“But think of the experience!” I cried.  “Now you can tell exactly how it feels to be arrested—­first-hand literary material.”

But he was not philosopher enough to look at it from that point of view.  To his Spanish mind arrest, even in innocence, was a disgrace for which no amount of “material” could compensate.  It is a common failing.  How many of us set out into the world for experience, yet growl with rage or sit downcast and silent all the way from Pedro Miguel to Panama if one such experience gives us a rough half-hour, or robs us of ten minutes sleep.

At the hospital the Peruvian gurgled and spat, beckoned for paper and wrote: 

“This is the man.”

“What man?” I asked.

“The man who came with that man,” he scribbled, nodding his heavy face toward the blue-eyed boy.

“But is this the man that shot you?” I demanded.

“The man who came with that man is the one,” he scrawled.

“Well, then this is the man that shot you?” I cried.

But he would not answer definitely to that, but sat a long time glaring out of his swollen, vindictive countenance propped up in his pillows at the tall, solemn correspondent.  By and by he motioned again for paper.

“I think so.  I am not sure,” he miswrote.

I did not think so, and as the sum total of his descriptions of his assailant during the past several days amounted to “a tall man, rather short, with a face and two eyes”—­he was very insistent about the eyes, which is the reason the doll-eyed boy had fallen into the drag-net—­I permitted myself to accept my own opinion as evidence.  The Peruvian was in all likelihood in no condition to recognize a man from a loup-garou by the time the fracas started.  Much ardent water had flowed that night.  I took the suspects down to Ancon station and let them cool off in porch rocking-chairs.  Then I gave them passes back to Pedro Miguel for the evening train.  The doll-eyed boy smiled girlishly upon me as he descended the steps, but the correspondent strode slowly away with the downcast, cheerless countenance of a man who has been hurt beyond recovery.

There were strangely contrasted days in the “gum-shoe’s” calendar.  Two examples taken almost at random will give the idea.  On May twentieth I lolled all day in a porch rocker at Ancon station, reading a novel.  Along in the afternoon Corporal Castillo drifted in.  For a time he stood leaning against the desk-rail, his felt hat pushed far back on his head, his eyes fixed on some point in the interior of China.  Then suddenly he snatched up a sheet of I. C. C. stationery, dropped down at a typewriter, and wrote at express speed a letter in Spanish.  Next he grasped a telephone and, in the words of the deskman, “spit Spig into the ’phone” for several minutes.  That over he caught up an envelope, sealed the letter and addressed it.  An instant later the station was in an uproar looking