Tutt and Mr. Tutt Part 9

Again the interpreter and Ah Fong held converse.

"He says," translated that official calmly, "that the chicken oath is all right in China, but that it is no good in United States, and that anyway the proper form of words was not used."

"Good Lord!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed O'Brien. "Where am I?"

"Me tell truth, all light," suddenly announced Ah Fong in English. "Go ahead! Shoot!" And he smiled an inscrutable age-long Oriental smile.

The jury burst into laughter.

"He's stringing you!" the foreman kindly informed O'Brien, who cursed silently.

"Go on, Mister District Attorney, examine the witness," directed the judge. "I shall permit no further variations upon the established forms of procedure."

Then at last and not until then--on the morning of the twenty-first day--did Ah Fong tell his simple story and the jury for the first time learn what it was all about. But by then they had entirely ceased to care, being engrossed in watching Mr. Tutt at his daily amus.e.m.e.nt of torturing O'Brien into a state of helpless exasperation.

Ah Fong gave his testimony with a clarity of detail that left nothing to be desired, and he was corroborated in most respects by the Italian woman, who identified Mock Hen as the Chinaman with the iron bar. Their evidence was supplemented by that of Bull Neck Burke and Miss Malone, who also were positive that they had seen Mock running from the scene of the murder at exactly four-one o'clock.

Mr. Tutt hardly cross-examined Fong at all, but with Mr. Burke he pursued very different tactics, speedily rousing the wrestler to such a condition of fury that he was hardly articulate, for the old lawyer gently hinted that Mr. Burke was inventing the whole story for the purpose of a.s.sisting his friends in the On Gee Tong.

"But I tell yer I don't know no c.h.i.n.ks!" bellowed Burke, looking more like a bull than ever. "This here Mock Hen run right by me. My goil saw him too. I looked at me ticker to get the time!"

"Ah! Then you expected to be a witness for the On Gee Tong!"

"Naw! I tell yer I was walkin' wit' me goil!"

"What is the lady's name?"

"Miss Malone."

"What is her occupation?"

"She's a gay burlesquer."

"A gay burlesquer?"

"Sure--champagne goil and gay burlesquer."

"A champagne girl!"

"Dat's what I said."

"You mean that she is upon the stage?"

"Sure--dat's it!"

"Oh!" Mr. Tutt looked relieved.

"What had you and Miss Malone been doing that afternoon?"

"I told yer--walkin'."

Mr. Tutt coughed slightly.

"Is that all?"

"Say, watcha drivin' at?"

Mr. Tutt elevated his bushy eyebrows.

"How do you earn your living?" he demanded, changing his method of attack.

Bull Neck allowed his head to sink still farther into the vast bulk of his immense torso, strangely resembling, in this position, the fabled anthropophagi whose heads are reputed thus to "grow beneath their shoulders."

Then throwing out his jaw he announced proudly between set teeth: "I'm a perfessor of physical sculture!"

The jury sn.i.g.g.e.red. Mr. Tutt appeared politely puzzled.

"A professor of what?"

"A perfessor of physical sculture!" repeated Bull Neck with great satisfaction.

"Oh! A professor of physical sculpture!" exclaimed Mr. Tutt, light breaking over his wrinkled countenance. "And what may that be?"

Bull Neck looked round disgustedly at the jury as if to say: "What ignorance!"

"Trainin' an' developin' prominent people!" he explained.

"Um!" remarked Mr. Tutt. "Who invited you to testify in this case?"

"Mr. Mooney."

"Oh, you're a friend of Mooney's! That is all!"

Now it is apparent from these questions and answers that Mr. Burke had testified to nothing to his discredit and had conducted himself as a gentleman and a sportsman according to his best lights. Yet owing to the subtle suggestions contained in Mr. Tutt's inflections and demeanor the jury leaped unhesitatingly to the conclusion that here was a man so ignorant and debased that if he were not deliberately lying he was being made a cat's-paw by the police in the interest of the On Gee Tong.

Miss Malone fared even worse, for after a preliminary skirmish she flatly refused to give Mr. Tutt or the jury any information whatever regarding her past life, while Mooney, of course, labored from the beginning to the end of his testimony under the curse of being a policeman, one of that cla.s.s whom most jurymen take pride in saying they hold in natural distrust. In a word, the white witnesses to the dastardly murder of Quong Lee created a general impression of unreliability upon the minds of the jury, who wholly failed to realize the somewhat obvious truth that the witnesses to a crime in Chinatown will naturally if not inevitably be persons who either reside in or frequent that locality.

Twenty-four days had now been consumed in the trial, and as yet no Chinese witnesses except Ah Fong had been called. Now, however, they appeared in cohorts. Though Mooney had sworn that the streets were practically empty at the time of the homicide forty-one Chinese witnesses swore positively that they had been within easy view, claiming variously to have been behind doors, peeking through shutters, at upper windows and even on the roofs. All had identified Mock Hen as the murderer, and none of them had ever heard of either the On Gee or the Hip Leong Tong! Mr. Tutt could not shake them upon cross-examination, and O'Brien began to show signs of renewed confidence. Each testified to substantially the same story and they occupied seventeen full days in the telling, so that when the prosecution rested, forty-two days had been consumed since the first talesman had been called. The trial had sunk into a dull, unbroken monotony, as Mr. Tutt said, of the "vain repet.i.tions of the heathen." Yet the police and the district attorney had done all that could reasonably have been expected of them. They were simply confronted by the very obvious fact--a condition and not a theory--that the legal processes of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence are of slight avail in dealing with people of another race.

Now it is possible that even had Mr. Tutt put in no defense whatever the jury might have refused to convict, for there was a curious air of unreality surrounding the whole affair. It all seemed somehow as if--a.s.suming that it had ever taken place at all--it had occurred in some other world and in some other age. Perhaps under what might have been practically a direction of the court a verdict of conviction might have been returned--but it is doubtful. The more witnesses testified to exactly the same thing in precisely the same words the less likely it appeared to be.

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 p.r.o.nounced 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 Flus.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sisted 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.