Then there was “the Mystery of the Knocked-out Niggers.”  Day after day there came reports from a spot out along the line that some negro laborer strolling along in a perfectly reasonable manner suddenly lay down, threw a fit, and went into a comatose state from which he recovered only after a day or two in Ancon or Colon hospitals.  The doctors gave it up in despair.  As a last resort the case was turned over to a Z. P. sleuth.  He chose him a hiding-place as near as possible to the locality of the strange manifestation.  For half the morning he sweltered and swore without having seen or heard the slightest thing of interest to an old “Zoner.”  A dirt-train rumbled by now and then.  He strove to amuse himself by watching the innocent games of two little Spanish switch-boys not far away.  They were enjoying themselves, as guileless childhood will, between their duties of letting a train in and out of the switch.  Well on in the second half of the morning another diminutive Iberian, a water-boy, brought his compatriots a pail of water and carried off the empty bucket.  The boys hung over the edge of the pail a sort of wire hook, the handle of their home-made drinking-can, no doubt, and went on playing.

By and by a burly black Jamaican in shirt-sleeves loomed up in the distance.  Now and then as he advanced he sang a snatch of West Indian ballad.  As he espied the “switcheros” a smile broke out on his features and he hastened forward his eyes fixed on the water-pail.  In a working species of Spanish he made some request of the boys, the while wiping his ebony brow with his sleeve.  The boys protested.  Evidently they had lived on the Zone so long they had developed a color line.  The negro pleaded.  The boys, sitting in the shade of their wigwam, still shook their heads.  One of them was idly tapping the ground with a broom-handle that had lain beside him.  The negro glanced up and down the track, snatched up the boys’ drinking vessel, of which the wire hooked over the pail was not after all the handle, and stooped to dip up a can of water.  The little fellow with the broom-stick, ceasing a useless protest, reached a bit forward and tapped dreamily the rail in front of him.  The Jamaican suddenly sent the can of water some rods down the track, danced an artistic buck-and-wing shuffle on the thin air above his head, sat down on the back of his neck, and after trying a moment in vain to kick the railroad out by the roots, lay still.

By this time the sleuth was examining the broom-handle.  From its split end protruded an inch of telegraph wire, which chanced also to be the same wire that hung over the edge of the galvanized bucket.  Close in front of the innocent little fellows ran a “third rail!”

Then suddenly this life of anecdote and leisure ended.  There was thrust into my hands a typewritten-sheet and I caught the next thing on wheels out to Corozal for my first investigation.  It was one of the most commonplace cases on the Zone.  Two residents of my first dwelling-place on the Isthmus had reported the loss of $150 in U. S. gold.