phy) above dishonesty. The quarters are virtually
abandoned during the day. Two negro janitors dawdle about the building,
but they, too, leave it for two hours at mid-day. Moreover each of the
forty-eight or more occupants probably has several friends or
acquaintances or enemies who may drift in looking for him at any hour
of the day or night. No negro janitor would venture to question a white
American's errand in a house; Panama is below the Mason and Dixon line.
In practice any white American is welcome in any bachelor quarters and
even to a bed, if there is one unoccupied, though he be a total
stranger to all the community. Add to this that the negro tailor's
runner often has permission to come while the owner is away for suits
in need of pressing, that John Chinaman must come and claw the week's
washing out from under the bed where the "rough-neck" kicked it on
Saturday night, that there are a dozen other legitimate errands that
bring persons of varying shades into the building, and above all that
the bachelors themselves, after the open-hearted old American fashion,
have the all but universal habit of tossing gold and silver, railroad
watches and real-estate bonds, or anything else of whatever value,
indifferently on the first clear corner that presents itself.
Precaution is troublesome and un-American. It seems a fling at the
character of your fellow bachelors--and in the vast majority of Zone
cases it would be. But it is in no sense surprising that among the many
thousands that swarm upon the Isthmus there should be some not averse
to increasing their income by taking advantage of these guileless
habits and bucolic conditions. There are suggestions that a few--not
necessarily whites--make a profession of it. No wonder "our chief
trouble is burglary" and has been ever since the Z. P. can remember.
Summed up, the pay-day gold that has thus faded away is perhaps no
small amount; compared with what it might have been under prevailing
conditions it is little.

As for detecting such felonies, police officers the world around know
that theft of coin of the realm in not too great quantities is
virtually as safe a profession as the ministry. The Z. P. plain-clothes
man, like his fellows elsewhere, must usually be content in such cases
with impressing on the victim his Sherlockian astuteness, gathering the
available facts of the case, and return to typewrite his report thereof
to be carefully filed away among headquarters