If only the film of time might roll back and there pass again before our eyes all that has come to pass within sight of Ancon hilltop.  Across the bay there, where now are only jungle-tangled ruins, Pizarro set out with his handful of vagabonds to conquer South America; there old Buccaneer Morgan laid his bloody hand.  Back in the hills there men died by scores trying to carry a ship across the Isthmus, the Spanish viceroys passed with their rich trains, there on some unknown knoll Balboa reached four hundred years ago the climax of a career that began with stowing away in a cask and ended under the headsman’s ax—­no end of it, down to the “Forty-niners” going hopefully out and returning filled with gold or disease, or leaving their bones here in the jungle before they really were “Forty-niners”; on down to the railroad days with men wading in swamps with survey kits, and frequently lying down to die.  Then if a bit of the future, too, could for a moment be unveiled, and one might watch the first ship glide majestically and silently into the canal and away into the jungle like some amphibious monster.

It was along in those days that we were looking for a “murderous assaulter.”  At a Saturday night dance in a native shack back in Miraflores bush the usual riot had broken out about midnight and a revolver had come into play.  As a result there was a Peruvian mulatto up in Ancon hospital who had been shot through the mouth, the bullet being somewhere in his neck.  It became my frequent duty, among other Z. P.’s, to take suspects up the hill for possible identification.

One morning I strolled into the station and fell to laughing.  The early train had brought in on suspicion a Spanish laborer of twenty or twenty-two; a pretty, girlish chap with huge blue eyes over which hung long black lashes like those painted on Nurnberg dolls.  No one with a shadow of faith in human nature left would have believed him capable of any crime; any one at all acquainted with Spaniards must have known he could not shoot a hare, would in fact be afraid to fire off a gun.

The fear in his big blue eyes struggled with his ingenuous, girlish smile as I marched him through the long hall full of white beds and darker inmates.  The Peruvian sat bolstered up in his cot, a stoical, revengeful glare on his reddish-brown swollen face.  He gazed a long minute at the boy’s face, across which flitted the flush of fear and embarrassment, at the big doll’s eyes, then shook a raised forefinger slowly back and forth before his nose—­ the negative of Spanish-speaking peoples.  Then he groaned, spat in a tin-can beside him, and called for paper and pencil.  In the note-book I handed him he wrote in atrociously spelled Spanish: 

“The man that came to the dance with this man is the man that shot me with a bullet.”

The blue-eyed boy promised to point out his companion of that night.  We took the 10:55 and reached Pedro Miguel during the noon hour.  Down in a box-car camp between the railroad and the canal the boy called for “Jose” and there presented himself immediately a tall, studious, solemn-faced Spaniard of spare frame, about forty, dressed in overalls and working shirt.  Here was even less a criminal type than the boy.