But Mr. Tutt was taking no chances and, upon the forty-third day of the trial, at a nod from the bench, he opened his case.  Never had he been more serious; never more persuasive.  Abandoning every suggestion of frivolity, he weighed the testimony of each white witness and pointed out its obvious lack of probative value.  Not one, he said, except the Italian woman, had had more than a fleeting glance of the face of the man now accused of the crime.  Such an identification was useless.  The Chinamen were patently lying.  They had not been there at all!  Would any member of the jury hang a dog, even a yellow one, on such testimony?  Of course not!  Much less a human being.  The people had called forty witnesses to prove that Mock Hen had killed Quong Lee.  It made no difference.  The On Gee could have just as easily produced four hundred.  Moreover, Mr. Tutt did a very daring thing.  He pronounced all Chinese testimony in an American court of justice as absolutely valueless, and boasted that for every Chinaman who swore Mock Hen was guilty he would bring forward two who would swear him innocent.

The thing was, as he had carefully explained to Bonnie Doon, to prove that Mock was a good Chinaman and, if the jury did not believe that there was any such animal, to convince them that it was possible.  His first task, however, was to polish off the Chinese testimony by calling the witnesses who had been secured under the guidance of Wong Get.  He admitted afterward that in view of the exclusion law he had not supposed there were so many Chinamen in the United States, for they crowded the corridors and staircases of the Criminal Courts Building, arriving in companies—­the Wong family, the Mocks, the Fongs, the Lungs, the Sues, and others of the sacred Hip Sing Society from near at hand and from distant parts—­from Brooklyn and Flatbush, from Flushing and Far Rockaway, from Hackensack and Hoboken, from Trenton and Scranton, from Buffalo and Saratoga, from Chicago and St. Louis, and each and every one of them swore positively upon the severed neck of the whitest rooster—­the broken fragments of the whitest of porcelain plates—­the holiest of books—­that he had been present in person at Fulton Market in New York City at precisely four-fifteen o’clock in the afternoon and assisted Mock Hen, the defendant, in selecting and purchasing a terrapin for stew.

Mr. Tutt grinned at the jury and the jury grinned affectionately back at Mr. Tutt.  Indeed, after the length of time they had all been together they had almost as much respect for him as for the judge upon the bench.  The whole court seemed to be a sort of Tutt Club, of which even O’Brien was a member.

“Now,” said Mr. Tutt, “I will call a few witnesses to show you what kind of a man this is whom these highbinders accuse of the crime of murder!”

Mock, rolling his eyes heavenward, assumed an expression of infantile helplessness and trust.

“Don’t overdo it!” growled Tutt.  “Just look kind of gentle.”