his conviction for stealing a gold necklace from a negro washerwoman of San Miguel left the Chief Justice no choice but to send him to meditate a half-year at Culebra.  There is no reform school on the Zone.  The few American minors who have been found guilty of misdoing have been banished to their native land.  When the deputy warden had sufficiently recovered from the shock brought upon him by the sight of his new charge to give me a receipt for him, I raced for the noon train back to the city.

Thereon I sat down beside Pol—­First-Class Policeman X—–­, surprised to find him off duty and in civilian clothes.  There was a dreamy, far-away look in his eyes, and not until the train was racing past Rio Grande reservoir did he turn to confide to me the following extraordinary occurrence: 

“Last night I dreamed old Judge-----had my father and my mother up
before him.  On the stand he asked my mother her age—­and the funny
part of it is my mother has been dead over ten years.  She turned
around and wrote on the wall with a piece of chalk ‘1859,’ the
year she was born.  Then my father was called and he wrote ‘1853.’ 
That’s all there was to the dream.  But take it from me I know what
it means.  Now just add ’em together, and multiply by five—­because
I could see five people in the court-room—­divide by two—­father
and mother—­and I get—­,” he drew out a crumpled “arrest” form
covered with penciled figures, “—­9280.  And there—­” his voice
dropped low, “—­is your winning number for next Sunday.”

So certain was this, that First-Class X——­had bribed another policeman to take his eight-hour shift, dressed in his vacation best, bought a ticket to Panama and return, with real money at tourist prices, and would spend the blazing afternoon seeking among the scores of vendors in the city for lottery ticket 9280.  And if he did not find it there he certainly paid his fare all the way to Colon and back to continue his search.  I believe he at length found and acquired the whole ticket, for the customary sum of $2.50.  But there must have been a slip in the arithmetic, or mother’s chalk; for the winning number that Sunday was 8895.

Frequent as are these melancholy errors, scores of “Zoners” cling faithfully to their arithmetical superstitions.  Many a man spends his recreation hours working out the winning numbers by some secret recipe of his own.  There are men on the Z. P. who, if you can get them started on the subject of lottery tickets, will keep it up until you run away, showing you the infallibility of their various systems, believing the drawing to be honest, yet oblivious to the fact that both the one and the other cannot be true.  Dreams are held in special favor.  It is probably safe to assert that one-half the numbers over 1,000 and under 10,000 that appear in Zone dreams are snapped up next day in lottery tickets.  Many have systems of figuring out the all-important number from the figures on engines and cars.  More than one Zone housewife has slipped into the kitchen to find the roast burning and her West Indian cook hiding hastily behind her ample skirt a long list of the figures on every freight-car that has passed that morning, from which by some Antillian miscalculation and the murmuring of certain invocations she was to find the magic number that would bring her cooking days to an end.