The first days in Gatun called for little else than patrol duty, without fixed hours, interspersed with an occasional loaf on the second-story veranda of the police-station overlooking the giant locks; close at hand was the entrance to the canal, up which came slowly barges loaded with crushed stone from Porto Bello quarry twenty miles east along the coast or sand from Nombre de Dios, twice as distant, while further still, spread Limon Bay from which swept a never-ending breeze one could wipe dry on as on a towel.  So long as he has in his pocket no typewritten report with the Inspector’s scrawl across it, “For investigation and report,” the plain-clothes man is virtually his own commander, with few duties beside trying to be in as many parts of his district at once as possible and the ubiquitous duty of “keeping in touch with headquarters.”  So I wandered and mingled with all the life of the vicinity, exactly as I should have done had I not been paid a salary to do so.  By day one could watch the growth of the great locks, the gradual drowning of little green, new-made islands beneath the muddy still waters of Gatun Lake, tramp out along jungle-flanked country roads, through the Mindi hills, or down below the old railroad to where the cayucas that floated down the Chagres laden with fruit came to land on the ever advancing edge of the waters.  With night things grew more compact.  From twilight till after midnight I prowled in and out through New Gatun, spilled far and wide over its several hills, watching the antics of negroes, pausing to listen to their guitars and their boisterous merriment, with an eye and ear ever open for the unlawful.  When I drifted into a saloon to see who might be spending the evening out, the bar-tender proved he had the advantage of me in acquaintance by crying:  “Hello, Franck!  What ye having?” and showing great solicitude that I get it.  After which I took up the starlit tramp again, to run perhaps into some such perilous scene as on that third evening.  A riot of contending voices rose from a building back in the center of a block, with now and then the sickening thump of a falling body.  I approached noiselessly, likewise weaponless, peeped in and found—­four negro bakers stripped to the waist industriously kneading to-morrow’s bread and discussing in profoundest earnest the object of the Lord in creating mosquitoes.  Beyond the native town, as an escape from all this, there was the back country road that wound for a mile through the fresh night and the droning jungle, yet instead of leading off into the wilderness of the interior swung around to American Gatun on its close-cropped hills.

I awoke one morning to find my name bulletined among those ordered to report for target test.  A fine piece of luck was this for a man who had scarcely fired a shot since, aged ten, he brought down with an air-gun an occasional sparrow at three cents a head.  We took the afternoon train to Mt.  Hope on the edge of Colon and trooped away to a little plain behind “Monkey Hill,” the last resting-place of many a “Zoner.”  The Cristobal Lieutenant, father of Z. P., was in charge, and here again was that same Z. P. absence of false dignity and the genuine good-fellowship that makes the success of your neighbor as pleasing as your own.