by Arthur Train
The evidence respecting the death of the unfortunate Quong Lee made little impression upon them. Seemingly they regarded the story much as they did that of Elisha and the bears or Bel and the dragon-as a sort of apocryphal narrative which they were required to listen to, but in no wise bound to believe. They were much interested in Quong's suit of chain mail, however, and from time to time awoke to enjoy the various verbal encounters between the judge and Mr. Tutt. As factors in the proceedings they did not count, except to receive their two dollars per diem, board, lodging and hack fare.
The trial of Mock Hen being conducted in a foreign language, the first judicial step was the swearing of an interpreter. The On Gees had promptly produced one, whom O'Brien told the court was a very learned man; a graduate of the Imperial University at Peking, and a Son of the Sacred Dragon. Be that as it may, he was not prepossessing in his appearance and Mr. Tutt assured Judge Bender that far from being what the district attorney pretended, the man was a well-known gambler, who made his living largely by blackmail. He might be a son of a dragon or he might not; anyway he was a son of Belial. An interpreter was the conduit through which all the evidence must pass. If the official were biased or corrupt the testimony would be distorted, colored or suppressed.
Now he-Mr. Tutt-had an interpreter, the well-known Dr. Hong Su, against whom nothing could be said, and upon whose fat head rested no imputation of partiality; a graduate of Harvard, a writer of note, a-
O'Brien sprang to his feet: “My interpreter says your interpreter is an opium smuggler, that he murdered his aunt in Hong Kong, that he isn't a doctor at all, and that he never graduated from anything except a chop-suey joint,” he interjected.
“This is outrageous!” cried Mr. Tutt, palpably shocked at such language.
“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” groaned Judge Bender. “What am I to do? I don't know anything about these men. One looks to me about the same as the other. The court has no time to inquire into their antecedents. They may both be learned scholars or they may each be what the other says he is-I don't know. But we've got to begin to try this case sometime.”
It was finally agreed that in order that there might be no possible question of partiality there should be two interpreters-one for the prosecution and one for the defense. Both accordingly were sworn and the first witness, Ah Fong, was called.
“Ask him if he understands the nature of an oath,” directed O'Brien.
The interpreter for the state turned to Ah Fong and said something sweetly to him in multitudinous words.
Instantly Doctor Su rose indignantly. The other interpreter was not putting the question at all, but telling the witness what to say. Moreover, the other interpreter belonged to the On Gee Tong. He stood waving his arms and gobbling like an infuriated turkey while his adversary replied in similar fashion.
“This won't do!” snapped the judge. “This trial will degenerate into nothing but a cat fight if we are not careful.” Then a bright idea suggested itself to his Occidental mind. “Suppose I appoint an official umpire to say which of the other two interpreters is correct-and let them decide who he shall be?”
This proposition was received with grunts of satisfaction by the two antagonists, who conferred together with astonishing amiability and almost immediately conducted into the court room a tall, emaciated Chinaman who they alleged was entirely satisfactory to both of them. He was accordingly sworn as a third interpreter, and the trial began again.
It was observed that thereafter there was no dispute whatever regarding the accuracy of the testimony, and as each interpreter was paid for his services at the rate of ten dollars a day it was rumored that the whole affair had been arranged by agreement between the two societies, which divided the money, amounting to some eighteen hundred dollars, between them. But, as O'Brien afterward asked Peckham, “How in thunder could you tell?”
The court's troubles had, however, only begun. Ah Fong was a whimsical-looking person, who gave an impression of desiring to make himself generally agreeable. He was, of course, the star witness-if a Chinaman can ever be a star witness-and presumably had been carefully schooled as to the manner in which he should give his testimony. He and he alone had seen the whole tragedy from beginning to end. He it was, if anybody, who would tuck Mock Hen comfortably into his coffin.
The problem of the interpreters having been solved Fong settled himself comfortably in the witness chair, crossed his hands upon his stomach and looked complacently at Mock Hen.
“Well, now let's get along,” adjured His Honor. “Swear the witness.”
Mr. Tutt immediately rose.
“If the court please,” said he, “I object to the swearing of the witness unless it is made to appear that he will regard himself as bound by the oath as administered. Now this man is a Chinaman. I should like to ask him a preliminary question or two.”
“That seems fair, Mr. O'Brien,” agreed the court. “Do you see any reason why Mr. Tutt shouldn't interrogate the witness?”
“Oh, let me qualify my own witness!” retorted O'Brien fretfully. “Ah Fong, will you respect the oath to testify truthfully, about to be administered to you?”
The interpreter delivered a broadside of Chinese at Ah Fong, who listened attentively and replied at equal length. Then the interpreter went at him again, and again Ah Fong affably responded. It was interminable.
The two muttered and chortled at each other until O'Brien, losing patience, jumped up and called out: “What's all this? Can't you ask him a simple question and get a simple answer? This isn't a debating society.”
The interpreter held up his hand, indicating that the prosecutor should have patience.
“Ah-ya-ya-oo-aroo-yung-ung-loy-a-a-ya oo-chu-a-oy-ah-ohay-tching!” he concluded.
“ A-yah-oy-a-yoo-oy-ah-chuck-uh-ung-loy-oo-ayah-a-yoo-chung-chung-szt-oo-aha-oy-ou-ungaroo-yah-yah-yah!” replied Ah Fong.
“Thank heaven, that's over!” sighed O'Brien.
The interpreter drew himself up to his full height.
“He says yes,” he declared dramatically.
“It's the longest yes I ever heard!” audibly remarked the foreman, who was feeling his oats.
“Does not that satisfy you?” inquired the court of Mr. Tutt.
“I am sorry to say it does not!” replied the latter. “Mr. O'Brien has simply asked whether he will keep his oath. His reply sheds no light on whether his religious belief is such that it would obligate him to respect an oath.”
“Well, ask him yourself!” snorted O'Brien.
“Ah Fong, do you believe in any god?” inquired Mr. Tutt.
“He says yes,” answered the interpreter after the usual interchange.
“What god do you believe in?” persisted Mr. Tutt.
Suddenly Ah Fong made answer without the intervention of the interpreter.
“When I in this country,” he replied complacently in English, “I b'lieve Gees Clist; when I in China I b'lieve Chinese god.”
“Does Your Honor hold that an obliging acquiescence in local theology constitutes such a religious belief as to make this man's oath sacred?” inquired Mr. Tutt.
The judge smiled.
“I don't see why not!” he declared. “There isn't any precedent as far as I am aware. But he says he believes in the Deity. Isn't that enough?”
“Not unless he believes that the Deity will punish him if he breaks his oath,” answered Mr. Tutt. “Let me try him on that?”
“Ah Fong, do you think God will punish you if you tell a lie?”
Fong looked blank. The interpreter fired a few salvos.
“He says it makes a difference the kind of oath.”
“Suppose it is a promise to tell the truth?”
“He says what kind of a promise?”
“A promise on the Bible,” answered Mr. Tutt patiently.
“He says what god you mean!” countered the interpreter.
“Oh, any god!” roared Mr. Tutt.
The interpreter, after a long parley, made
reply.
“Ah Fong says there is no binding oath except on a chicken's head.”
Judge Bender, O'Brien and Mr. Tutt gazed at one another helplessly.
“Well, there you are!” exclaimed the lawyer. “Mr. O'Brien's oath wasn't any oath at all! What kind of a chicken's head?”
“A white rooster.”
“Quite so!” nodded Mr. Tutt. “Your Honor, I object to this witness being sworn by any oath or in any form except on the head of a white rooster!”
“Well, I don't happen to have a white rooster about me!” remarked O'Brien, while the jury rocked with glee. “Ask him if something else won't do. A big book for instance?”
The interpreter put the question and then shook his head. According to Ah Fong there was no virtue in books whatever, either large or small. On some occasions an oath could be properly taken on a broken plate-also white-but not in murder cases. It was chicken or nothing.
“Are you not willing to waive the formality of an oath, Mr. Tutt?” asked the judge in slight impatience.
“And wave my client into the chair?” demanded the lawyer. “No, sir!”
“I don't see what we can do except to adjourn court until you can procure the necessary poultry,” announced Judge Bender. “Even then we can't slaughter them in court. We'll have to find some suitable place!”
“Why not kill one rooster and swear all the witnesses at once?” suggested Mr. Tutt in a moment of inspiration.
* * * * *
“My God, chief!” exclaimed O'Brien at four o'clock. “There ain't a white rooster to be had anywhere! Hens, yes! By the hundred! But roosters are extinct! Tomorrow will be the twenty-first day of this prosecution and not a witness sworn yet.”
However, a poultryman was presently discovered who agreed simply for what advertising there was in it to furnish a crate of white roosters, a hatchet and a headsman's block, and to have them in the basement of the building promptly at ten o'clock.
Accordingly, at that hour Judge Bender convened Part IX of the General Sessions in the court room and then adjourned downstairs, where all the prospective witnesses for the prosecution were lined up in a body and told to raise their right hands.
Meantime Clerk McGuire was handed the hatchet, and approached the coop with obvious misgivings. Ah Fong had already given a dubious approval to the sex and quality of the fowls inside and naught remained but to submit the proper oath and remove the head of the unfortunate victim. A large crowd of policemen, witnesses, reporters, loafers, truckmen and others drawn by the unusual character of the proceedings had assembled and now proceeded without regard for the requirements of judicial dignity to encourage McGuire in his capacity of executioner, by profane shouts and jeers, to do his deadly deed.
But the clerk had had no experience with chickens and in bashfully groping for the selected rooster allowed several other occupants of the crate to escape. Instantly the air was filled with fluttering, squawking fowls while fifty frenzied police officers and Chinamen attempted vainly to reduce them to captivity again. In the midst of the melee McGuire caught his rooster, and fearful lest it should escape him managed somehow to decapitate it. The body, however, had been flopping around spasmodically several seconds upon the floor before he realized that the oath had not been administered, and his voice suddenly rose above the pandemonium in an excited brogue.
“Hold up your hands, you! You do solemnly swear that in the case of The People against Mock Hen you will tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God!”
But the interpreter was at that moment engaged in clasping to his bosom a struggling rooster and was totally unable to fulfill his functions. Meantime the jury, highly edified at this illustration of the administration of justice, gazed down upon the spectacle from the stairs.
“This farce has gone far enough!” declared Judge Bender disgustedly. “We will return to the court room. Put those roosters back where they belong!”
Once more the participants ascended to Part IX and Ah Fong took his seat in the witness chair. The interpreter's blouse was covered with pin-feathers and one of his thumbs was bleeding profusely.
“Ask the witness if the oath that he has now taken will bind his conscience?” directed the court.
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!” ejaculated 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 amusement 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 assisting his friends in the On Gee Tong.
“But I tell yer I don't know no Chinks!” 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 sniggered. 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 exp
lained.
“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 class 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 repetitions 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.