“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 together to pay honor where they felt honor to be due; namely, at the shrine of Mr. Tutt.

Deft Chinese waiters slipped silently from guest to guest with bird’s-nest soup, guy soo main, mon goo guy pan, shark’s fin and lung har made of shreds of lobster, water chestnuts, rice and the succulent shoots of the young bamboo, while three musicians in a corner sang through their nose a syncopated dirge.  “Wang-ang-ang-ang!” it rose and fell as Mr. Tutt, his neck encircled by a wreath of lilies, essayed to manipulate a pair of long black chop-sticks.  “Wang-ang-ang-ang!” About him were golden limes, ginger in syrup, litchi nuts, pickled leeches.