dressed and suggesting to the nostrils perambulating drug-stores shuttle back and forth with their perfumed dandies.  Above the throng pass the heads and shoulders of unemotional, self-possessed Americans, erect and soldierly.  Sergeant Jack of Ancon station was sure to be there in his faultless civilian garb, a figure neat but not gaudy; and even busy Lieutenant Long was known to break away from his stacked-up duties and his black stenographer and come to overtop all else in the square save the palm-trees whispering together in the evening breeze between the numbers.

There is no favoritism in Zone police work.  Every crime reported receives full investigation, be it only a Greek laborer losing a pair of trousers or—­

There was the case that fell to me early in May, for instance.  A box billed from New York to Peru had been broken open on Balboa dock and—­one bottle of cognac stolen.  Unfortunately the matter was turned over to me so long after the perpetration of the dastardly crime that the possible culprits among the dock hands had wholly recovered from the probable consumption of the evidence.  But I succeeded in gathering material for a splendid typewritten report of all I had not been able to unearth, to file away among other priceless headquarters’ archives.

Not that the Z. P. has not its big jobs.  The force to a man distinctly remembers that absorbing two months between the escape of wild black Felix Paul and the day they dragged him back into the penitentiary.  No less fresh in memory are the expeditions against Maurice Pelote, or Francois Barduc, the murderer of Miraflores.  All Martinique negroes, be it noted; and of all things on this earth, including greased pigs, the hardest to catch is a Martinique criminal.  After all, four or five murders on the Zone in three years is no startling record in such a swarm of nationalities.

Cases large and small which it would be neither of interest nor politic to detail poured in during the following weeks.  Among them was the counterfeit case unearthed by some Shylock Holmes on the Panamanian force, that called for a long perspiring hunt for the “plant” in odd corners of the Zone.  Then there was—­, an ex-Z.  P. who lost his three years’ savings on the train, for which reason I shadowed a well-known American—­for it is a Z. P. rule that no one is above suspicion—­about Panama afoot and in carriages nearly all night, in true dime-novel fashion.  There was the day that I was given a dangerous convict to deliver at Culebra Penitentiary.  The criminal was about three feet long, jet black, his worldly possessions comprising two more or less garments, one reaching as far down as his knees and the other as far up as the base of his neck.  He had long been a familiar sight to “Zoners” among the swarm of bootblacks that infest the corner near the P. R. R. station.  He claimed to be eleven, and looked it.  But having already served time for burglary and horse-stealing,