“Oh!” said the Lieutenant.  “Well, here it is in a spectacle-case, as our friend Kipling would put it.  We’re on our way to Culebra Island.  There are now in quarantine there three men who arrived yesterday from South America.  They are members of the party of the murdered president.  To-day there will arrive and also be put in hock the three gents whose names you have there.  Now we have a private inside hunch that the three already here have come up particularly and specifically to prepare for the funeral of the three who are arriving.  Which is no hair off our brows, except it’s up to us to see they don’t pull off any little stunts of that kind on Zone territory.”

At least this police business was starting well; if this was a sample it would be a real job.

The train had stopped and we were climbing the steps of Balboa police station; for without the co-operation of the “Admiral of the Pacific Fleet” we could not reach Culebra Island.

“By the way, I suppose you’re well armed?” asked the Lieutenant in his high querulous voice, as we drank a last round of ice-water preparatory to setting out again.

“Em—­I’ve got a fountain pen,” I replied.  “I haven’t been a policeman twenty minutes yet, and I was appointed in a hurry.”

“Fine!” cried “the Admiral” sarcastically, snatching open the door of a closet beside the desk.  “With a warm job like this on hand!  You know what these South Americans are—­” with a wink at the Lieutenant that was meant also for Castillo, who stood with his felt hat on the back of his head and a far-away look in his eyes.

“Yah, mighty dangerous—­around meal time,” said the Corporal; though at the same time he drew from a hip pocket a worn leather holster containing a revolver, and examined it intently.

Meanwhile “the Admiral” had handed me a massive No. 88 “Colt” with holster, a box of cartridges, and a belt that might easily have served as a horse’s saddle-girth.  When I had buckled it on under my coat the armament felt like a small boy clinging about my waist.

We trooped on down a sort of railroad junction with a score of abandoned wooden houses.  It was here I had first landed on the Zone one blazing Sunday nearly two months before and tramped away for some miles on a rusty sandy track along a canal already filled with water till a short jungle path led me into my first Zone town.  Already that seemed ancient history.

The police launch, manned by negro prisoners, with “the Admiral” in a cushioned arm-chair at the wheel, was soon scudding away across the sunlit harbor, the breakwater building of the spoil of Culebra “cut” on our left, ahead the cluster of small islands being torn to pieces for Uncle Sam’s fortifications.  The steamer being not yet sighted, we put in at Naos Island, where the bulky policeman in charge led us to dinner at the I. C. C. hotel, during which the noonday blasting on the Zone came dully across to us.  Soon after we were landing at the cement sidewalk of the island—­ where I had been a prisoner for a day in January as my welcome to U. S. territory—­and were being greeted by the pocket edition doctor and the bay-windowed German who had been my wardens on that occasion.