“Shall I borrow a gun, Lieutenant?” I asked when I found myself “on deck.”

“Well, you’ll have to use your own judgment as to that,” replied the Lieutenant, busy pasting stickers over holes in the target.

The test was really very simple.  All you had to do was to cling to one end of a No. 38 horse-pistol, point it at the bull’s-eye of a target, hold it in that position until you had put five bullets into said bull’s-eye, repeat that twice at growing distances, mortally wound ten times the image of a Martinique negro running back and forth across the field, and you had a perfect score.  Only, simple as it was, none did it, not even old soldiers with two or three “hitches” in the army.  So I had to be content with creeping in on the second page of a seven-page list of all the tested force from “the Chief” to the latest negro recruit.

The next evening I drifted into the police station to find a group of laborers from the adjoining camps awaiting me on the veranda bench, because the desk-man “didn’t sabe their lingo.”  They proved upon examination to be two Italians and a Turk, and their story short, sad, but by no means unusual.  Upon returning from work one of the Italians had found the lock hinges of his ponderously padlocked tin trunk hanging limp and screwless, and his pay-day roll of some $30 missing from the crown of a hat stuffed with a shirt securely packed away in the deepest corner thereof.  The Turk was similarly unable to account for the absence of his $33 savings safely locked the night before inside a pasteboard suitcase; unless the fact that, thanks to some sort of surgical operation, one entire side of the grip now swung open like a barn-door might prove to have something to do with the case.  The $33 had been, for further safety’s sake, in Panamanian silver, suggesting a burglar with a wheelbarrow.

The mysterious detective work began at once.  Without so much as putting on a false beard I repaired to the scene of the nefarious crime.  It was the usual Zone type of laborers’ barracks.  A screened building of one huge room, it contained two double rows of three-tier “standee” canvas bunks on gas-pipes.  Around the entire room, close under the sheet-iron roof, ran a wooden platform or shelf reached by a ladder and stacked high with the tin trunks, misshapen bundles, and pressed-paper suitcases containing the worldly possessions of the fifty or more workmen around the rough table below.

Theoretically not even an inmate thereof may enter a Zone labor-camp during working hours.  Practically the West Indian janitors to whom is left the enforcement of this rule are nothing if not fallible.  In the course of the second day I unearthed a second Turk who, having chanced the morning before to climb to the baggage shelf for his razor and soap preparatory to welcoming a fellow countryman to the Isthmus, had been mildly startled to step on the shoulder-blade of a negro of given length and proportions lying prone behind the stacked-up impedimenta.  The latter explained both his presence in a white labor-camp and his unconventional posture by asserting that he was the “mosquito man,” and shortly thereafter went away from there without leaving either card or address.