“Most certainly not!” retorted W.M.P. with the shadow of a sneer.

“Then I will bid you good-day,” said Mr. Tutt, taking his hat from the window ledge and turning to the door.  “And—­you young whippersnapper,” he added when once it had closed behind him and he had turned to shake his lean old fist at the place where W.M.P. presumably was still sitting, “I’ll show you how to treat a reputable member of the bar old enough to be your grandfather!  I’ll take the starch out of your darned Puritan collar!  I’ll harry you and fluster you and heckle you and make a fool of you, and I’ll roll you up in a ball and blow you out the window, and turn old Hassoun loose for an Egyptian holiday that will make old Rome look like thirty piasters!  You pinheaded, pretentious, pompous, egotistical, niminy-piminy—­”

“Well, well, Mr. Tutt, what’s the matter?” inquired Peckham, laying his hand on the old lawyer’s shoulder.  “What’s Peppy been doing to you?”

“It isn’t what he’s been doing to me; it’s what I’m going to do to him!” returned Mr. Tutt grimly.  “Just wait and see!”

“Go to it!” laughed the D.A.  “Eat him alive!  We’re throwing him to the lions!”

“No decent lion would want him!” retorted Mr. Tutt.  “He might maul him a little, but I won’t.  I’m just going to give him a full opportunity to test his little proposition that the institutions of these jolly old United States are perfectly adapted to settle quarrels among all the polyglot prevaricators of the world and administer justice among people who are still in a barbarous or at least in a patriarchal state.  He’s young, and he don’t understand that a New York merchant is entirely too conscientious to find a man guilty on testimony that he would discount heavily in his own business.”

“Go as far as you like,” laughed Peckham.

“Oh, I’m only going as far as Bagdad,” answered Mr. Tutt.

Deputy Assistant District Attorney Pepperill complacently set about the preparation of his case, utterly unconscious of the dangers with which his legal path was beset.  As he sat at his shiny oaken desk and pressed the button that summoned the stenographer it seemed to him the simplest thing in the world to satisfy any jury of what had taken place and the summit of impudent audacity on the part of Mr. Tutt to have suggested that Hassoun should be dealt with otherwise than a first-degree murderer.  And it should be added parenthetically that W.M.P., in spite of his New England temperament, had a burning ambition to send somebody to the electric chair.

In truth, on its face the story as related by Fajala Mokarzel and the other friends of Sardi Babu the deceased pillow-sham vender was simplicity itself.  Besides Sardi Babu and Mokarzel there had been Nicola Abbu, the confectioner; Menheem Shikrie, the ice-cream vendor; Habu Kahoots, the showman; and David Elias, a pedler.  All six of them, as they claimed, had been sitting peacefully in Ghabryel & Assad’s restaurant, eating kibbah arnabeiah and mamoul.  Sardi had ordered sheesh kabab.  It was about nine o’clock in the evening, and they were talking politics and drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.