"There is much in this police business," said "the Captain," with his
slow, deliberate enunciation, "that must lead to a blank wall. Out of
ten cases to investigate it is quite possible nine will result in
nothing. This percentage could not of course be true of a thousand
cases and a man's services still be considered satisfactory. But of ten
it is quite possible. As for knowing HOW to do detective work, all I
bring to the department myself is some ordinary common sense and a
little knowledge of human nature, and with these I try to work things
out as best I can. This peeping-through-the-key-hole police work I know
nothing whatever about, and don't want to. Nor do I expect a man to."
I had been discussing with "the Captain" my dissatisfaction at my
failure to "get results" in an important case. A few weeks on the force
had changed many a preconceived notion of police life. It had gradually
become evident, for instance, that the profession of detective is
adventurous, absorbing, heart-stopping chiefly between the covers of
popular fiction; that real detective work, like almost any other
vocation, is made up largely of the little unimportant every-day
details, with only a rare assignment bulking above the mass. As "the
Captain" said, it was just plain every-day work carried on by the
application of ordinary common sense. Such best-seller artifices as
disguise were absurd. Not only would disguise in all but the rarest
cases be impossible, but useless. The A-B-C of plain-clothes work is to
learn to know a man by his face rather than by his clothing--and at the
outset one will be astonished to find how much he has hitherto been
depending on the latter. It must be the same with criminals, too,
unless your criminal is an amateur or a fool, in which event you will
"land" him without the trouble of disguising. A detective furthermore
should not be a handsome man or a man of striking appearance in any
way; the ideal plain-clothes man is the little insignificant snipe whom
even the ladies will not notice.
Since April tenth I had been settled in notorious House 111, Ancon, a
sort of frontiersman resort or smugglers' retreat--had there been
anything to smuggle--where to have fallen through the veranda screening
would have been to fall into a foreign land. As pay-day approached
there came the duty of standing a half-hour at the station gate before
the departure of each train to watch and discuss with the ponderous,
smiling, dark-skinned chief of Panama's plain-clothes squad, or with a
vigilante the suspicious characters and known crooks of all colors
going out along the line. On the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth the
I. C. C. pay-car, that bank on wheels guarded by a squad of Z. P.,
sprinkled its half-million a day along the Zone. Then plain-clothes
duty was not merely to scan the embarking passengers but to ride out
with each train to one of the busy towns. There scores upon scores of
soil-smeared workmen swarmed over all the landscape with long
paper-wrapped rolls of Panamanian silver in their hands, while flashily
dressed touts and crooks of both sexes drifted out from Panama with
every train to worm their insidious way into wherever the scent of coin
promised another month free from labor. To add to those crowded times
the chief dissipation of the West Indian during the few days following
pay-day that his earnings last is to ride aimlessly and joyously back
and forth on the trains.
There is one advantage, though some policemen call it by quite the
opposite name, in being stationed at Ancon. When crime takes a holiday
and do-nothing threatens tropical dementia, or a man tires of his
native land and people a short stroll down the asphalt takes him into
the city of Panama. Barely across the street where his badge becomes
mere metal, and he must take care not to arrest absent-mindedly the
first violator of Zone laws--whom he is sure to come upon within the
first block--he notes that the English tongue has suddenly almost
disappeared. On every hand, lightly sprinkled with many other dialects,
sounds Spanish, the slovenly Spanish of Panama in which bueno is
"hueno" and calle is "caye." As he swings languidly to the right into
Avenida Central he grows gradually aware that there has settled down
about him a cold indifference, an atmosphere quite different from that
on his own side of the line. Those he addresses in the tongue of the
land reply to his questions with their customary gestures and fixed
phrases of courtesy. But no more; and a cold dead silence falls sharply
upon the last word, and at times, if the experience be comparatively
new, there seems to hover in the air something that reminds him that
way back fifty-six years ago there was a "massacre" of Americans in
Panama city. For the Panamanian has little love for the United States
or its people; which is the customary thanks any man or nation gets for
lifting a dirty half-breed gamin from the gutter.
Off in the vortex of the city lolls Panama's public market, where
Chinamen are the chief sellers and flies the chief consumers. Myriads
of fruits in every stage of development and disintegration, haggled
bits of meat, the hundred sights and sounds and smells one hurries past
suggest that Panama may even have outdone Central America before Uncle
Sam came with his garbage-cans and his switch. Further on, down at the
old harbor, lingers a hint of the picturesqueness of Panama in
pre-canal days. Clumsy boats, empty, or deep-laden with fruit from, or
freight to, the several islands that sprinkle the bay, splash and bump
against the little cement wharf. Aged wooden "windjammers" doze at
their moorings, everywhere are jabbering natives with that shifty
half-cast eye and frequent evidence of deep-rooted disease. Almost
every known race mingles in Panama city, even to Chinese coolies in
their umbrella hats and rolled up cotton trousers, delving in rich
market gardens on the edges of the town or dog-trotting through the
streets under two baskets dancing on the ends of a bamboo pole, till
one fancies oneself at times in Singapore or Shanghai. The black Zone
laborer, too, often prefers to live in Panama for the greater freedom
it affords--there he doesn't have to clean his sink so often, marry his
"wife," or banish his chickens from the bedroom. Policemen with their
clubs swarm everywhere, for no particular reason than that the little
republic is forbidden to play at army, and with the presidential
election approaching political henchmen must be kept good-humored. Not
a few of these officers are West Indians who speak not a word of
Spanish--nor any other tongue, strictly speaking.
Rubber-tired carriages roll constantly by along Uncle Sam's macadam,
amid the jingling of their musical bells. Every one takes a carriage in
Panama. Any man can afford ten cents even if he has no expense account;
besides he runs no risk of being overcharged, which is a greater
advantage than the cost. All this may be different when Panama's
electric line, all the way from Balboa docks to Las Sabanas, is
opened--but that's another year. Meanwhile the lolling in carriages
comes to be quite second nature.
But like any tropical Spanish town Panama seethes only by night,
especially Saturday and Sunday nights when the paternal Zone government
allows its children to spend the evening in town. Then frequent trains,
unknown during the week, begin with the setting of the sun to disgorge
Americans of all grades and sizes through the clicking turnstiles into
the arms of gesticulating hackmen, some to squirm away afoot between
the carriages, all to be swallowed up within ten minutes in the great
sea of "colored" people. So that, large as may be each train-load,
white American faces are so rare on Panama streets that one
involuntarily glances at each that passes in the throng.
It is the "gum-shoe's" duty to know and be unknown in as many places as
possible. Wherefore on such nights, whatever his choice, he drifts
early down by the "Normandie" and on into the "Pana-zone" to see who is
out, and why. In the latter emporium he adds a bottle of beer to his
expense account, endures for a few moments the bawling above the scream
of the piano of two Americans of Palestinian antecedents, admires some
local hero, like "Baldy" for instance, who is credited with doing what
Napoleon could not do, and floats on, perhaps to screw up his courage
and venture into the thinly-clad Teatro Apolo. He who knows where to
look, or was born under a lucky star, may even see on these merry
evenings a big Marine from Bas Obispo or a burly soldier of the Tenth
howling some joyful song with six or seven little "Spig" policemen
climbing about on his frame. At such times everything but real blood,
flows in Panama. Her history runs that way. On the day she won her
independence from Spain it is said the General in Chief cut his finger
on a wine glass. The day she won it from Colombia there was a Chinaman
killed--but every one agrees that was due to the celestial's criminal
carelessness.
Down at the quieter end of the city are "Las Bovedas," that curving
sea-wall Phillip of Spain tried to make out from his palace walls, as
many another, regal and otherwise, has strained his eyes in vain to see
where his good coin has gone. But the walls are there all right, though
Phillip never saw them; crumbling a bit, yet still a sturdy barrier to
the sea. A broad cement and grass promenade runs atop, wide as an
American street. Thirty or forty feet below the low parapet sounds the
deep, time-mellowed voice of the Pacific, as there rolls higher and
higher up the rock ledges that great tide so different from the
scarcely noticeable one at Colon. The summer breeze never dies down,
never grows boisterous. On the landward side Panama lies mumbling to
itself, down in the hollow between squats Chiriqui prison with its
American warden, once a Zone policeman; while in the round stone
watch-towers on the curving parapets lean prison guards with fixed
bayonets and incessantly blow the shrill tin whistles that is the
universal Latin-American artifice for keeping policemen awake. On the
way back to the city the elite--or befriended--may drop in at the
University Club at the end of the wall for a cooling libation.
On Sunday night comes the band concert in the palm-ringed Cathedral
Plaza. There is one on Thursday, too, in Plaza Santa Ana, but that is
packed with all colors and considered "rather vulgah." In the square by
the cathedral the aggregate color is far lighter. Pure African blood
hangs chiefly in the outskirts. Then the haughty aristocrats of Panama,
proud of their own individual shade of color, may be seen in the same
promenade with American ladies--even a garrison widow or two--from out
along the line. Panamanian girls gaudily dressed and suggesting to the
nostrils perambulating drug-stores shuttle back and forth with their
perfumed dandies. Above the throng pass the heads and shoulders of
unemotional, self-possessed Americans, erect and soldierly. Sergeant
Jack of Ancon station was sure to be there in his faultless civilian
garb, a figure neat but not gaudy; and even busy Lieutenant Long was
known to break away from his stacked-up duties and his black
stenographer and come to overtop all else in the square save the
palm-trees whispering together in the evening breeze between the
numbers.
There is no favoritism in Zone police work. Every crime reported
receives full investigation, be it only a Greek laborer losing a pair
of trousers or--
There was the case that fell to me early in May, for instance. A box
billed from New York to Peru had been broken open on Balboa dock
and--one bottle of cognac stolen. Unfortunately the matter was turned
over to me so long after the perpetration of the dastardly crime that
the possible culprits among the dock hands had wholly recovered from
the probable consumption of the evidence. But I succeeded in gathering
material for a splendid typewritten report of all I had not been able
to unearth, to file away among other priceless headquarters' archives.
Not that the Z. P. has not its big jobs. The force to a man distinctly
remembers that absorbing two months between the escape of wild black
Felix Paul and the day they dragged him back into the penitentiary. No
less fresh in memory are the expeditions against Maurice Pelote, or
Francois Barduc, the murderer of Miraflores. All Martinique negroes, be
it noted; and of all things on this earth, including greased pigs, the
hardest to catch is a Martinique criminal. After all, four or five
murders on the Zone in three years is no startling record in such a
swarm of nationalities.
Cases large and small which it would be neither of interest nor politic
to detail poured in during the following weeks. Among them was the
counterfeit case unearthed by some Shylock Holmes on the Panamanian
force, that called for a long perspiring hunt for the "plant" in odd
corners of the Zone. Then there was--, an ex-Z. P. who lost his three
years' savings on the train, for which reason I shadowed a well-known
American--for it is a Z. P. rule that no one is above suspicion--about
Panama afoot and in carriages nearly all night, in true dime-novel
fashion. There was the day that I was given a dangerous convict to
deliver at Culebra Penitentiary. The criminal was about three feet
long, jet black, his worldly possessions comprising two more or less
garments, one reaching as far down as his knees and the other as far up
as the base of his neck. He had long been a familiar sight to "Zoners"
among the swarm of bootblacks that infest the corner near the P. R. R.
station. He claimed to be eleven, and looked it. But having already
served time for burglary and horse-stealing, his conviction for
stealing a gold necklace from a negro washerwoman of San Miguel left
the Chief Justice no choice but to send him to meditate a half-year at
Culebra. There is no reform school on the Zone. The few American minors
who have been found guilty of misdoing have been banished to their
native land. When the deputy warden had sufficiently recovered from the
shock brought upon him by the sight of his new charge to give me a
receipt for him, I raced for the noon train back to the city.
Thereon I sat down beside Pol--First-Class Policeman X----, surprised
to find him off duty and in civilian clothes. There was a dreamy,
far-away look in his eyes, and not until the train was racing past Rio
Grande reservoir did he turn to confide to me the following
extraordinary occurrence:
"Last night I dreamed old Judge ---- had my father and my mother up
before him. On the stand he asked my mother her age--and the funny part
of it is my mother has been dead over ten years. She turned around and
wrote on the wall with a piece of chalk '1859,' the year she was born.
Then my father was called and he wrote '1853.' That's all there was to
the dream. But take it from me I know what it means. Now just add 'em
together, and multiply by five--because I could see five people in the
court-room--divide by two--father and mother--and I get--," he drew out
a crumpled "arrest" form covered with penciled figures, "--9280. And
there--" his voice dropped low, "--is your winning number for next
Sunday."
So certain was this, that First-Class X---- had bribed another
policeman to take his eight-hour shift, dressed in his vacation best,
bought a ticket to Panama and return, with real money at tourist
prices, and would spend the blazing afternoon seeking among the scores
of vendors in the city for lottery ticket 9280. And if he did not find
it there he certainly paid his fare all the way to Colon and back to
continue his search. I believe he at length found and acquired the
whole ticket, for the customary sum of $2.50. But there must have been
a slip in the arithmetic, or mother's chalk; for the winning number
that Sunday was 8895.
Frequent as are these melancholy errors, scores of "Zoners" cling
faithfully to their arithmetical superstitions. Many a man spends his
recreation hours working out the winning numbers by some secret recipe
of his own. There are men on the Z. P. who, if you can get them started
on the subject of lottery tickets, will keep it up until you run away,
showing you the infallibility of their various systems, believing the
drawing to be honest, yet oblivious to the fact that both the one and
the other cannot be true. Dreams are held in special favor. It is
probably safe to assert that one-half the numbers over 1,000 and under
10,000 that appear in Zone dreams are snapped up next day in lottery
tickets. Many have systems of figuring out the all-important number
from the figures on engines and cars. More than one Zone housewife has
slipped into the kitchen to find the roast burning and her West Indian
cook hiding hastily behind her ample skirt a long list of the figures
on every freight-car that has passed that morning, from which by some
Antillian miscalculation and the murmuring of certain invocations she
was to find the magic number that would bring her cooking days to an
end.
Yet there is sometimes method in their madness. Did not "Joe" who slept
in the next room to me at Gatun "hit Duque for two pieces"--which is to
say he had $3,000 to sprinkle along with his police salary? Yet
personally the only really appealing "system" was that of Cristobal.
Upon his arrival on the Isthmus four years ago he picked out a number
at random, took out a yearly subscription to it, and thought no more
about it than one does of a newspaper delivered at the door each
morning--until one Monday during this month of May, after he had
squandered something over $500, on worthless bits of paper, he strolled
into the lottery office and was handed an inconspicuous little bag
containing $7,500 in yellow gold.
Like all Z. P. "rookies" (recruits) I had been warned early to beware
the "sympathy dodge." But experience is the only real teacher. One
afternoon I bestraddled a crazy, stilt-legged Jamaican horse to go out
into the bush beyond the Panama line to fetch and deliver a citizen of
that sovereign republic who was wanted on the Zone for horse-stealing.
At the town of Sabanas, where those Panamanians who have bagged the
most loot since American occupation have their "summer" homes,--giddy,
brick-painted monstrosities among the great trees, deep green foliage
and brilliant flower-beds (pause a moment and think of brilliant red
houses in the tropics; it will make you better acquainted with the
"Spig") I dropped in at the police station for ice-water and
information. I found it in charge of a negro policeman who knew
nothing, and had forgotten that. When, therefore, it also chanced that
an officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
stopped before the gate with a coachman of Panama, it fell upon me to
assume command. The horse was the usual emaciated rat of an animal
indigenous to Panama City. When overhauled, the driver was beating the
animal uphill on his way to Old Panama to bring back a party of
tourists visiting the ruins. How he expected the decrepit beast to
carry four more persons was a mystery. When the harness was lifted
there was disclosed the expected half-dozen large raw sores. We tied
the animal in the shade near hay and water and adjourned to the station.
The coachman, a weary, unshaven Spaniard whose red eyelids showed lack
of sleep, was weeping copiously. He claimed to be a madrileno--which
was evident; that he had been a coachman in Spain and Panama all his
life without ever before having been arrested--which was possible. He
was merely one of many drivers for a livery-stable owner in Panama.
Ordered to go for the tourists, he had called his employer's attention
to the danger of crossing Zone territory with a horse in that
condition; but the owner had ordered him to cover up the sores with
pads and harness and drive along.
It was a very sad case. Here was a poor, honest coachman struggling to
support a wife and I don't recall how many children, but any number
sounds quite reasonable in Panama, who was about to be punished for the
fault of another. The paradox of honest and coachman did not strike me
until later. He was certainly telling the truth--you come to recognize
it readily in all ordinary cases after a few weeks in plain clothes.
The real culprit was, of course, the employer. My righteous wrath
demanded that he and not his poor serf be punished. I could not release
the driver. But I would see that the truth was brought out in court
next morning and a warrant sworn out against the owner. With showering
tears and rib-shaking sobs the coachman promised to tell the judge the
whole story. I went through him, and locking him up with assurances of
my deepest sympathy and full assistance, stilted on toward the little
village of shacks scattered out of sight among the hills, and valleys
across the border.
Coachman, witnesses, and arresting officer, to say nothing of horse,
carriage, and sores were on hand when court opened next morning. As I
expected, the judge failed to ask the poor fellow a single question
that would bring out the complicity of his employer; did not in fact
discover there was an employer. I asked to be sworn, and gave the true
version of the case. The judge listened earnestly. When I had ended, he
recalled the coachman. The latter expressed his astonishment that I
should have made any such statements. He denied them in toto. His
employer had nothing whatever to do with the case. The fault was
entirely his, and no one else was in the remotest degree connected with
the matter.
"Five dollars!" snapped the judge.
The coachman paid, hitched up the rat of a horse, and wabbled away into
Panama.
Police business, taking me down into "the Grove" that night, I found
the driver, clean-shaven and better dressed, waiting for fares before
the principal house of that section.
"What kind of a game--," I began.
"Senor," he cried, and tears again seemed on the point of falling,
"every word I told you was true. But of course I couldn't testify
against the patron. He'd discharge me and blackmail me, and you know I
have a wife and innumerable children to support. Come on over and have
a drink."
This justice business, one soon learns, is of the same infallible stuff
as the rest of life. After all it is only the personal opinion of the
judge between two persons swearing on oath to diametrically opposed
statements; and for all the impressiveness of deep furrowed brows I did
not find that the average judge had any more power of reading human
nature than the average of the rest of us. I well remember the morning
when a meek little Panamanian was testifying in his own behalf, in
Spanish of course, when the judge broke in without even asking for a
translation of the testimony:
"That'll do! Because of your gestures I believe you are trying to bunco
this court. You are lying--tell him that," this to the negro
interpreter; and he therewith sentenced the witness to jail.
As if any Panamanian could talk earnestly of anything without waving
his arms about him.
The telephone-bell rang one afternoon. It was always doing that,
twenty-four hours a day; but this time it sounded especially sharp and
insistent. In the adjoining room, over the "blotter," snapped the brusk
stereotyped nasal reply:
"Ancon! Bingham talking!"
The instrument buzzed a moment and the deskman looked up to say:
"'Andy' and a nigger just fell over into Pedro Miguel locks. They're
sending in his body. The nigger lit on his head and hurt his leg."
His body! How uncanny it sounded! "Andy," that bunch of muscles who had
made such short work of the circus wrestler in Gatun and whom I had
seen not twenty-four hours before bubbling with life was now a "body."
Things happen quickly on the Zone, and he whom the fates have picked to
go generally shows no hesitation in his exit. But at least a man who
dies for the I. C. C. has the affairs he left behind him attended to in
a thorough manner. In ten minutes to a half-hour one of the Z. P. is on
the ground taking note of every detail of the accident. A special train
or engine rushes the body to the morgue in Ancon hospital grounds. A
coroner's jury is soon meeting under the chairmanship of a policeman,
long reports of everything concerning the victim or the accident are
soon flowing Administration-ward. The police accident report is
detailed and in triplicate. There is sure to be in the "personal files"
at Culebra a history of the deceased and the names of his nearest
relative or friend both on the Isthmus and in the States; for every
employee must make out his biography at the time of his engagement.
There are men whose regular duty it is to list and take care of his
possessions down to the last lead pencil, and to forward them to the
legal heirs. A year's pay goes to his family--were as much required of
every employer and his the burden of proving the accident the fault of
the employee, how the safety appliances in factories would multiply.
There is a man attached to Ancon hospital whose unenviable duty it is
to write a letter of condolence to the relatives in the States.
And so the "Kangaroos" or the "Red Men" or whatever his lodge was filed
behind the I. C. C. casket to the church in Ancon, and "Andy" was laid
away under another of the simple white iron crosses that thickly
populate many a Zone hillside, and he was charged up to the big debit
column of the costs of the canal. On the cross is his new number; for
officially a "Zoner" is always a number; that of the brass-check he
wears as a watch-charm alive, that at the head of his grave when his
canal-digging is over.
Late one unoccupied afternoon I picked up the path behind the
Administration Building and, skirting a Zone residence, began to climb
that famous oblong mound that dominates the Pacific end of the
landscape from every direction,--Ancon Hill. For a way a fairly steep
and stony path lead through thick undergrowth. Then this ceased, and a
far steeper trail zigzagged up the face of the bare mountain, covered
only with thin dead grass. The setting sun cast its shadow obliquely
across the summit when I reached it,--a long ridge, with groves of
trees, running off abruptly toward the sea. On the opposite side Uncle
Sam was cutting away a whole side of the hill. But the five o'clock
whistle had blown, and whole armies of little workmen swarmed across
all the landscape far below, and silence soon settled down save for the
dredges at Balboa that chug on through the night. But for myself the
hill was wholly unpeopled. A sturdy ocean breeze swept steadily across
it. The sinking sun set the jungle afire in a spot that would have
startled those who do not know that it rises in the Pacific at Panama,
crude, glaring colors glowed, fading to gentler and more delicate
tints, then the evening shadow that had climbed the hill with me spread
like a great black veil over all the world.
But the moon nearing its full followed almost on the heels of the
setting sun and, casting its half-day over a scene rich in nature and
history, invited the eye to swing clear round the hazy circle. Below
lay Panama dully rumbling with night traffic. Silent Ancon, still
better lighted, cuddled upon the lower skirts of the hill itself. Then
beyond, the curving bay, half seen, half guessed, with its long
promontory dying away into the hazy moonlit distance, lighted up here
and there by bush fires in the jungled hills. Some way out winked the
cluster of lights that marked Las Sabanas. In front, the placid
Pacific, the "South Sea" of the Spaniards, spread dimly away into the
void of night, its several islands seen only by the darker darkness
that marked where they lay.
On the other side of the hill the rumble of cranes and night labor came
up from Balboa dock. There, began the canal, which the eye could follow
away into the dim hilly inland distance--and come upon a great cluster
of lights that was Corozal, then another group that was Miraflores,
close followed by those of Pedro Miguel; and yet further, rising to
such height as to be almost indistinguishable from the lower stars the
lights of the negro cabins of upper Paraiso twinkled dimly above a
broad glow that was Paraiso itself. There the vista ended. For at
Paraiso the canal turns to the left for its plunge through Culebra
hill, and all that follows,--Empire, Cascadas, and far Gatun, was
visible only in the imagination.
If only the film of time might roll back and there pass again before
our eyes all that has come to pass within sight of Ancon hilltop.
Across the bay there, where now are only jungle-tangled ruins, Pizarro
set out with his handful of vagabonds to conquer South America; there
old Buccaneer Morgan laid his bloody hand. Back in the hills there men
died by scores trying to carry a ship across the Isthmus, the Spanish
viceroys passed with their rich trains, there on some unknown knoll
Balboa reached four hundred years ago the climax of a career that began
with stowing away in a cask and ended under the headsman's ax--no end
of it, down to the "Forty-niners" going hopefully out and returning
filled with gold or disease, or leaving their bones here in the jungle
before they really were "Forty-niners"; on down to the railroad days
with men wading in swamps with survey kits, and frequently lying down
to die. Then if a bit of the future, too, could for a moment be
unveiled, and one might watch the first ship glide majestically and
silently into the canal and away into the jungle like some amphibious
monster.
It was along in those days that we were looking for a "murderous
assaulter." At a Saturday night dance in a native shack back in
Miraflores bush the usual riot had broken out about midnight and a
revolver had come into play. As a result there was a Peruvian mulatto
up in Ancon hospital who had been shot through the mouth, the bullet
being somewhere in his neck. It became my frequent duty, among other Z.
P.'s, to take suspects up the hill for possible identification.
One morning I strolled into the station and fell to laughing. The early
train had brought in on suspicion a Spanish laborer of twenty or
twenty-two; a pretty, girlish chap with huge blue eyes over which hung
long black lashes like those painted on Nurnberg dolls. No one with a
shadow of faith in human nature left would have believed him capable of
any crime; any one at all acquainted with Spaniards must have known he
could not shoot a hare, would in fact be afraid to fire off a gun.
The fear in his big blue eyes struggled with his ingenuous, girlish
smile as I marched him through the long hall full of white beds and
darker inmates. The Peruvian sat bolstered up in his cot, a stoical,
revengeful glare on his reddish-brown swollen face. He gazed a long
minute at the boy's face, across which flitted the flush of fear and
embarrassment, at the big doll's eyes, then shook a raised forefinger
slowly back and forth before his nose--the negative of Spanish-speaking
peoples. Then he groaned, spat in a tin-can beside him, and called for
paper and pencil. In the note-book I handed him he wrote in atrociously
spelled Spanish:
"The man that came to the dance with this man is the man that shot me
with a bullet."
The blue-eyed boy promised to point out his companion of that night. We
took the 10:55 and reached Pedro Miguel during the noon hour. Down in a
box-car camp between the railroad and the canal the boy called for
"Jose" and there presented himself immediately a tall, studious,
solemn-faced Spaniard of spare frame, about forty, dressed in overalls
and working shirt. Here was even less a criminal type than the boy.
"Senor," I asked, "did you go to the dance in Miraflores last Saturday
night with this youth?"
"Si, senor."
"Then I place you under arrest. We will take the one o'clock train."
He opened his mouth to protest, but closed it again without having
uttered a sound. He opened it a second time, then sat suddenly down on
the low edge of the box-car porch. A more genuinely astonished man I
have never seen. No actor could have approached it. Still, whatever my
own conviction, it was my business to bring him before his accuser.
After a time he recovered sufficiently to ask permission to change his
clothes, and disappeared in one of the resident box-cars. The boy was
already being fed in another. Had my prisoners been of almost any one
of the other seventy-one nationalities I should not have thought of
letting them out of my sight. But the Zone Spaniard's respect for law
is proverbial.
"Jose! Pinched Jose!" cried his American boss, when I explained that he
would find himself a man short that afternoon. "You people are sure
barking up the wrong tree this time. Why, Jose has been my engineer for
over two years, and the steadiest man on the Zone. He writes for some
Spanish paper and tells 'em the truth over there so straight that the
rest of 'em down here, the anarchists and all that bunch, are aching to
get him into trouble. But they'll never get anything on Jose. Have him
tell you about it in Spanish if you sabe the lingo."
But Jose was a gallego, whence instead of the voluble flood of
protesting words one expects from a Spaniard on such an occasion, he
wrapped himself in a stoical silence. Not until we were on our way to
the railroad station did I get him to talk. Then he explained in quiet,
unflowery, gestureless language.
He had come to the Canal Zone chiefly to gather literary material. Not
being a man of wealth, however, nor one satisfied with superficial
observation, he had sought employment at his trade as stationary
engineer. Besides laying in a stock for more important writing he hoped
to do in the future, he was Zone correspondent of "El Liberal" of
Madrid and other Spanish cities. In the social life of his
fellow-countrymen on the Isthmus he had taken no part, whatever. He was
too busy. He did not drink. He could not dance; he saw no sense in
squandering time in such frivolities. But ever since his arrival he had
been promising himself to attend one of these wild Saturday-night
debauches in the edge of the jungle that he might use a description of
it in some later work. So he had coaxed his one personal friend, the
boy, to go with him. It was virtually the one thing besides work that
he had ever done on the Zone. They had stayed two hours, and had left
the moment the trouble began. Yet here he was arrested.
I bade him cheer up, to consider the trip to Ancon merely an afternoon
excursion on government pass. He remained downcast.
"But think of the experience!" I cried. "Now you can tell exactly how
it feels to be arrested--first-hand literary material."
But he was not philosopher enough to look at it from that point of
view. To his Spanish mind arrest, even in innocence, was a disgrace for
which no amount of "material" could compensate. It is a common failing.
How many of us set out into the world for experience, yet growl with
rage or sit downcast and silent all the way from Pedro Miguel to Panama
if one such experience gives us a rough half-hour, or robs us of ten
minutes sleep.
At the hospital the Peruvian gurgled and spat, beckoned for paper and
wrote:
"This is the man."
"What man?" I asked.
"The man who came with that man," he scribbled, nodding his heavy face
toward the blue-eyed boy.
"But is this the man that shot you?" I demanded.
"The man who came with that man is the one," he scrawled.
"Well, then this is the man that shot you?" I cried.
But he would not answer definitely to that, but sat a long time glaring
out of his swollen, vindictive countenance propped up in his pillows at
the tall, solemn correspondent. By and by he motioned again for paper.
"I think so. I am not sure," he miswrote.
I did NOT think so, and as the sum total of his descriptions of his
assailant during the past several days amounted to "a tall man, rather
short, with a face and two eyes"--he was very insistent about the eyes,
which is the reason the doll-eyed boy had fallen into the drag-net--I
permitted myself to accept my own opinion as evidence. The Peruvian was
in all likelihood in no condition to recognize a man from a loup-garou
by the time the fracas started. Much ardent water had flowed that
night. I took the suspects down to Ancon station and let them cool off
in porch rocking-chairs. Then I gave them passes back to Pedro Miguel
for the evening train. The doll-eyed boy smiled girlishly upon me as he
descended the steps, but the correspondent strode slowly away with the
downcast, cheerless countenance of a man who has been hurt beyond
recovery.
There were strangely contrasted days in the "gum-shoe's" calendar. Two
examples taken almost at random will give the idea. On May twentieth I
lolled all day in a porch rocker at Ancon station, reading a novel.
Along in the afternoon Corporal Castillo drifted in. For a time he
stood leaning against the desk-rail, his felt hat pushed far back on
his head, his eyes fixed on some point in the interior of China. Then
suddenly he snatched up a sheet of I. C. C. stationery, dropped down at
a typewriter, and wrote at express speed a letter in Spanish. Next he
grasped a telephone and, in the words of the deskman, "spit Spig into
the 'phone" for several minutes. That over he caught up an envelope,
sealed the letter and addressed it. An instant later the station was in
an uproar looking for a stamp. One was found, the Corporal stuck it on
the letter, fell suddenly motionless and stared for a long time at
vacancy. Then a new thought struck him. He jerked open a drawer of the
"gum-shoe" desk, flung the letter inside--where I found it accidentally
one day some weeks afterward--and dropping into the swivel-chair laid
his feet on the "gum-shoe" blotter and a moment later seemed to have
fallen asleep.
By all of which signs those of us who knew him began to suspect that
the Corporal had something on his mind. Not a few considered him the
best detective on the force; at least he was different enough from a
printer's ink detective to be a real one. But naturally the strain of
heading a detective bureau for weeks was beginning to wear upon him.
"Damn it!" said the Corporal suddenly, opening his eyes, "I can't be in
six places at once. You'll have to handle these cases," and he drew
from a pocket and handed me three typewritten sheets, then drifted away
into the dusk. I looked them over and returned to the porch rocker and
the last chapters of the novel.
A meek touch on the leg awoke me at four next morning. I looked up to
see dimly a black face under a khaki helmet bent over me whispering,
"It de time, sah," and fade noiselessly away. It was the frontier
policeman carrying out his orders of the night before. For once there
was not a carriage in sight. I stumbled sleepily down into Panama and
for some distance along Avenida Central before I was able to hail an
all night hawk chasing a worn little wreck of a horse along the
macadam. I spread my lanky form over the worn cushions and we spavined
along the graveled boundary line, past the Chinese cemetery where John
can preserve and burn joss to his ancestors to the end of time, out
through East Balboa just awakening to life, and reached Balboa docks as
day was breaking. I was not long there, and the equine caricature
ambled the three miles back to town in what seemed reasonable time,
considering. As we turned again into Avenida Central my watch told me
there was time and to spare to catch the morning passenger. I was not a
little surprised therefore to hear just then two sharp rings on the
station gong. I dived headlong into the station and brought up against
a locked gate, caught a glimpse of two or three ladies weeping and the
tail of the passenger disappearing under the bridge. Americans have
introduced the untropical idea of starting their trains on time, to the
disgust of the "Spig" in general and the occasional discomfiture of
Americans. I dashed wildly out through the station, across Panama's
main street, down a rugged lane to the first steps descending to the
track, and tumbled joyously onto a slowly moving train--to discover
that it was the Balboa labor-train and that the Colon passenger was
already half-way to Diablo Hill.
A Panama policeman of dusky hue, leaning against a gate-post, eyed me
drowsily as I slowly climbed the steps, mopping my brow and staring at
my watch.
"What time does that 6:35 train leave?" I demanded.
"Yo, senor," he said with ministerial dignity, shifting slowly to the
other shoulder, "no tengo conocimiento de esas cosas" (I have no
knowledge of those things).
He probably did not know there is a railroad from Panama to Colon. It
has only been in operation since 1855.
Later I found the fault lay with my brass watch.
With a perspiration up for all day I set out along the track. Hounding
Diablo Hill the realization that I was hungry came upon me
simultaneously with the thought that unless I got through the door of
Corozal hotel by 7:30 I was likely to remain so. Breakfast over, I
caught the morning supply-train to Miraflores, there to dash through
the locks for a five-minute interview. I walked to Pedro Miguel and,
descending from the embankment of the main line, "nailed" a dirt-train
returning empty and stood up for a breezy ride down through the "cut."
It was the same old smoky, toilsome place, a perceptible bit lower. As
in the case of a small boy only those can see its growth who have been
away for a time. The train stopped with a jerk at the foot of Culebra.
I walked a half-mile and caught a loaded dirt-train to Cascadas. The
matter there to be investigated required ten minutes. That over, I "got
in touch" at the nearest telephone, and the Corporal's voice called for
my immediate presence at headquarters. There chanced to be passing
through Cascadas at that moment a Panama-bound freight, the caboose of
which caught me up on the fly; and forty minutes later I was racing up
the long stairs.
There I learned among other things that a man I was anxious to have a
word with was coming in on the noon train, but would be unavailable
after arrival. I sprang into a cab and was soon rolling away again,
past the Chinese cemetery. At the commissary crossing in East Balboa we
were held up by an empty dirt-train returning from the dump. I tossed a
coin at the cabman and scrambled aboard. The train raced through
Corozal, down the grade and around the curve at unslacking speed. I
dropped off in front of Miraflores police station, keeping my feet,
thanks to practice and good luck, and dashing up through the village,
dragged myself breathlessly aboard the passenger train as its head and
shoulders had already disappeared in the tunnel.
The ticket-collector pointed out my man to me in the first passenger
coach, the "ladies' car"--he is a school-teacher and tobacco smoke
distresses him--and by the time we pulled into Panama I had the desired
information. Dinner was not to be thought of; I had barely time to dash
through the second-class gate and back along the track to Balboa
labor-train. From the docks a sand-train carried me to Pedro Miguel.
There was a craneman in Bas Obispo "cut" whose testimony was wanted. I
reached him by two short walks and a ride. His statements suggested the
advisability of questioning his room-mate, a towerman in Miraflores
freight-yards. Luck would have it that my chauffeur friend ---- was
just then passing with an I. C. C. motor-car and only a photographer
for a New York weekly aboard. I found room to squeeze in. The car raced
away through the "cut," up the declivity, and dropped me at the foot of
the tower. The room-mate referred me to a locomotive engineer and,
being a towerman, gave me the exact location of his engine. I found it
at the foot of Cucaracha slide with a train nearly loaded. By the time
the engineer had added his whit of information, we were swinging around
toward the Pacific dump. I dropped off and, climbing up the flank of
Ancon hill, descended through the hospital grounds.
Where the royal palms are finest and there opens out the broadest view
of Panama, Ancon, and the bay, I gave myself five minutes' pause, after
which a carriage bore me to a shop near Cathedral Plaza where
second-hand goods are bought--and no questions asked. On the way back
to Ancon station I visited two similar establishments.
I had been lolling in the swivel-chair a full ten minutes, perhaps,
when the telephone rang. It was "the Captain" calling for me. When I
reached the third-story back he handed me extradition papers to the
Secretary of Foreign Affairs in Panama. A half-hour later, wholly
outstripping the manana idea, I had signed a receipt for the Jap in
question and transferred him from Panama to Ancon jail. Whereupon I
descended to the evening passenger and rode to Pedro Miguel for five
minutes' conversation, and caught the labor-train Panamaward. At
Corozal I stepped off for a word with the officer on the platform and
the labor-train plunged on again, after the fashion of labor-trains,
spilling the last half of its disembarking passengers along the way.
Ten minutes later the headlight of the last passenger swung around the
curve and carried me away to Panama.
That might have done for the day, but I had gathered a momentum it was
hard to check. Not long after returning from the police mess to the
swivel chair a slight omission in the day's program occurred to me. I
called up Corozal police station.
"What?" said a mashed-potato voice at the other end of the wire.
"Who's talking?"
"Policeman Green, sah."
"Station commander there?"
"No, sah. Station commander he gone just over to de Y. M. to play
billiards, sah. Dey one big match on to-night."
Of course I could have "got" him there. But on second thoughts it would
be better to see him in person and clear up at the same time a little
matter in one of the labor camps, and not run the risk of causing the
loss of the billiard championship. Besides Corozal is cooler to sleep
in than Ancon. In a black starry night I set out along the invisible
railroad for the first station.
An hour later, everything settled to my satisfaction, I had discovered
a vacant bed in Corozal bachelor quarters and was pulling off my coat
preparatory to the shower-bath and a well-earned night's repose.
Suddenly I heard a peculiar noise in the adjoining room, much like that
of a seal coming to the surface after being long under water. My
curiosity awakened, I sauntered a few feet along the veranda. Beside
one of the cots stood a short, roly-poly little man, the lower third of
whom showed rosy pink below his bell-shaped white nightie. As he turned
his face toward the light to switch it off I swallowed the roof of my
mouth and clawed at the clap-boarding for support. It was "the Sloth!"
He had been transferred. I slipped hastily into my coat and, turning up
the collar, plunged out into the rain and the night and stumbled
blindly away on weary legs towards Panama.