“Senor,” I asked, “did you go to the dance in Miraflores last Saturday night with this youth?”

“Si, senor.”

“Then I place you under arrest.  We will take the one o’clock train.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but closed it again without having uttered a sound.  He opened it a second time, then sat suddenly down on the low edge of the box-car porch.  A more genuinely astonished man I have never seen.  No actor could have approached it.  Still, whatever my own conviction, it was my business to bring him before his accuser.  After a time he recovered sufficiently to ask permission to change his clothes, and disappeared in one of the resident box-cars.  The boy was already being fed in another.  Had my prisoners been of almost any one of the other seventy-one nationalities I should not have thought of letting them out of my sight.  But the Zone Spaniard’s respect for law is proverbial.

“Jose!  Pinched Jose!” cried his American boss, when I explained that he would find himself a man short that afternoon.  “You people are sure barking up the wrong tree this time.  Why, Jose has been my engineer for over two years, and the steadiest man on the Zone.  He writes for some Spanish paper and tells ’em the truth over there so straight that the rest of ’em down here, the anarchists and all that bunch, are aching to get him into trouble.  But they’ll never get anything on Jose.  Have him tell you about it in Spanish if you sabe the lingo.”

But Jose was a gallego, whence instead of the voluble flood of protesting words one expects from a Spaniard on such an occasion, he wrapped himself in a stoical silence.  Not until we were on our way to the railroad station did I get him to talk.  Then he explained in quiet, unflowery, gestureless language.

He had come to the Canal Zone chiefly to gather literary material.  Not being a man of wealth, however, nor one satisfied with superficial observation, he had sought employment at his trade as stationary engineer.  Besides laying in a stock for more important writing he hoped to do in the future, he was Zone correspondent of “El Liberal” of Madrid and other Spanish cities.  In the social life of his fellow-countrymen on the Isthmus he had taken no part, whatever.  He was too busy.  He did not drink.  He could not dance; he saw no sense in squandering time in such frivolities.  But ever since his arrival he had been promising himself to attend one of these wild Saturday-night debauches in the edge of the jungle that he might use a description of it in some later work.  So he had coaxed his one personal friend, the boy, to go with him.  It was virtually the one thing besides work that he had ever done on the Zone.  They had stayed two hours, and had left the moment the trouble began.  Yet here he was arrested.

I bade him cheer up, to consider the trip to Ancon merely an afternoon excursion on government pass.  He remained downcast.