Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/394

362 the house that night and has never seen it, though he knew what was to be done. That is all I need of you now, Sin Chung Ming; for I have learned what I wanted to know."

As the fourth of the Chinamen was led away to his cell, Trant turned back to Inspector Walker and Siler.

"I must acknowledge my debt to Mr. Ferris," he said with a glance toward the man of whom he spoke, "for help in solving this case, without which I could not have brought it to a conclusion without giving much more time to the investigation. Mr. Ferris, as you already know, Inspector Walker, as special agent for the Government, has for years been engaged in the enforcement of the Chinese exclusion laws. The sentence repeated to us by Mrs. Newberry, in which her husband, delirious with fright, seemed warning some one that to acknowledge that his mother had large feet would prevent him from 'getting in,' seemed to me to establish a connection between young Newberry's terror and an evasion of the exclusion laws. I went at once to Mr. Ferris to test this idea, and he recognized its application at once.

"As the exclusion laws against all but a very small class of Chinese are being more strictly enforced than ever before, there has been a large and increasing traffic among the Chinese in bogus papers to procure entry into this country of Chinese belonging to the excluded classes. And in addition to being supplied with forged official papers for entry, as Ferris can tell you, the applicants of the classes excluded are supplied with regular 'coaching papers' so that they