Fortunately, however, the proprietor of the expense account is not required personally to consume it each month.  It is designed rather to win the esteem of bar-tenders, loosen the tongues of suspects, libate the thirsty stool-pigeon, and prime other accepted sources of information.  But beware!  Exceeding care in filling out the account of such expenditures at the month’s end.  Carelessness leads a hunted life on the Canal Zone.  Take, for instance, the slight error of my friend—­who, having made such expenditure in Colon, by a slip of the pen, or to be nice, of the typewriter, sent in among three score and ten items the following: 

Feb. 4/ 2 bots beer; Cristobal........50c

and in the course of time found said voucher again on his desk with a marginal note of mild-eyed wonder and more than idle curiosity, in the handwriting of a man very high up indeed;

    Where can you buy beer in Cristobal?

All this and more I learned in the swivel-chair waiting for orders, reading the latest novel that had found its way to Ancon station, and receiving frequent assurances that I should be quite busy enough once I got started.  Opposite sat Lieutenant Long pouring choice bits of sub-station orders into the ’phone: 

“Don’t you believe it.  That was no accident.  He didn’t lose everything he had in every pocket rolling around drunk in the street.  He’s been systematically frisked.  Sabe frisked?  Get on the job and look into it.”

For the Lieutenant was one of those scarce and enviable beings who can live with his subordinates as man to man, yet never find an ounce of his authority missing when authority is needed.

Now and then a Z. P. story whiled away the time.  There was the sad
case of Corporal-----in charge of-----station.  Early one Sunday
afternoon the Corporal saw a Spaniard leading a goat along the
railroad.  Naturally the day was hot.  The Corporal sent a policeman
to arrest the inhuman wretch for cruelty to animals.  When he had
left the culprit weeping behind padlocks he went to inspect the
goat, tied in the shade under the police station.

“Poor little beast,” said the sympathetic Corporal, as he set before it a generous pan of ice-water fresh from the police station tank.  The goat took one long, eager, grateful draught, turned over on its back, curled up like the sensitive-plants of Panama jungles when a finger touches them, and departed this vale of tears.  But Corporal-----was an artist of the first rank.  Not only did he “get away with it” under the very frowning battlements of the judge, but sent the Spaniard up for ten days on the charge against him.  Z. P.’s who tell the story assert that the Spaniard did not so much mind the sentence as the fact that the Corporal got his goat.