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 pronounced 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.
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