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.
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--assuming 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.
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