“Say, I hope you’re not nervous?” he remarked.

“Not immoderately.”

“One of my stunts is night-mare,” he went on, rising to switch on the electric light, “and when I get ’em I generally imagine my room-mate is a burglar trying to go through my junk and—­”

He reached under his pillow and brought to light a “Colt’s” of 45 caliber; then crossing the room he pointed to three large irregular splintered holes in the wall some three or four inches above me, and which I had not already seen simply because I had not chanced to look that way.

“There’s the last three.  But I’m tryin’ to break myself of ’em,” he concluded, slipping the revolver back under his pillow and turning off the light again.

Which is among the various reasons why it was without protest that, with “the Captain’s” telephoned consent on the ground that I was now virtually on the force, I took up my residence in Corozal police station.  ’T is a peaceful little building of the usual Zone type on a breezy knoll across the railroad, with a spreading tree and a little well-tended flower plot before it, and the broad world stretching away in all directions behind.  Here lived Policeman T——­and B—–.”  First-class policemen” perhaps I should take care to specify, for in Zone parlance the unqualified noun implies African ancestry.  But it seems easier to use an adjective of color when necessary.  Among their regular duties was that of weighing down the rocking-chairs on the airy front veranda, whence each nook and cranny of Corozal was in sight, and of strolling across to greet the train-guard of the seven daily passengers; though the irregular ones that might burst upon them at any moment were not unlikely to resemble a Moro expedition in the Philippines.  B—–­ and I shared the big main room; for T——­, being the haughty station commander, occupied the parlor suite beside the office.  That was all, except the black Trinidadian boy who sat on the wooden shelf that was his bed behind a huge padlocked door and gazed dreamily out through the bars—­when he was not carrying a bundle to the train for his wardens or engaged in the janitor duties that kept Corozal station so spick and span.  Oh!  To be sure there were also a couple of negro policemen in the smaller room behind the thin wooden partition of our own, but negro policemen scarcely count in Zone Police reckonings.

“By Heck!  They must use a lot o’ mules t’ haul aout all thet dirt,” observed an Arkansas farmer to his nephew, home from the Zone on vacation.  He would have thought so indeed could he have spent a day at Corozal and watched the unbroken deafening procession of dirt-trains scream by on their way to the Pacific,—­ straining Moguls dragging a furlong of “Lidgerwood flats,” swaying “Oliver dumps” with their side chains clanking, a succession as incessant of “empties” grinding back again into the midst of the fray.  On the tail of every train lounged an American conductor,