It was a very sad case.  Here was a poor, honest coachman struggling to support a wife and I don’t recall how many children, but any number sounds quite reasonable in Panama, who was about to be punished for the fault of another.  The paradox of honest and coachman did not strike me until later.  He was certainly telling the truth—­you come to recognize it readily in all ordinary cases after a few weeks in plain clothes.  The real culprit was, of course, the employer.  My righteous wrath demanded that he and not his poor serf be punished.  I could not release the driver.  But I would see that the truth was brought out in court next morning and a warrant sworn out against the owner.  With showering tears and rib-shaking sobs the coachman promised to tell the judge the whole story.  I went through him, and locking him up with assurances of my deepest sympathy and full assistance, stilted on toward the little village of shacks scattered out of sight among the hills, and valleys across the border.

Coachman, witnesses, and arresting officer, to say nothing of horse, carriage, and sores were on hand when court opened next morning.  As I expected, the judge failed to ask the poor fellow a single question that would bring out the complicity of his employer; did not in fact discover there was an employer.  I asked to be sworn, and gave the true version of the case.  The judge listened earnestly.  When I had ended, he recalled the coachman.  The latter expressed his astonishment that I should have made any such statements.  He denied them in toto.  His employer had nothing whatever to do with the case.  The fault was entirely his, and no one else was in the remotest degree connected with the matter.

“Five dollars!” snapped the judge.

The coachman paid, hitched up the rat of a horse, and wabbled away into Panama.

Police business, taking me down into “the Grove” that night, I found the driver, clean-shaven and better dressed, waiting for fares before the principal house of that section.

“What kind of a game—­,” I began.

“Senor,” he cried, and tears again seemed on the point of falling, “every word I told you was true.  But of course I couldn’t testify against the patron.  He’d discharge me and blackmail me, and you know I have a wife and innumerable children to support.  Come on over and have a drink.”

This justice business, one soon learns, is of the same infallible stuff as the rest of life.  After all it is only the personal opinion of the judge between two persons swearing on oath to diametrically opposed statements; and for all the impressiveness of deep furrowed brows I did not find that the average judge had any more power of reading human nature than the average of the rest of us.  I well remember the morning when a meek little Panamanian was testifying in his own behalf, in Spanish of course, when the judge broke in without even asking for a translation of the testimony: