouble with the foreign element since the administration—­of which he was an ornament—­came into office, saw Quong Lee emerge from his doorway in Doyers Street just before four o’clock the following Thursday and slip silently along under the shadow of the eaves toward Ah Fong’s grocery—­and instantly sensed something peculiar in the Chink’s walk.

“Hello, Quong!” he called, interposing himself.  “Where you goin’?”

Quong paused with a deprecating gesture of widely spread open palms.

“‘Lo yourself!” replied blandly.  “Me go buy li’l’ glocery.”

Mooney ran his hands over the rotund body, frisking him for a possible forty-four.

“For the love of Mike!” he exclaimed, tearing open Quong’s blouse.  “What sort of an undershirt is that?” Quong grinned broadly as the detective lifted the suit of double-chain mail which swayed heavily under his blue blouse from his shoulders to his knees.

“So-ho!” continued the plain-clothes man.  “Trouble brewin’, eh?”

He knew already that something was doing in the tongs from his lobby-gow, Wing Foo.

“Must weigh eighty pounds!” he whistled.  “I’d like to see the pill that would go through that!” It was, in fact, a medieval corselet of finest steel mesh, capable of turning an elephant bullet.

“Go’long!” ordered Mooney finally.  “I guess you’re safe!”

He turned back in the direction of Chatham Square, while Quong resumed his tortoiselike perambulation toward Ah Fong’s.  Pell and Doyers Streets were deserted save for an Italian woman carrying a baby, and were pervaded by an unnatural and suspicious silence.  Most of the shutters on the lower windows were down.  Ah Fong’s subsequent story of what happened was simple, and briefly to the effect that Quong, having entered his shop and priced various litchi nuts and pickled starfruit, had purchased some powdered lizard and, with the package in his left hand, had opened the door to go out.  As he stood there with his right hand upon the knob and facing the afternoon sun four shadows fell aslant the window and a man whom he positively identified as Sui Sing emptied a bag of powder—­afterward proved to be red pepper—­upon Quong’s face; then another, Long Get, made a thrust at him with a knife, the effect of which he did not observe, as almost at the same instant Mock Hen felled him with a blow upon the head