, honor and religion
upon every member, who rather than fail to carry it out would have
knotted a yellow silken cord under his left ear and swung himself gently
off a table into eternal sleep.

Young Mock Hen, one of the four avengers, had created a distinct place
for himself in Chinatown by making a careful study of New York
psychology. He was a good-looking Chink, smooth-faced, tall and supple;
he knew very well how to capitalize his attractiveness. By day he
attended Columbia University as a special student in applied
electricity, keeping a convenient eye meanwhile on three coolies whom he
employed to run The College Laundry on Morningside Heights. By night he
vicariously operated a chop-suey palace on Seventh Avenue, where
congregated the worst elements of the Tenderloin. But his heart was in
the gambling den which he maintained in Doyers Street, and where anyone
who knew the knock could have a shell of hop for the asking, once Mock
had given him the once-over through the little sliding panel.

Mock was a Christian Chinaman. That is to say, purely for business
reasons--for what he got out of it and the standing that it gave him--he
attended the Rising Star Mission and also frequented Hudson House, the
social settlement where Miss Fanny Duryea taught him to play ping-pong
and other exciting parlor games, and read to him from books adapted to
an American child of ten. He was a great favorite at both places, for he
was sweet-tempered and wore an expression of heaven-born innocence. He
had even been to church with Miss Duryea, temporarily absenting himself
for that purpose of a Sunday morning from the steam-heated flat
where--unknown to her, of course--he lived with his white wife, Emma
Pratt, a lady of highly miscellaneous antecedents.

Except when engaged in transacting legal or oilier business with the
municipal, sociologic or religious world--at which times his vocabulary
consisted only of the most rudimentary pidgin--Mock spoke a fluent and
even vernacular English learned at night school. Incidentally he was the
head of the syndicate which controlled and dispensed the loo, faro,
fan-tan and other gambling privileges of Chinatown.

* * * * *

Detective Mooney, of the Second, detailed to make good District Attorney
Peckham's boast that there had never been so little trouble with the
foreign element since the administration--of which he was an
ornament--came into office, saw Quong L