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 Lee emerge from his doorway in Doyers Street just before four o'clock the following Thursday and slip silently along under the shadow of the eaves toward Ah Fong's grocery--and instantly sensed something peculiar in the Chink's walk. "Hello, Quong!" he called, interposing himself. "Where you goin'?" Quong paused with a deprecating gesture of widely spread open palms. "'Lo yourself!" replied blandly. "Me go buy li'l' glocery." Mooney ran his hands over the rotund body, frisking him for a possible forty-four. "For the love of Mike!" he exclaimed, tearing open Quong's blouse. "What sort of an undershirt is that?" Quong grinned broadly as the detective lifted the suit of double-chain mail which swayed heavily under his blue blouse from his shoulders to his knees. "So-ho!" continued the plain-clothes man. "Trouble brewin', eh?" He knew already that something was doing in the tongs from his lobby-gow, Wing Foo. "Must weigh eighty pounds!" he whistled. "I'd like to see the pill that would go through that!" It was, in fact, a medieval corselet of finest steel mesh, capable of turning an elephant bullet. "Go'long!" ordered Mooney finally. "I guess you're safe!"