in one summer day from some uncharted point of the compass with nothing but his hat and a winning smile on his brassy features, and naturally soon drifted up the “Thousand Stairs.”  But Marley wasn’t exactly of that manly build that takes “the Chief” and “the Captain” by storm; and there were suggestions on his young-old face that he had seen perhaps a trifle too much of life.  So he wiped the sweat from his brow several times at the third-story landing only to find as often that the expected vacancy was not yet.  Meanwhile the tropical days slipped idly by and Marley’s “standin” with the owners of I. C. C. hotel-books began to strain and threaten to break away, and everything sort of gave up the ghost and died.  Everything, that is, except the winning smile.  ’Til one afternoon with only that asset left Marley met the department head on the grass-bordered path in front of the Episcopal chapel, just where the long descent ends and a man begins to regain his tractable mood, and said Marley: 

“Say, looka here, Chief.  It’s a question of eats with me.  We can’t put this thing off much longer or—­”

Which is why that evening’s train carried Marley, with a police badge and the little flat volume bound in imitation leather in his pocket, out to some substation commander along the line for the corporal in charge to break in and hammer down into that finished product, a Zone Policeman.

Incidentally Marley also illustrated some months later one of the special ways of getting off the force.  It was still simpler.  Going “on pass” to Colon to spend a little evening, Marley neglected to leave his No. 38 behind in the squad-room, according to Z. P. rules.  Which was careless of him.  For when his spirits reached that stage where he recognized what sport it would be to see the “Spigoty” policemen of Bottle Alley dance a western cancan he bethought him of the No. 38.  Which accounts for the fact that the name of Marley can no longer be found on the rolls of the Z. P. But all this is sadly anticipating.

Obviously, you will say, a force recruited from such dissimilar sources must be a thing of wide and sundry experience.  And obviously you are right.  Could a man catch up the Z. P. by the slack of the khaki riding breeches and shake out their stories as a giant in need of carfare might shake out their loose change, then might he retire to some sunny hillside of his own and build him a sound-proof house with a swimming pool and a revolving bookcase and a stable of riding horses, and cause to be erected on the front lawn a kneeling-place where publishers might come and bow down and beat their foreheads on the pavement.

There are men in the Z. P. who in former years have played horse with the startled markets of great American cities; men whose voices will boom forth in the pulpit and whisper sage councils in the professional in years to come; men whom doting parents have sent to Harvard—­on whom it failed to take, except on their clothes—­men who have gone down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death and crawled on hands and knees through the brackish red brook that runs at the bottom and come out again smiling on the brink above.  Careers more varied than Mexican sombreros one might hear in any Z. P. squad-room—­were not the Z. P. so much more given to action than to autobiography.