and the case proceeded.  Within an hour the defendant was standing up, the cheery grin still on his black countenance, to be sentenced to two years and eight months in the Zone penitentiary at Culebra.  A deaf man would have fancied he was being awarded some prize.  One of the never-ending surprises on the Zone is the apparent indifference of negro prisoners whether they get years or go free.  Even if they testify in their own behalf it is in a listless, detached way, as if the matter were of no importance anyway.  But the glance they throw the innocent arresting officer as they pass out on their way to the barb-wire enclosure on the outskirts of the Zone capital tells another story.  There are members of the Z. P. who sleep with a gun under their pillow because of that look or a muttered word.  But even were I nervous I should have been little disturbed at the glare in this case, for it will probably be a long walk from Culebra penitentiary to where I am thirty-two months from that morning.

A holiday air brooded over all Gatun and the country-side.  Workmen in freshly washed clothing lolled in the shade of labor-camps, black Britishers were gathering in flat meadows fitted for the national game of cricket, far and wide sounded the care-free laughter and chattering of negroes, while even within Gatun police station leisure and peace seemed almost in full possession.

The morning “touch” with headquarters over, therefore, I scrambled away across the silent yawning locks and the trainless and workless dam to the Spillway, over which already some overflow from the lake was escaping to the Caribbean.  My friends “Dusty” and H——­ had carried their canoe to the Chagres below, and before nine we were off down the river.  It was a day that all the world north of the Tropic of Cancer could not equal; just the weather for a perfect “day off.”  A plain-clothes man, it is true, is not supposed to have days off.  Some one might run away with the Administration Building on the edge of the Pacific and the telephone wires be buzzing for me—­with the sad result that a few days later there would be posted in Zone police stations where all who turned the leaves might read: 

Special Order No. .... 
Having been found Guilty of charges of
Neglect of Duty
preferred against him by his commanding officer
First-class Policeman No. 88
is hereby fined $2.

Chief of Division.

But shades of John Aspinwall!  Should even a detective work on such a Sunday?  Surely no criminal would—­least of all a black one.  Moreover these forest-walled banks were also part of my beat.