"This is very irregular!" he said.

Then he beckoned to O'Brien, and the two whispered together for several
minutes, while all over the court room on the part of those who had sat
there so patiently for sixty-nine days there was a prolonged and
ecstatic wriggling of arms and legs. Instinctively they all knew that
the farce was over.

The assistant district attorney returned to his table but did not sit
down.

"If the court please," he said rather wearily, "the last witness, Miss
Duryea, by her testimony, which I personally am quite ready to accept as
truthful, has interjected a reasonable doubt of the defendant's guilt
into what otherwise would in my opinion be a case for the jury. If Mock
Hen was at Hudson House, nearly two miles from Pell and Doyers Streets,
at four o'clock on the afternoon of the homicide, manifestly he could
not have been one of the assailants of Quong Lee at one minute past
four. I am satisfied that no jury would convict--"

"Not on your life!" snorted the foreman airily.

"--and I therefore," went on O'Brien, "ask the court to direct an
acquittal."

* * * * *

In the grand banquet hall of the Shanghai and Hongkong American-Chinese
Restaurant, Ephraim Tutt, draped in a blue mandarin coat with a tasseled
pill box rakishly upon his old gray head, sat beside Wong Get and Buddha