“His father’s a ‘Man of Silence,’” was the reply, “and Caesar himself knows all there is to know.  You’ll see.”

Arriving at the center of the crowd, just by the school gate, the boy turned, and speaking to the nearest officer, said, in English, without a trace of foreign accent, shrugging his shoulders: 

“Some of them won’t ever learn!”

For a moment he scanned the mob, called the names of two or three men on the outskirts, and Hamilton could see them wince as this fourteen-year-old lad named them; then he commenced a speech, which seemed,—­so far as Hamilton could tell—­to be ridiculing them for their fears.

The crowd relaxed, and for a moment Hamilton thought the whole trouble was over; but suddenly a man sprang to the front of the rioters, and gesticulating wildly, answered the boy in what seemed to be a threatening tone.  The young Italian lad heard him through patiently, then almost without raising his voice, uttered one crisp sentence.  The man turned white to the lips and slunk away.

“Ask him,” said Hamilton to a policeman, “what he said?”

“I only asked him,” the Italian said, “if he wanted me to find out his name—­so that you would know it if you wanted to arrest him of course,” he added, as an afterthought.

The policeman looked at him and pulled the boy’s ear, in fun.

“Av I knew as much about some things as you do,” he said, “they’d make me chief.  Maybe, though,” he added, “I wouldn’t hold it long.  But what about this, Caesar, is it all over?”

The Italian nodded.

“See,” he said, “they all go!”

It was as the boy said; Hamilton could see that little by little the crowd was dispersing and that the members of the boyish gang were going all through the groups, evidently explaining that the trouble was all over.

“Ye see what we’re up against,” the policeman said to Hamilton.  “Here’s a slip of a lad that c’n just make a crowd do what he says because his father is a leader in the Mafia.  There’s never any one gives credit enough to the force for keepin peace, between all these foreigners and the Chinks; this ain’t an American city, it’s a racial nightmare.”

“Do the Chinese give much trouble, then?”

“Not such a great deal usually, but they do once in a while.  There’s bloody murder in Chinatown going on now, or going to begin mighty soon.  Three were killed yesterday and the word was given out at Headquarters this morning that the Tongs were out.”

[Illustration:  THE FIGHTING MEN OF THE TONGS.  The younger combatants of the Five Brothers outside the impregnably guarded headquarters in Chinatown, New York.]

“Have we Tongs in New York?” asked Hamilton.  “I’ve heard all about the troubles in the West.  Before the fire in San Francisco, I know, there were fifteen organized Tongs of Highbinders, each with its paid band of ‘Hatchet Men’ for no other purpose than to rule Chinatown.  The man who got up the report for the government told me that ’Frisco Chinatown was far more under Tong rule and had far more crimes in proportion than any city in China.”