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.”