The result of all this sweating and sight-seeing was that some days later there was gathered in a young Barbadian who had been living for months in and about Gatun without any visible source of income whatever—­not even a wife.  The Turk and the camp janitor identified him as the culprit.  But the primer lesson the police recruit learns is that it is one thing to believe a man guilty and quite another to convince a judge—­the most skeptical being known to zoology—­of that perfectly apparent fact.  With the suspect behind bars, therefore, I continued my underground activities, with the result that when at length I took the train at New Gatun one morning for the court-room in Cristobal I loaded into a second-class coach six witnesses aggregating five nationalities, ready to testify among other things to the interesting little point that the defendant had a long prison record in Barbados.

When the echo of the black policeman’s “Oye!  Oye!” had died away and the little white-haired judge had taken his “bench,” I made the discovery that I was present not in one, but in four capacities,—­as arresting officer, complainant, interpreter, and to a large extent prosecuting attorney.  To swear a Turk who spoke only Turkish through another Turk, who mangled a little Spanish, for a judge who would not recognize a non-American word from the voice of a steam-shovel, with a solemn “So Help Me God!” to clinch and strengthen it when the witness was a follower of the prophet of Medina—­or nobody—­was not without its possibilities of humor.  The trial proceeded; the witnesses witnessed in their various tongues, the perspiring arresting officer reduced their statements to the common denominator of the judge’s single tongue, and the smirking bullet-headed defendant was hopelessly buried under the evidence.  Wherefore, when the shining black face of his lawyer, retained during the two minutes between the “Oye!” and the opening of the case, rose above the scene to purr: 

“Your Honor, the prosecution has shown no case.  I move the charge against my client be quashed.”

I choked myself just in time to keep from gasping aloud, “Well, of all the nerve!” Never will I learn that the lawyer’s profession admits lying on the same footing with truth in the defense of a culprit.

“Cause shown,” mumbled the Judge without looking up from his writing, “defendant bound over for trial in the circuit court.”

A week later, therefore, there was a similar scene a story higher in the same building.  Here on Thursdays sits one of the three members of the Zone Supreme Court.  Jury trial is rare on the Isthmus—­which makes possibly for surer justice.  This time there was all the machinery of court and I appeared only in my legal capacity.  The judge, a man still young, with an astonishingly mobile face that changed at least once a minute from a furrowy scowl with great pouting lips to a smile so broad it startled, sat in state in the middle of three judicial arm-chairs,