Yet there is sometimes method in their madness.  Did not “Joe” who slept in the next room to me at Gatun “hit Duque for two pieces”—­ which is to say he had $3,000 to sprinkle along with his police salary?  Yet personally the only really appealing “system” was that of Cristobal.  Upon his arrival on the Isthmus four years ago he picked out a number at random, took out a yearly subscription to it, and thought no more about it than one does of a newspaper delivered at the door each morning—­until one Monday during this month of May, after he had squandered something over $500, on worthless bits of paper, he strolled into the lottery office and was handed an inconspicuous little bag containing $7,500 in yellow gold.

Like all Z. P. “rookies” (recruits) I had been warned early to beware the “sympathy dodge.”  But experience is the only real teacher.  One afternoon I bestraddled a crazy, stilt-legged Jamaican horse to go out into the bush beyond the Panama line to fetch and deliver a citizen of that sovereign republic who was wanted on the Zone for horse-stealing.  At the town of Sabanas, where those Panamanians who have bagged the most loot since American occupation have their “summer” homes,—­giddy, brick-painted monstrosities among the great trees, deep green foliage and brilliant flower-beds (pause a moment and think of brilliant red houses in the tropics; it will make you better acquainted with the “Spig”) I dropped in at the police station for ice-water and information.  I found it in charge of a negro policeman who knew nothing, and had forgotten that.  When, therefore, it also chanced that an officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals stopped before the gate with a coachman of Panama, it fell upon me to assume command.  The horse was the usual emaciated rat of an animal indigenous to Panama City.  When overhauled, the driver was beating the animal uphill on his way to Old Panama to bring back a party of tourists visiting the ruins.  How he expected the decrepit beast to carry four more persons was a mystery.  When the harness was lifted there was disclosed the expected half-dozen large raw sores.  We tied the animal in the shade near hay and water and adjourned to the station.

The coachman, a weary, unshaven Spaniard whose red eyelids showed lack of sleep, was weeping copiously.  He claimed to be a madrileno—­which was evident; that he had been a coachman in Spain and Panama all his life without ever before having been arrested—­ which was possible.  He was merely one of many drivers for a livery-stable owner in Panama.  Ordered to go for the tourists, he had called his employer’s attention to the danger of crossing Zone territory with a horse in that condition; but the owner had ordered him to cover up the sores with pads and harness and drive along.