did not notice the numerous Chinamen who dawdled about the entrance or
the half dozen who crowded with him into the elevator, but when Pat the
elevator man called, "Second floor!--Part One to your right!--Part Two
to the left!" and he stepped out into the marble-floored corridor that
ran round the inside of the building, he was confronted with an unusual
and somewhat ominous spectacle.

The entire hallway on two sides of the building was lined with
Chinamen! They sat there motionless as blue-coated images, faces front,
their hands in their laps, their legs crossed beneath them. If anyone
appeared in the offing a couple of hundred pairs of glinting eyes
shifted automatically and followed him until he disappeared, but
otherwise no muscle quivered.

"Say," growled Hogan, Judge Bender's private attendant, who was the
first to run the gantlet, "those Chinks are enough to give you the
Willies! Their eyes scared me to death, sticking me through the back!"

Even dignified Judge Bender himself as he stalked along the hall,
preceded by two police officers, was not immune from a slight feeling of
uncanniness, and he instinctively drew his robe round his legs that it
might not come into contact with those curious slippers with felt soles
that protruded across the marble slabs.

"Eyes right!" They had picked him up the instant he stepped out of the
private elevator--the four hundred of them. If he turned and looked they
were seemingly not watching him, but if he dropped his glance they swung
back in a single moment and focused themselves upon him. And every one
of them probably had a gun hidden somewhere in his baggy pants! The
judge confessed to not liking these foreign homicide cases. You never